I started to learn NLP on my own years ago,mostly from cues I was picking up from the people around me. I never really studied the subject formally at first. Instead, I'd make observations about human nature and how people created sets of rules unconsciously for their interactions. I observed how these interactions played out, and came up with models about how to influence people. I think I even picked up a little bit of NLP hypnosis because I was soon able to gently suggest new thoughts or ideas to people that they wouldn't have had on their own.
Taking NLP practitioner training, however, took things to a whole new level. When I first started out, I didn't really intend to get that serious about practicing NLP. NLP practitioner training was right out of the question. I barely read any books about it. I figured that just using my own intuition and practicing on the people around me would be enough to teach me the skills that I needed. One of my friends was going to an NLP weekend seminar, however, and invited me along. I had want to spend some time with her, so I decided to take the NLP practitioner training course as a way to socialize with my friend and get to know her own interests a little better.
That NLP practitioner training course definitely took me to places I had never been before. I think a lot of it has to do with just immersing yourself in something. No matter what you are learning, you will pick it up at an incredibly accelerated rate of speed if it is all you do for even a couple days. The three-day weekend NLP practitioner training course didn't teach me everything I could learn about NLP, but it did immerse me in it for 72 hours. I would practice the techniques I learned on the other people at the conference, take notes about the speeches I heard, and think about neurolinguistic programming pretty much all the time. Even though a lot of it was review for me, I still felt like I understood it better when I was all done with the class.
I had thought that I would be one of the only people there for NLP practitioner training who didn't really want to be an NLP practitioner, however I was mistaken. A lot of people just treated it as a neurolinguistic programming master course of sorts. There are literally millions of people who are interested in the techniques NLP offers, and many of them go to courses like this just to get a better perspective straight from the mouths of the experts. I definitely felt like I fit in as a lay practitioner there.
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