Ask Sue Knight

I would like to know that how excactly NLP deiffers from Hypnotism.

Is it true that NLP is actually hypnotism with just a different name?

Dear Ashwin, thank you for your question. The answer is that No they are not the same thing at all. NLP is a process of modelling what works, excellence, what makes a difference. For example if I want to know how to be really confident when I stand up and talk to a large audience I can use the tools for awareness that I have learned with NLP to model either myself when I do achieve that or someone who is a model of excellence for that. So it is a process of finding out (unpacking) the difference that makes a difference in order to achieve consistency with excellence.

Now it happens that some of the early and current models of excellence that were modelled by the founders of NLP for example were people who were skilled at hypnotism Milton Eriksson for example so we have learned a lot about hypnotism and how people who are good at what they do sometimes hypnotise themselves by the way that they think prior and during peak performance but the hypnotism is a part of the output the discovery of NLP and is not NLP itself and we might sometimes model things that very conscious and not at all hypnotic.

I hope that helps you understand the difference which is a very important one.

Yours sincerely,

Sue Knight