5 reasons why NLP doesn't work as well as hypnosis

If you're reading this article, chances are you've already heard of both disciplines and are wondering which of the two is actually the best. NLP and hypnosis do seem somewhat similar at first glance, but when you look up a little more about both NLP and hypnosis, you quickly come to the conclusion that there are some fundamental differences. In this article, we compare NLP and hypnosis and give some reasons why you should prefer hypnosis over NLP

Why NLP doesn't work as well as hypnosis

NLP can teach you how to be successful, both in your professional and personal life. In that area, NLP is quite effective, but hypnosis does much more than that. Hypnosis does not glorify "success" as the ultimate goal, but helps you solve fundamental psychological problems you are struggling with.

NLP can provide excellent results if you want to achieve success on a superficial level, but much deeper than that an NLP training will never go. It often remains superficial tricks and never really goes into depth. Now it doesn't have to, but so it is often not a good way to solve problems.

Hypnosis, on the other hand, utilizes one of the most powerful parts of the human mind: the subconscious mind. This is a huge asset that many other similar disciplines (such as NLP or classical psychology) largely omit. By using the subconscious mind, the hypnotherapist has a much more extensive and thorough arsenal of working tools at his disposal.

Looking for emergence is better than a trick

He can look for the root of the problem and get to the heart of the matter from the deepest subconscious. With hypnosis, you work from the inside out to address problems such as insecurity and stress, whereas with NLP you simply address the symptoms: an NLP course will teach you how to act like someone who is very self-confident. In hypnosis, you will learn what that really is: self-confidence.

One practical criticism addressed to a lot of NLP training programs is the price. These can sometimes run into several thousand dollars for a single training program. When this also involves a large group of trainees being trained by a single NLP trainer, you may begin to question the sincerity of such NLP training programs.

Why on earth does NLP training have to be so terribly expensive for often a few days? Of course, a really good hypnosis training also falls into that category, only then you have many more training days and sometimes you can even redo the training for free, as with us.

During the 1970s and 1980s, NLP was very popular, but in the last twenty-five years, NLP has faced a lot of legitimate criticism from an academic scientific perspective. There are suspiciously few scientific texts in respected publications that describe NLP as an effective method, but you can immediately find dozens of examples to the contrary.

NLP is almost unanimously described from academic circles as an outdated form of psycho-mythology based on dated metaphors of the human brain. This while hypnosis is increasingly being described as a working form of psychotherapy by scientific experts.

NLP relies on several techniques to achieve success. Those techniques are taught to trainees one at a time to address different situations. It is for this reason that NLP lacks some kind of central philosophy. NLP is not a uniform philosophy, not a whole, not a worldview, but rather a series of (sometimes useful) tricks for very specific situations.