soulman said:
Uhhh I'm incredibly not-well-read on it and it's been many years since I was checking it out properly. But snatching this quick quote from a website describing NLP:
The basic premise of NLP is that the words we use reflect an inner, subconscious perception of our problems. If these words and perceptions are inaccurate, they will create an underlying problem as long as we continue to use and to think them. Our attitudes are, in a sense, a self-fulfilling prophecy
It does say elsewhere that their definition of the term "linguistics" doesn't just refer to the manipulation of words in the brain, but ideas and images as well (which is a bit dodgy IMO - linguistics is the study of language). But it seems a bit of a leap of faith to me to say that using inaccurate language is the cause of misery, fear and depression, the removal of which are the goals most often used to "sell" NLP (except when it's being portrayed in a more career/motivational guise). Thought gives rise to language, not the other way round - languageless people still think and still feel.
I find the ideas very interesting (never get tired of talking about language and/or perception), and there are many things about it which ring true, but I'm suspicious when NLP documentation seems to refer to "success" as one of the outcomes of NLP "therapy". Maybe I need "remodelling" ...
There's a sense of Orwellian Newspeak about it.
soulman said:
It sounds like you're saying that an individual cannot have an impact on another individual, or on society. Not convinced.
Of course people have an impact on each other. And there is a sense in which every interaction I have with everyone I meet moves out from person to person into society at large, so yes, my mental state (my cheerfulness, my confidence, my depression, my foaming at the mouth) does change the world in a very specific, diffuse sense.
But it's a chaotic process; I can't even predict how my demeanour and my values will affect just the first person I meet, let alone predict how they're going to go on to affect others. I don't see how visualising a goal involving mass change of personality - say, Everybody Being Happy - is going to be achieved in this way.
Every now and then, history does throw up people that manage to motivate large numbers of people. The results aren't usually too pretty. Even then, it's largely chance.
