Neuro-Linguistic Programming for Dummies

Rating:
Summary: Clinging to the Law of Averages
Review: Have you ever run into the sort of person who talks about things they know nothing about, but talks on and on and on, apparently in the hope that if they keep talking for long enough then the law of averages means they must get at least some of it right?

That's what I felt I was up against when I was reading this book.

Firstly, it is badly laid out, by which I mean that it has no obvious flow other than (I guess) the order in which things popped into the authors' heads.
Secondly, a significant amount of the material has little or nothing to do with NLP - like the "Wheel of Life" and the stuff on PTSD - and quite a lot the material, whether about NLP or not, is at best ambiguous and at worst plain inaccurate.
Thirdly, the frequent, pointless repetition of quite basic material, and the inclusion of the irrelevant material, means that a whole lot of genuine NLP material gets left out.

In the case of the meta programs, for example, only six meta programs are included, and even those aren't explained particularly well. Indeed, at one point in the book the authors claim that all meta programs ("metaprograms", as they call them) work along a sliding scale. Which clearly is NOT true of meta programs such as the "Work Preference Filter", the "Primary Interest Filter", and especially not in the case of the "In Time/Through Time" or "Time Storage Filter" meta program, which the authors confuse with "Time Lines" as in Time Line Therapy.

Worst of all, there doesn't seem to have been any attempt to edit the book once it was complete. Thus, for example, there are several places where a topic flagged up as being covered "later in this chapter" actually turns up on the very next page. Likewise the text itself is inconsistent, as in:

"We get very good at one style of thinking and processing information and let the rest of our senses lie dormant in a rusty heap."

Not only is this not true, psychologically speaking, but the authors flatly contradict themselves less than three pages later:

"As human beings we naturally blend a rich and heady mix of these three main dimensions, yet we tend to have a preference for one mode over the others."

So, "rusty heap" or "rich and heady mix"?
If you know enough to recognise which description is more accurate then you already know far more about NLP than this book will tell you. And if you don't know enough to weed out the nonsense, I'm afraid you're likely to end up with a pretty confused view of the subject if you read this book.

Definitely one of the worst books on NLP I've read.


Rating:
Summary: An easy to read introduction to the subject
Review: I picked this book up knowing little about the subject, and somewhat intimidated by the complexity of what I had previously read. I was surprised and delighted by how easy to read this book is, and how well it seems to explain the concepts of, and get over the practical uses of, neuro-linguistic programming.

I'd strongly recommended this book for anyone wanting to find out about what NLP is and how it can be used.