NLP is like Sales For Weirdos
A lot of people in copywriting, sales and business say that you should learn about NLP. NLP, or neuro-linguistic programming, is the art of causing mental change (or something) and it’s a necessary skill so you can read people’s minds and make them change according to your will.
Obviously, as copywriters the idea that you can use NLP to make someone buy whatever you’re selling would be a great power. I can see why people recommend it.
I recommend learning about it for another reason: It’s weird and you’ll realise after reading about it for ten minutes that most of the information you get in an NLP book is just basic information you already know from being a copywriter.
Backstory
In 2007 I attended an NLP course. I was there because our University had a “professional development” requirement where we had to either go and work for a local company or otherwise do something that we thought would help us in our professional lives.
Being a bohemian nerd, I decided that learning how to hypnotically persuade people how to do stuff was probably a decent life skill.
It probably would have been… except that there was one problem: The people there were weird. They would wave their hands around and all of a sudden slowly emphasise words. And talk. Like. This. It was like they were trying to perform Jedi mind tricks on the audience. A social club meets autistic street magicians.
This was just the people running the course. The people on the course all nodded their heads as though there were revelations occurring in the lessons which basically amounted to “don’t be a weirdo” whilst being the weirdest people I’d ever seen.
But I learned a few lessons there, and thinking back now as a copywriter, I can see a few more.
What is NLP Really?
NLP was born when two guys (John Grinder and Richard Bandler) decided to work out what a famous hypnotherapist (Milton Erickson) did to get his results. They then developed a formula for achieving this success by looking at Erickson’s language, and then proceeded in New-Age fashion to try and link this method to absolutely every subject under the Sun.
Hypnosis, psychology, linguistics, sales techniques, tech jargon and all other kinds of jargon and metaphors all came together to create what’s known as NLP: Neuro-linguistic programming. It’s a misnomer of a name, because it doesn’t involve neuro, linguistics or programming.
It’s essentially basic hypnotic techniques combined with sales techniques. Things that NLP Gurus will teach you (in their weird way):
- Rapport building.
- Pacing
- Eliciting the values of the listener and working out how best they learn.
- Delivering a message according to the information from above.
- ‘Anchoring’ positive feelings to a pre-determined outcome.
Those are some of the logical and useful applications. You’ll also learn weird stuff like eye cues (which aren’t really accurate,) super-hypnotic techniques to make you master incredibly difficult subjects in a matter of hours (which sadly don’t work,) and palm-reading/astrology/whatever nonsense the guru is going to upsell you with.
What Are Some Of The Lessons From NLP?
I’ve erred on the side of negativity in this article. That said, the above skills; rapport building, pacing, eliciting values and delivering a message according to those values are probably information you want to learn. So you might wonder why I’m so negative.
Those lessons are better taught by basic copywriting and sales books. When you’re writing a sales letter, you already go through all these processes, and you do it without any jargon about whether or not a person is lying due to how their eyes flicker.
NLP courses cost thousands of pounds, and you’ll get taught information that you can find in books that are available used on Amazon for a penny. This extends even to texts about hypnosis: hypnosis itself, like psychology and sales, is a pretty well-established entity by this point. NLPer’s will act like they have some new and unknown technology when they tell you about “anchoring” or “inductions” but that’s just basic hypnotic/psychological material which you’ll understand in far more detail if you just read a text book on the subject.
Final Thoughts
This has been another tangential article, so I’ll wrap it up in bullet form:
- NLP is a mix & match of different disciplines.
- The useful information you’ll get from it is on rapport building, anchoring, value elicitation, delivering a message and pacing.
- You can learn all of those things from simple books on sales and copywriting.
- You can learn everything else about NLP from better sources – such as text books that were the original source material for the NLP ideas in the first place.
That sums that subject up quite nicely, so I’ll leave it there.
Have a good Easter to all who are reading this as its released.