I got into NLP 15 years ago, not because I wanted to make money. I got into NLP because when I first came across NLP, I had such a profound realisation. What I realised was this. Up to this point, I knew nothing about personal growth and what I learnt on the first 4 days of my NLP training changed my life. You see, I thought I understood all the important principles in the world at that age.
In university I was awarded a first-class honours in Physics. I got the Nortel Prize for the Best Student of the Year. I had always done well academically. I had an engineering and scientific background and I really thought I understood the world. In my mind I was a man of the world.
What I learned from NLP – specifically the NLP Communication Model and how language impacts your reality – blew my mind. It is a model that every academic, every engineer, every scientist, and every developer should know because it helps them deal with one thing that is not found in science books: how to deal with emotional turmoil in day-to-day life.
Scientists and engineers are terrible at obsessing over problems. They create obsessions with trying to solve a problem. This may lead to compulsions, becoming neurotic or exhibit impulsive behaviours. And without understanding the NLP communication model, and how the limbic system works, you really are susceptible to experience mental health problems: depression, anxiety problems, stress related problems and eventually heart related problems. This is a result of not understanding how your thinking affects your emotional state.
When I discovered this back in 2002 it had such profound impact to me that I wanted to share with other people like myself, people who obsess over problems, people who have got anxiety and stress, people who are plagued with guilt when they do anything wrong. These people really want to make a difference in the world. Yet they haven’t really thought about how their emotional state impacts their ability to lead. And that’s what NLP taught me.
When I look back on the last 15 years, I’ve found that there’s a lot of other people in the NLP space, who don’t have the same vision, or are moving in same direction as me. A lot of people got into NLP because they wanted to learn how to sell, or they wanted to learn how to manipulate other people’s thinking. I didn’t. NLP profoundly affected my ability to manage my own state and manage my own life. And now after 15 years of teaching NLP I must ask the question who really needs to know about this model. And I think the people who really need to know about this model more than anyone else are mostly introverted people, who spend a lot of time by themselves trying to solve problems without necessarily having the ability to understand how their thinking affects their mental state. That is why engineers should learn about NLP!