Showboating, duty of care & credibility issues

I was recently reflecting on the importance of duty of care when working with clients and some examples where this is totally disregarded. Some of the worst examples are in live trainings and at change work conferences. Little wonder many approaches like NLP, hypnosis and other spin offs are so frowned upon by the wider therapeutic and coaching professions.

That said, many of those professions also have their own issues and cane be in my view far to rigid when working and clients often don’t get the outcomes they seek. There’s a balance to be had between genuine exploration to figure how best to help people and avoid what Frank Farrelly called “The therapeutic archaeological dig” and at the other extreme experimenting on clients with little or no duty of care and consideration for the outcome.

Roll up, roll up for the amazing cure all technique!

There are many examples of dreadful lack of duty of care, but I’ll mention a few that come to mind.

The first one was at a hypnosis conference where a self-proclaimed expert in curing food phobias was working with a demo subject in a live setting. I only caught the last part of the session because this presenter was running late, but what I say was pretty horrifying. The client was clearly becoming more anxious by the minute and the supposed “hypnotic cure all technique” was only creating more distress for her. In the end the session had to be abandoned and this was a master class in lack of duty of care. Of course, the trainer will probably never admit that they were negligent in their work.

Another example was a major household name in NLP “having a go” at working with a client with Parkinson’s disease in front of a live NLP paying audience. The trainer engaged in his trademark “cure all process” much to the delight of the audience who had bought into the whole “you can achieve anything” mindset. The end result was a car crash, leaving the client less than happy, but still some of the trainer’s super fans reference this as a fantastic example of how NLP can cure all ills. I saw the same trainer totally botch a phobia demo in Dublin a few years earlier and become visibly frustrated that the client showed no sign of feeling any different. The 80 attendees all felt pretty uncomfortable as clearly ‘the magic wasn’t working…”

Post covid this kind of nonsense still occurs in online paid events where the trainers seek to ‘experiment with clients” with little or no regard for the consequences for the client. Its all mostly showboating and status seeking for the trainer to impress students of course and generate income. There will always be an appetite for such dumbed down nonsense but there’s also an appetite for underground dog fights, people often gravitate to what they regard as visceral entertainment and don’t really consider the wider consequences of their actions.

How to kill credibility for a therapeutic/coaching approach

Many years ago, I was at a meal in Tokyo with a group of longstanding NLP folks who were lamenting how NLP had a very poor image, especially on Wikipedia. NLP is described as

“Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) is a pseudoscientific approach to communication, personal development and psychotherapy, that first appeared in Richard Bandler and John Grinder’s 1975 book The Structure of Magic I. NLP asserts that there is a connection between neurological processes, language and acquired behavioral patterns, and that these can be changed to achieve specific goals in life.[1][2]: 2  According to Bandler and Grinder, NLP can treat problems such as phobias, depression, tic disorders, psychosomatic illnesses, near-sightedness,[3] allergy, the common cold,[a] and learning disorders,[5][6] often in a single session.”

“There is no scientific evidence supporting the claims made by NLP advocates, and it has been called a pseudoscience.[11][12][13] Scientific reviews have shown that NLP is based on outdated metaphors of the brain’s inner workings that are inconsistent with current neurological theory, and that NLP contains numerous factual errors.[10][14] Reviews also found that research that favored NLP contained significant methodological flaws, and that there were three times as many studies of a much higher quality that failed to reproduce the claims made by Bandler, Grinder, and other NLP practitioners.[12][13]”

I trained in NLP since the 1990s and ran certificated courses. However, I became increasingly concerned by the hype associated with the approach. Yes, there are some great tools in the NLP model, but many of the claims were quite frankly bonkers and did the field no favours. The whole “cure everything in one session” was one of the many ridiculous claims.

Other ill-advised claims during covid, included using NLP as defence against covid and in my view any semblance of credibility for NLP disappeared after the NLP hierarchy made a series of ludicrous statements about NLP and health. Little wonder the approach is not taken seriously by many professionals and the Wikipedia article is not that far from the truth. Such a wasted opportunity and many NLP trainers with spin off work are still endorsed by co-creators and described as “geniuses” and “brilliant” which of course may be well intentioned but is also pretty daft.

“I read War and Peace in 30 secs, it’s about Russia”.

There’s an old Woody Allen joke, where he talks about taking a speed-reading course and comments – “I read War and Peace in 30 secs, it’s about Russia” The emphasis on speed v actual learning is a major flaw in many personal change approaches.

Often trainers will run a course for a few hours with no actual continual professional development. That’s 100% fine, if we class such situations as “entertainment” but of course there’s no real integration of skills in these situations. In the worst situations a trainer will showboat in front of an audience claiming their magic technique will cure even the greatest psychological and/or health issue. I’ve seen claims to try and cure cancer among many other serious conditions. Ladies and gentlemen welcome to a whole new breed of idiot.

Mostly this activity is of course pure fantasy on behalf of the trainer and super fans., The only tangible benefits are financial ones for the events promoter and the trainer in such situations. By 2009 I’d seen enough from the world of NLP, Hypnosis and daft spin off approaches to stay well away. Many of these supposed magical techniques come and go and I’ve often had conversations with colleagues that start with “Whatever happened to?”

So, what’s the good news?

If all this sounds depressing dear reader, well there is some good news if you are still reading this article! There are still several people who work with professional duty of care and recognise the importance of continual professional development. That will never be most people and that’s fine. In the same way thousands of individuals will love karaoke, but few will take the time to learn actual singing skills. That takes a big time and financial investment and there’s a place for both orientations in the world.

All of the people I have admired over the years in terms of skills and care towards clients all maintain a healthy sense of humour and a genuine humility about their own abilities. These are in the minority, but such folks are in my view the best hope for creating models and approaches that will genuinely help others.

Nick Kemp Feb 2024