Steven Leeds and I participated in the NLP Leadership Summit in Alicante, Spain on January 12-14 with 79 other NLP Leaders. There were NLP trainers, authors, educators, business coaches and therapists from all parts of the world to have a conversation about NLP. Although the summit is leaderless, we did have two facilitators, Heidi Heron, from Australia (born in the U.S.) and Michael Hall from the United States who made sure that we stayed on point, found ways to be respectful and created a format for us to follow. The phrase, ‘herding cats,” was used quite often to describe a variety of ourgroup processes. We had large group sessions and then would have break out tables of 8-10 people for the smaller work group discussions. In the small groups we discussed issues such as Professionalism, Standards (including competencies), Marketing, Branding, Technology, Research, The 4 th Generation (the future developments) and the Overall Big Picture. After a 40 minute discussion we would come back to the group at large and report.
The discussions began about NLP and what we each believed was the best thing NLP had to offer and our visions for the future, and then went to what are some of the problems to achieve those visions and then what are solutions and next steps. The visions ranged from wanting to see NLP in all educational systems to helping create a peaceful world. The problems ranged from discussing the lack of research to why people don’t know about NLP. The solutions ranged from commitments to research, to sharing any news about NLP that we see in the main stream.
As I reflect on the meeting one