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issues of the newsletter ************************************************************************ Issue #1: 2003.11.05.
************************************************************************ The author, who has been formally trained by the four most important co-developers of NLP (Grinder, Bandler, Dilts, and DeLozier) will send newsletters containing a variety of information concerning the advanced communication psychology/ pragmatic psychology known as NLP. ************************************************************************ Hello everybody! I am Taiten Kitaoka, a Japanese NLP trainer/facilitator. I will start my own NLP Practitioner certifying course through JMA Inc. in Japan from the end of November, and, taking advantage of this opportunity, this newsletter has been launched. I would like to heartily thank Mr Chihiro Wada, Head of the Selsyne Aim Institute, where this newsletter is issued. Since my graduation from a Japanese university in 1981, I have lived most of the time in Western countries, having come back to Japan from the UK last year. During my time abroad, I studied and practiced Western psychologies, and have come to think that Japanese people may not be able to understand to what extent NLP (Neuro-linguistic Programming) has become popular and accepted in the business world in Europe and America. For example, in the UK, it is presently estimated that up to as much as 250,000 people have acquired NLP certificates (according to the Association for NLP in Britain, whose member I have been for 15 years). These figures suggest that in Western countries NLP has permeated into all the social layers including not only people engaged in therapy, psychology and education, but also businessmen, managers, politicians, sports people, martial arts practitioners, visual artists and musicians, as well as ordinary people such as housewives. Because the population in the UK is about a half of that in Japan, the figure of 250,000 would be equivalent to half a million in Japan, which would in turn mean that one in every 200 Japanese people would have obtained NLP certificates. Furthermore, in countries of Chinese origin, especially Hong Kong and Taiwan, if job seekers mention in the CV's, which they present to their interviewers, that they have an NLP certificate, this is considered to be as important as the mentioning of a high score of TOIEC in job seekers' CV's in Japan. This fact is all the more ironic because, historically speaking, among the Asian countries, it has always been Japan that has imitated the West first. I do hope that such an NLP related situation as currently found in Hong Kong and Taiwan will also happen in Japan as soon as possible, and that is what brought me back to this country last year. Fortunately I have been trained in the past by all of the four most important co-developers of NLP, i.e., John Grinder, Richard Bandler, Robert Dilts, and Judith DeLozier, and hope that I would be entitled to send these newsletters containing multifarious information concerning this advanced communication psychology/ pragmatic psychology, while believing that I deserve such a provocative title. I also think that I may even be able to discuss "insider stories" of NLP in the future, which have not yet been known in this country. In the following issues, I would like to elucidate and analyze why NLP has become so popular in Europe and America as well as in Chinese countries (probably still excluding Mainland China), while it has not yet been known much in Japan. I for the moment would like to propose the three unique definitions of NLP a la Kitaoka in this inaugural issue: 1. "NLP is communication psychology.": There exist two distinct types of human communication, i.e., "inter-personal" and "intra-personal" communication, the latter meaning the dialogues inside ourselves and/or with ourselves. Usually, communication tends to be understood to only mean inter-personal communication, but, if the fact that human beings cannot stop the internal dialogues taking place inside their head is borne in mind, it is only too obvious that the aspects of intra-personal communication should be strongly emphasized. Fortunately, NLP has proven to be an extremely effective methodology devised to enhance one's interactive skills both in inter- and intra-personal communications. 2. "NLP is pragmatic psychology.": Usually, for example, in the business world, there is a strong tendency to seek practical tools which can bring instantaneous changes and effects in office environment. Each technique of NLP can exhibit exactly that. Also, NLP, which was born in the States, renown for being a "country of pragmatism", is a purely pragmatic approach only interested in what kind of behavioral changes can be produced and how quickly. This approach is of course diametrically opposite to cognitive approaches, including Freudian Psychoanalysis. In this very sense, I personally strongly believe that NLP provides the practical tools that may quite probably be accepted by the Japanese business world, contrary to apparent common sense. Incidentally, I think that there are many Japanese business people who may be greatly surprised to hear that Coaching, which has become so popular here in recent years, is based on NLP. Recently I met a Japanese lady, a professional coach, who clearly said to me "If you know Coaching, you may not know everything about NLP, but if you know NLP, you will know all about Coaching, and that is why I want to seriously study NLP"! 3. "NLP is content free methodology.": NLP has provided the rules of human communication, as a learnable set of explicit tools, and these rules are like mathematical formulas or linguistic syntaxes. Namely, NLP has enabled its practitioners to obtain the answers (their behavioral changes) they have been seeking, purely by putting the details of their problems into these communicational formulas. As any details can be put into these formulas, NLP is described as "content-free". It is for this reason that NLP can be used to dramatically accelerate our learning processes. Presently, NLP trainers are forced to intervene as soon as their clients begin to talk about their problems in detail, by saying "I am sorry, but could you please stop talking, because too detailed a verbal description of the problems HINDERS my process to follow the necessary steps of the formulas?"! It is exactly for this reason that I am convinced that NLP must be the first (and possibly the last) "therapeutic" school which can be accepted even by the Japanese people for the first time, who have historically shown extreme allergic reactions against any therapies after psychoanalysis, where clients are forced to "talk about their secrets in front of strangers". Also, it must not be forgotten that adult learning for grown-up people cannot depend on the inductive approach where rules are extracted after a series of trials and errors, which children necessarily must go through, and that such a deductive approach as NLP, which tries first to learn universal rules, turns out to be an extremely effective and efficient way of learning for adult people. I hope that the above three definitions of NLP will dispel any possible misunderstanding of NLP on the part of Japanese people, and that they will understand that NLP is a set of very practical tools easily amenable to the Japanese mind. How did you find this opening issue of the newsletter? If you have questions and feedback, please contact me at magazine@creativity.co.uk. Go to Taiten Kitaoka's Official Web site. Go to the site in English: Taiten Kitaoka's Newsletter: "This is the Genuine NLP!". Go to the site in Japanese: Taiten Kitaoka's Newsletter:"  ".(c) Copyright 2003, Taiten Kitaoka. All rights reserved. |