From: Tania Jammal (Lebanon)

There's a question that I've been asked many times and I wonder if you can help me with an answer. Should I have a base of psychology to really know what's going on with the people I see? In other words, how can NLP be effective if there's no foundation in psychology?

In answer to the first part, I would say experience in any field that deals with human behaviour will help enrich your work. However, if people suggest you need qualifications in psychology to practise NLP, the answer is simply this: NLP is not psychology. Richard Bandler has repeatedly said that it was designed to educate - that is, to help people learn new ways of running their own lives. Neither he nor John Grinder held qualifications in NLP. and they explicitly stated at the time that they developed their approach to compensate for the tendency of psychological schools of the time to argue about who was right, despite their failure to fix the people who came for help.The suggestion that we can only practise NLP if we hold qualifications in an entirely different field is the same as saying you can only play cricket if you obey the rules of football.

NLP can and does function as a "meta-psychology", however - a means of understanding the rules behind behaviour and behavioural change, but that is because it is a modelling tool. It can go meta to any process or skill to understand what makes it tick.

Psychology is often not as successful at changing people as many psychologists would like to believe, which is one of the reasons some of them can display such hostility. Others, on the other hand, are happy to incorporate NLP into their array of skills. This can only be a good thing.

GT