How to choose an NLP Practitioner course?

Andy Smith of Practical EQ has written an excellent summary of ways to choose an NLP Practitioner course that’s right for you. Given the plethora of courses available in all sorts of styles, this is a very helpful guide to new ‘NLP shopper’.

Here’s my shortened version of his list.

1. What is the emphasis of the course? Therapy, business, self development or general purpose.
2. How big is the course? Course sizes can range from 12 to 500! How big would you like your group to be?
3. ‘Intensive’ or ‘Extensive’? Intensive courses can be as little as 7 days long, extensive courses are usually 20 days long.
4. How is the course structured? Does the course run for 10 days straight, or one weekend a month over 10 months? Do you want to complete the course quickly or do you want time to take it on board and integrate the learning into your life.
5. How much access do you get to the trainer? Is the trainer available to answer questions or does he use assistants and coaches to do that work?
6. How much are NLP Practitioner courses? The pricing varies from under £1,000 to £3,000 that’s quite an investment.
7. How much does the personality of the trainer matter? Does your trainer inspire trust? Do you feel at ease with them? If possible meet up with them before taking a training to find out what they are like.
8. Does accreditation matter? Since there is no official body setting the standards a lot training institutes adding their own ‘accreditation’ to the trainings.

I think this is a great list of things to look out for when choosing an NLP Practitioner training. Take a look at his full article to get more help in making the correct choice. You can even download the article as a pdf file to have it on hand when you are making your choice.

I’m a little biased about NLP training as I am running an NLP Practitioner Training in Newcastle in about a months time as part of IntegrityNLP. I’ll be writing a post explaining where our training fits within his list of characteristics.