Diagnosing or categorising or labelling people contradicts the spirit of NLP. So somebody who labels others as a “visual” or a “towards person” or a “Blamer” or a “Placater” is demonstrating their lack of understanding of what NLP is all about.

In one of the best original books on NLP, NLP Volume I, Robert Dilts and the co-writers describe NLP as the “study of subjective experience”. In other words with NLP we are studying or exploring how somebody experiences the world – moment by moment.

Yet, nearly 30 years after its publication, labelling people is, unfortunately, very common in the world of NLP.

However, trying to be fair to the labellers, the temptation to do so is very strong especially if they need to feel a sense of  power and a sense of superiority over others.

Once somebody, with even a smidgen of knowledge about NLP, discovers you’ve done some NLP training they will tend to pressurise you to diagnose them – to tell them which category they fit into. And this can be quite seductive because “diagnosing” them can give you a sense of power and a sense of status and even a sense of control over them.

However, even if these are needs of your’s,  it’s completely missing the point of what NLP is really about.

Bandler, Grinder, and the original NLP developmental group were seeking to come up with something which was about exploring a person’s moment-to-moment experience. It was not about putting them into neat little statistical boxes as in conventional psychology.

Take, to go back to my original example, the NLP Representational Systems. (By the way, Representational Systems is simply NLP jargon for our use of our five senses plus our sub-vocalising or analytical thinking.). An NLP novice may notice that, in particular situation or when thinking about a particular event, you tend to do a lot of your thinking in images. Their temptation, especially if they don’t know much about the subject, is to then diagnose you e.g. “Ah, I can tell… you’re definitely a Visual”!

But, no, you are most certainly not a visual! You simply happen to be favouring visual thinking (or, in NLP jargon, visual processing) whilst thinking about this particular situation. If you were to begin thinking about a different situation you might do so in feelings or sounds or analytical thinking rather than in images.

The risk in diagnosing people is that some of them will then try to live up to the diagnosis. “Oh, an NLP Practitioner told me I was an Auditory”. The diagnosis then becomes a trap. And instead of developing the senses which they don’t tend to use so much they will relax into the Comfort Zone of “I am an Auditory”.

One of the things which we encourage in our Pegasus NLP courses is to assist a person in recognising which Representational System they use most and in most contexts. And to then compare this with the ones which they use least. And to then treat this insight  as a challenge to get better at the other systems!

For example, if you discover that you use your Auditory system most this means that the visual and kinaesthetic and auditory digital (analytical thinking) systems are likely being underused – which could mean that you’re missing out on a lot of life experiences. So the recognition of your ‘favourite system’ then becomes a spur to begin developing your ability with the underused systems.

(There is also a newsletter article on this topic here http://www.nlp-now.co.uk/rep__systems_predicates.htm – published in September 20o1)