Course content – NLP Practitioner Competencies

Below is a minimum set of competencies expected of an NLP Practitioner who has attended an ITA certified NLP Practitioner course. This list is not exhaustive and where time is available, we may include additional patterning.

Calibration (input channels)

Being able to calibrate in each of the sensory input channels (please notice that we distinguish between ‘sensory input channel’ and ‘representational system’), visual, auditory and kinaesthetic.

The ability to distinguish between conscious and unconscious signals in non-verbal communication.

Rapport

• Mirroring
  Visual, auditory
• Cross-over mirroring
  Visual, auditory Alignments (including representation systems manipulation)

Representational systems

The ability to detect what might be happening with your client and potentially preferred representational system and build deeper rapport by:

• Eye movements
• Predicates
• Voice quality
• The ability to rapidly and smoothly adjust your communication (both verbal and non-verbal) to the preferred system of the client
• Overlap of representational systems, and use in pacing and leading the client from one representational system to the other
• Identification and utilisation of ordered sequences of representational systems, (sometimes referred to as strategies)
• Synaesthesia patterns
• Submodalities and their use both as interventions as barometers of the effectiveness of change techniques

Language patterns

• Verbal package (The Precision Model)
• Framing, Backtracking
• The specification questions

Methods of verifying map alignment (paraphrase, for example)

• The Intention question
• Modal operators and universal quantifiers
• Frank Farrelley’s provocation method

Minimum metaphor competency

• Isomorphic/homomorphic mappings
• Naturalistic metaphors
• Metaphors using anchoring
• Living metaphors
• Logical levels and logical types (defined in Whispering)

Anchoring techniques

• The ability to establish and successfully re-activate anchors in each of the three major input channels (V A K, and also spatially)
• Use of anchoring in change formats
• Change personal history/re-imprinting
• Collapse of anchors
• Time line interventions
• Circle of excellence (spatial anchoring)

Multiple perceptual positions

With special emphasis on triple description (the use of 1st, 2nd and 3rd position), with full competency to move quickly and cleanly between these perceptual positions.

Chain of Excellence

• Understanding the components
• Recognizing/Calibrating when student and/or client needs in terms of Chain of Excellence

Epistemology (from Whispering) with f1, FA and f2

• F1 Transforms
• First Access
• F2 Transforms
• Linguistic Representations

Being able to recognise the above distinctions and how they impact mental processing at different points of representation.

Being able to design interventions and understand the leverage point of that intervention in the epistemological distinction.

Simple hypnotic patterning

Using inductions and language patterns (portions of the Milton Model) to utilise both deliberate and spontaneously occurring altered states.

Involuntary signal systems

• Arbitrary involuntary systems (like those found in step two of N-Step Reframing)
• Use of natural involuntary systems (pain and sensations associated with health, disease and dreams)
• Methods for assisting people who are disassociated kinaesthetically to develop signals – the orienting response

N-Step Reframing (old Six Step Reframing)

• Calibrating and working with clients involuntary unconscious signals
• Working with ‘unconscious intention’, again through calibrating and working with involuntary unconscious signals

Tasking (especially for changing belief systems)

• Listening off the top for semantically packed words.
• Being able to set parallel tasks, that are isomorphic to the client’s ‘present issue’ to create change in the clients circumstances with the direct involvement of the client’s conscious mind.

Parts Interventions

• Negotiation between parts
• Parts integration
• Building a team