Well, well, it has certainly been a while since I wrote anything. That is not to say that I have been lying around lazily, I actually have been quite busy. Among other things, I am helping a friend launch a company for training people in NLP, hypnosis and Mind power. This is a very interesting venture for me, as I have worked mostly as a freelance trainer before, so now making all the “executive decisions” is tricky. One of the biggest ones is which type of NLP course to offer! “What do you mean, what type of course?” I hear you ask. Well, there is a debate raging in the (decidedly small) world of NLP, regarding the length of practitioner courses. Originally, NLP Practitioner courses lasted…

Forever. Well, not really, but the first practitioner was, to the best of my knowledge, about 6 months long, if not more. That is quite some time investment, don’t you think?? Gradually, they reduced the length of the courses to about 21 days, and gradually down to 15 with some pre study material. Then the big bang came: Richard Bandler and John Grinder separated (goes to show that you can learn all you want about communication and rapport, it’s always a personal decision on if it is worth applying the knowledge or not) and Richard Bandler went on to discover Submodalities.

Once he had done that, he also separated from the 15 (or so) original trainers, and put on a 7 day course called “The Bandler Effect”, teaching exclusively his material. 7 days, compared to 21….well, guess the market reaction. So, the story goes that Tad James thought: “Damn, 7 days is much better than 21…how about we do the whole thing in 7 days?!” Thus, the 7 day accelerated practitioner was born.

Looking at learning theory, hypnosis, and other topics, the 7 day accelerated practitioner does make sense. It works on the conscious and unconscious level, and is aimed at behavioural integration of the skills. So far, so good….or not?

Well, while the 7 day format is now widely used, there are still schools teaching 15 or even 21 days, and they claim that the 7 day format is too short to really learn anything properly, while the 7 day school of thought claims that 15 days are just too long.

In my experience, I have seen people coming from both of these courses being on par with each other. In my humble opinion, the efficacy of the course depends not on the length, but on the learner. Time really says nothing about the quality of a course, so depending on how you prefer to learn, you should choose the course. Some people like to have in-depth discussions about topics, going down to the nitty gritty, others just want the general outline and get cracking with playing with the ideas. Some people want an exact outline, others prefer a more inductive style of self discovery.

So, in the business, what have we decided. Well, we decided to go with out feeling, and offer both types of courses, long and short, simply because we want to offer something for many different learning styles.

This only leaves one last question: Which course would you do 7 days or 15 days?