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Courses - FAQ

The Indian & International Professional Association of Neuro-Linguistic Programming are often asked the same questions by multiple people.  Compiled here are the most often asked questions about NLP courses endorsed by the IPANLP 

If you have a question which is not answered here please send your question via the Contacts page.

Questions answered below are:

  1. Are the courses all certified by IPANLP?
  2. Do all courses follow the same standards?
  3. Are all same level courses charged at a set fee?
  4. Are the course trainers always certified by IPANLP?
  5. Can I attend an advanced course after doing the previous one with another organisation?
  6. Will I get free repeats if I want to re-attend a course?
  7. Why do the IPANLP advise AGAINST pre-course study materials?

Are the courses all certified by IPANLP?

Unlike NLP membership organisations, the IPANLP do not claim to certify or certificate NLP Courses.

The trainer alone is in a position to evaluate and certificate at their course. IPANLP endorse the certification that the trainer awards. Often the trainer will award an IPANLP specific certificate. Be aware that the trainer has evaluated and awarded the certificate to you and that IPANLP endorse it.

IPANLP keep in touch with and encourage continual development of the trainers endorsed by us. IPANLP endorsed Trainers and Educators are encouraged to stay in touch with their participants and make themselves available to answer questions post course and offer help and advice to their participants who choose to take on NLP projects.

IPANLP's endorsement of your certificate is our recognising you and the fact that you have taken steps to ensure your own quality NLP Education. It is a recognition that you view the certificate as the start of your learning rather than simply the end of the training and that you are committed to continual professional development.

Do all IPANLP courses follow the same standard?

No!

For all courses to follow the same 'standard' syllabus would be restrictive and this is quite simply the exact opposite of what NLP is actually about!

All the courses by NLP Trainers & Educators endorsed by IPANLP will have at the foundation all you need for that particular level.

However NLP is now a very broad field of study and no one course can encompass it all. Each of the IPANLP endorsed Trainers & Educators will train from their own unique perspective. They create different exercises, teach topics in different orders and utilise differing descriptions of techniques and patterns.

Some courses may teach the old techniques in order to demonstrate how the newer techniques evolved. Others may prefer to focus only on what is practically applicable today. Each training will be different and by attending multiple trainings your grasp of the foundations will only continue to improve and at the same time learning more and more about the field in general.

So even though they all may be teaching an NLP Practitioner course, each will contain the relevant foundations but each will be refreshingly different. So that a participant can attend the same level course with different trainers, with new learnings and also get the core fundamentals in a different way from each.

This is to encourage continual professional development and an opportunity to gain multiple perspectives and multiple descriptions, to expand choice which is after all what NLP is actually about.

 

Are all same level courses charged at a set fee?

No!

The course fee depends on many things:

  • The type and quality of the venue
  • If event organisers are being used
  • If refreshments and lunch are included
  • If high quailty materials, manuals etc. are being provided
  • Travel and accommodation of the trainer if required
  • Cost & quality of advertising, marketing, sales etc.
  • If sales & marketing teams are used, if commission is paid out
  • Amount the trainer requires as his/her fee commensurate with experience
  • How many participants are on the course. The more participants the lower the fee can be.

Higher fees do not necessarily mean the higher the quality of training but may indicate that quality venues, salesman commissions and other facilities are being paid for from your money.

The fee therefore is entirely up to the trainer or sponsor to set, depending on their expenses for marketing & running the training and their expected fee for facilitating it.

Are the course trainers always certified by IPANLP?

IPANLP do not claim to certify, certificate, accredit, verify or recognise as other NLP membership organisations falsely do.

Trainers whose certificate has been endorsed by the IPANLP, automatically their participants certificate is endorsed by IPANLP. They may themselves in turn, evaluate & certify their own participants and have those certificates endorsed by IPANLP too.

IPANLP encourage continual professional development by encouraging associates to train with excellent trainers who have a good track record of applying NLP. The context maybe business, health, spirituality, finance, relationships etc.  Those trainers who we come to know as excellent at what they do, even though they are not associated with IPANLP may be endorsed by IPANLP so that we can encourage our associates to train with quality people and bring that quality into our community.

Can I attend an advanced course after attending the previous one with another organisation?

Yes!

We do not recognise who you were certified by, we recognise YOU! We recognise that you are searching for NLP Training with quality trainers. IPANLP Trainers are able to run their trainings, teaching at multiple levels simultaneously.

IPANLP endorsed Trainers & Educators teach the same course at differing levels of understanding. Many of the participants arrive at the course with different levels of knowledge and skill. So it is important to include them all in the training and allow them to develop at their own individual pace.

This is why having a rigid set standard way of teaching is NOT how NLP is taught and why the co-creators of NLP state that 99% of NLP Trainers haven't a clue about NLP. It is about paying attention to the individuals who are present at the training and being able to customise the training around them on the fly.

Will I get free repeats if I want to re-attend a course?

No!

This used to be a way of filling up courses with previous attendees who could come back at cost. It was a way to cover costs and appear to have a full course.

If you feel that you need to review or re-attend a course, perhaps that trainer was not suitable for you or the pace was not right for you.

It is better to choose a different trainer to attend with. You will get the foundational knowledge along with a lot of new skills from a different perspective and with different descriptions so that you will be greatly motivated to learn and keen to pay attention.

Often participants at the same course arrive with different levels of knowledge and skill. IPANLP endorsed Trainers & Educators are able to teach at different levels during the same training. So each individual gets the same increase in knowledge and skill albeit at their own personal starting point & comfort level.

Why do IPANLP advise AGAINST pre-course study materials?

In the early days of NLP training there were very few books on NLP.  Trainers at that time had to put together reasonable material to support their trainings.  Much of it was back ground reading material and some of it specifically followed the structure of their course.

NLP Courses were (and the excellent ones still are) run minimalistically, with the focus on discovery & conditioning of NLP Patterns through drills. Originally NLP Practitioner courses were 20 -24 days long as Therapists legally had to undertake at least 120 hours of training over a miminum of 20 days.

In the early 90's some NLP trainers noticing the interest from business and personal development segments reduced the training to 15 and then only 7 days and introduced pre-study material for the participant to get up to speed on the NLP content prior to the course. This did appear to work for a short time with experienced Trainers who understood how to utilise it and would exclude participants from their courses if the participant had not gone through the pre-study material in detail.

These pre-course materials are no longer necessary as there are literally thousands of books, audio CD's and DVD & YouTube video's on NLP available at very reasonable cost.  Almost all participants attending modern NLP courses have heard, read or viewed some of these prior to attending an NLP course.

There are a couple of things to keep in mind.  Pre-study materials continued to evolved mainly for marketing purposes, to "anchor" the participant to a particular training and are rather ineffective for pre-study because in the main people do not utilise it and the whole of the face to face training ends up covering content meant to have been covered in the pre-study material.

The costs of production of pre-study material are initially high and costs are passed onto the participant.  New NLP Trainers reduce the cost by copying from existing pre-study CD's or by downloading scripts from the internet and simply reading it aloud into a microphone. They are ineffective because the participant could more easily read a good book in a fraction of the time with much higher quality content. 

More importantly in the rare case that the participant has listened to the audio, from their own perspective and subjective experience, they arrive at the course with pre-conceived ideas about NLP which may be difficult to change during the training.

It takes about 4 minutes to listen to an A4 page of text read to you, but only about 30 seconds to read that same page quietly to yourself (I've tested it!).  It makes more sense to buy a book and read the content yourself in a fraction of the time. 

Even if some of the pre-course material is now on DVD in video? Without the skill in NLP patterns of sensory acuity and calibration, particularly to unconscious signals, what exactly are you observing in a DVD video of a practitioner applying a technique to a client??

Pre-study material is about marketing, appearing to 'give' great quantities of materials, and appearing to give you greater value for money.

What makes more sense to us is that AFTER undergoing NLP Training and experiencing for yourself the NLP Patterns and Processes - that your trainer provides you with 'post-course' learning material in the form of exercises to continue the conditioning of the core NLP patterns.

This embeds the generative skills and helps them become second nature.  Even if there is a manual, giving it out at the END of the training means that when the participant reads it at home AFTER the training, as a reference manual as it was originally intended, they can relate what they read back to the experiences of the training rather than their previous subjective experience.

It is far better to leave an NLP Training with immediately useful skills which can be enhanced with post course exercises.