Shocking Truth about NLP Certification Standards

To be honest, there’s no shocking truth about NLP Certification Standards…there’s a sad truth:

The sad truth is that very few NLP Training companies actually follow the Certification Standards! (If you know of an NLP Training company that adheres to the standards, please let me know and I’ll create a link to them.)

At this point however I think NLP Centres CANADA is the only trainer in Canada (and likely in the North East of North America) that does follow the International and Canadian training standards.

Here are the standards for proper NLP Certification as published by the Canadian Association of NLP (and taken from International Associations):

Practitioner Level

Demonstration of ability to identify the following basic skills, techniques, patterns and concepts of NLP and to utilize them competently with self and with others.
1. Behavioral integration of the basic presuppositions of NLP:

Outcome orientation with respect for others’ models of the world and the ecology of the system
Distinction between map and territory
There is only feedback (cybernetic) – no failure
The meaning of your communication is the response you get
All behavior has an adaptive intent
Everyone has the necessary resources
Resistance is a signal of insufficient pacing
The law of requisite variety.

2. Rapport, establishment and maintenance of;
3. Pacing and leading (verbal and nonverbal);
4. Calibration (sensory experience);
5. Representational systems (predicates, and accessing cues);
6. Meta-Model
7. Milton-Model
8. Elicitation of well-formed, ecological outcomes and structures of present state;
9. Overlap and translation of representational systems;
10. Metaphor creation;
11. Frames: contrast, relevancy, as if, backtrack
12. Anchoring (VAK)
13. Anchoring techniques (contextualized to the field of application)
14. Ability to shift consciousness to external or internal stimuli, as required by the moment’s task;
15. Dissociation and association
16. Chunking;
17. Submodalities;
18. Verbal and nonverbal elicitation of responses;
19. Accessing and building of resources;
20. Reframing;
21. Strategies: detection, elicitation, utilization and installation;
22. Demonstration of behavioral flexibility.

Duration of Training: Minimum of 120 hours of training in the basics of NLP patterns led by a certified Trainer, or a certified Master Practitioner under the supervision of a Trainer.

Make no mistake: 120 hours of training really means classroom training…otherwise anyone can claim they’re NLP Certified if they read a few books and spend some time on Youtube.

So, buyer beware – you pay good money to be Certified as an NLP Practitioner. If an NLP Trainer is trying to sell you a course of 3 or 6 or 8 or 9 or 12 days duration and instead of properly training you gives you a handful of CDs to ‘make up the time’, you might think twice…it’s far easier and much more cost effective to train 9 days and hand out some audio than it is to be train for double that!

Sadly at the end of the day it’s just a business decision that misleads NLP Trainers to NOT give proper value for money when they short-change NLP students out of proper training.

NLP Rehab

We’ve been called by too many ‘practitioners’ asking us to help them with their skills after taking training with our competitors. In fact, we joke that we’re sometimes in the NLP Rehab business.

If you’ve taken NLP and received a certificate but trained for 60 or 70 hours, let us know. We’d be happy to train you up to the standards so you have the skills you deserve at a discounted rate.