How long does it take to become an NLP practitioner? While most trainings at the base level tend to hover around 7 days, this may lead you to think that allows you time to become skilled with everything you learn.
The truth is, trainings used to be around 20 days long, but because most people couldn’t commit to that length, the trainings got shorter and shorter. Some people do 2 day trainings now and issue a certification! Thats craziness. NLP is a VAST field with a lot of content contained.
It needs to be learned in layers, and there are different styles to teaching it. The way I learned first was via reading books and watching a LOT of NLP videos and slowly started to grasp what I was doing. When I teach it now, I go about it MUCH differently than the way I learned it.
Generally, I believe in spending a LOT of time teaching the meta-model, since it’s the essence of gathering information. Information gathering itself can be time consuming if you don’t know WHAT information you should be looking for, then of course what to DO with that information. This is the second part I focus on.
Unfortunately most NLP trainings focus too much on “techniques” or “patterns”. There are hundreds of these, but the real magic is knowing when to use them, under what circumstances, and of course in which person (if at all!).
As you can probably imagine, going to a 7 day certification and getting slammed with a volume of techniques and learnings then getting a certificate does not an NLP expert one make.
Get exposed to the information, then back off, and chunk it down into bite sized sections to learn, refine your skills, and develop masters in application. So, in conclusion to the question of “how long does it take to become an NLP practitioner?”, probably around 7 days to get a piece of paper, but then a LIFETIME of learning afterward!
