Cognitive Clarity
Prerequisite: at least 2 days of NLP Training. This course is not currently scheduled.
Much of your clients’ suffering comes from buying into maps of the world that do not fit with reality. It is this lack of reality-testing that makes them vulnerable to online scams, to ending up in dissatisfying relationships and jobs, and to getting fooled by fake news online, not to mention being fooled by their own internal fake news. John Grinder described the NLP metamodel, which he believed was the core of all psychotherapy, as a “bullshit detection system”. My aim with Cognitive Clarity is to present a model of NLP “psychotherapy” and “coaching” as unpacking specific cognitive distortions that limit people’s ability to enjoy life. Our failure to do this leads to both depression and to conspiracy theories or “conspirituality”. The NLP community is burdened by conspirituality more so than the general population, because it has focused almost entirely on deliberately utilizing people’s “gullibility” (their cognitive biases) to produce emotional change. Our skill with “spinning people’s heads” needs to be balanced with a skill in creating measurable, reality-tested, real-world outcomes. This latter is the focus of modern coaching, and NLP is at a crossroads where it must add scientific and measurable real-world outcomes, or spiral further into conspirituality and feel-good session-by-session emotional changes. Conspirituality feels nice in the short term: you are totally in charge of your world; global awakening is coming; any belief system is as valid as any other; you have secret knowledge that allows you to manipulate others and evade their manipulations. In the long term it means living in a delusional universe where the ecosystem is deteriorating, civilization is caught in a new wave of fascist ideology, and the very sciences that could help us create a future worth living in, are seen as our enemy.
Cognitive clarity was implicit in NLP from the beginning, with the world of Alfred Korzybski, and the metamodel. We can now draw on half a century of new definitions in the list of cognitive biases and logical fallacies. We can understand NLP changework as a successful alternation of a) unpacking cognitive biases and fallacies, b) installing more useful responses that both use and allow for our biases, and c) testing the changes in the real world where we live. This gives us a crystal clear overview of the full range of NLP language patterns (ways to deconstruct or construct logical fallacies) and of cognitive biases (which we utilize in NLP change processes such as submodality shifts, anchoring and reframing.
You’ll learn:
- How the NLP change techniques utilize cognitive biases, and when it’s appropriate to use them.
- How the NLP language patterns (Metamodel, Milton Model, Sleight of Mouth) align with logical fallacies and the methodology for unpacking them.
- How to structure your coaching/therapy so as to elicit the logical fallacies and biases that limit your client, how to alter these by utilizing their biases and even utilizing logical fallacies, and how to check that they can walk clear-headed into their future with rational models of the world.
- How to differentiate conspiracy theories from real conspiracies, and how to help people step out of conspiracy theories.
- How to make sense of the information war and create cognitive clarity.
Richard Bolstad is a trained Psychiatric Nurse and a member of the New Zealand Association of Psychotherapists, as well as a Master Trainer of NLP with IN and a Fellow Member Trainer with the IANLP.
This course is not currently scheduled.
Online with Richard Bolstad
Full fee NZ$600, reduced to NZ$550 if paid early
- I really like what are doing here. Thanks Richard Bolstad for bringing some sanity again to the field. – Ahmed Sharif
- Again, real clarity. They say that you are a true master when you can explain something complex deceptively simply…thank you Richard. – Reb Veale