The NLP Activist

A Weekend Training with Richard Bolstad

Prerequisite: Open entry but recommended at least 2 days of NLP Training. This course is not currently scheduled.

As a coach or therapist using NLP, your aim is to help your client to achieve changes in the real world. To make those changes ecological, they need to change not just what your client does, but the systems in which they exist. Instead of thinking of a coach as a person who helps their client “fit in” with whatever is happening, I believe it is important that we see ourselves as activists, helping our clients to make changes in that world. The process of social transformation depends on skills that can be learned. You and your clients can become more successful at creating the changes you want. Your activism can enhance your sense of personal fulfilment instead of draining it.

This weekend will help you plan how to create change in a real world system of which you are a part (you choose which system, group, or community you want to be a part of changing). In working with numerous social change organizations over the years, and training workers from groups such as Greenpeace New Zealand and the New Zealand Peace Foundation, I have an increasing sense of the importance of sharing the NLP skills for personal resilience, community change, and conflict management. This world is in crisis, but NLP gives us the tools to make “changing the world” a celebration.

This training will give you practical tools to help people plan change in their family, in their community, in their business organization, and empower them to see what they do as active rather than just responsive. What is the point of helping person after person to respond resiliently to a system that actually creates the disasters they must cope with? You will use an example of your own and create a specific, realistic plan for effecting change in that system. You will learn how to coach others to do that too. You will practice some of the latest researched skills for influencing other human beings to act. Not only will you understand how NLP models like reframing, anchoring, metaprogram sorting and outcomes can be utilised in this process, you will also get a sense of your own inner power to create a world that is worth living in. This is an opportunity to renew your sense of passion for creating that world, and a way to get tools to inspire others with that passion also. An unhealthy social system makes its own transformation the first healthy act.

• Plan a social activism campaign for your own issue
• Identify your preferred role in social activism: drawing attention to what needs changing, challenging the system, creating models of the future, or negotiating the needed reforms
• Identify where in the 8 stages of social change your movement is, and what are the next steps.
• Understand how to reinspire activists rather than spiral into hopelessness
• Utilize NLP the way John Grinder imagined it originally when he was a professor teaching

Richard has run Social Activist Training with organizations like Greenpeace New Zealand.