There’s a strange confidence that surrounds NLP. You can hear it before you see it. The hand gestures, the buzzwords, the absolute certainty that they’ve unlocked the human mind with a weekend course and a new vocabulary.
What always interests me is how familiar all the techniques look once you strip the branding off. A bit of mirroring, a bit of perspective-shifting, a bit of persuasion, all glued together and sold as if someone has reinvented psychology.
Mirroring becomes a “rapport strategy.” Changing perspective becomes “reframing.” Interrupting someone becomes “pattern interruption.” The renaming does most of the heavy lifting. The behaviour itself is nothing new.
And then there’s the habit of borrowing language from real behavioural science. Terms like anchoring, calibration, modelling.
All of them have established meanings. NLP uses them as camouflage, because familiarity creates the illusion of credibility. Remove the stolen vocabulary and the whole structure falls apart.
My personal favourite is the eye-movement claim. The idea that you can diagnose someone’s internal state by watching which direction they glance. If that were true, we’d replace behavioural experts with CCTV cameras and call it a day.
People don’t defend NLP because the method is strong. They defend it because the experience feels good. Someone pays attention to them. Someone sounds certain. There’s novelty in the room.
Their nervous system perks up and they credit the tool instead of the atmosphere. Expectancy is a powerful thing. Hope always creates a temporary lift, even when the mechanism underneath is hollow.
If you want to know whether something is worth taking seriously, test what happens when you examine it closely. Anything real gets stronger. NLP doesn’t.
