21^st Century Dharma Bum

by Brian Van der Horst

Translating NLP for The French.

Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), a cognitive science with hundreds of behavioral applications for business, education, and psycho-therapy, is taken perhaps more seriously in France than in any other country in the world.

In 1984, when I began teaching NLP in Paris, my company-the first to train according to American standards-took an informal poll.  Nearly 95% of the French companies and 75% of the training and consulting organizations we talked to had never heard of NLP.  Two years later, the figures had reversed.

Within three years, I began to see NLP included in business and medical school curricula, wherever communication courses were taught.  In 1988, I co-founded an association of French NLP practitioners, masters and trainers and by 1990, they had grouped together virtually all the training organizations in the country run by certified trainers-a global first.

When I started teaching, we were the only company, and no books had been published in French. Today, more than 200 original NLP books have been published in French, about 15 organizations give practitioner programs and around 440 training organizations give programs that are either introductions to or applications of NLP.

Not bad for a little country of 62 million people.

In the years between 1985 and 1988, I saw a growth in NLP in France that had taken over ten years to accomplish in the States.

How did this phenomenon take place? 

I think it's worth taking a look at the French experience of NLP.  In it lie many lessons.  Perhaps the greatest lesson is how to present a new discipline, science, social movement or paradigm to a "foreign" country.

I don't have all the answers, but I've spent 23 years adjusting how I was taught to teach NLP so that it would be appropriate for the French and European audiences.

I'd like to share what I've learned pretty much as it happened to me, for I think there is a model to be made of the corporate and administrative skills an international organization can apply to produce a thriving learning community, as well as the competences that individual trainers can acquire to produce maximum educational results overseas.

The characteristics of such a model for a company might include:

1.  The ability to create a context of professionalism.

2.  The ability to present and market professionally.

3.  Training with heart, rigour and commitment.

4.  Encouraging and creating your own competition.

I think the list can also include:

1. Learning the host country's language or learning how to be translated.

2. Pacing the host culture: learning and citing historical references and culture-specific, relevant teaching examples.

3. Pacing the cognitive styles. In France, for example, divergent and convergent thinking patterns.

3. Producing relevant teaching materials: translating and reverse translation. Working constantly on updating and revising materials.

4. Pacing the high context vs. high content cultural styles, and the differing time orientations of the host culture.

5. Public relations: giving free introductions in schools and professional organizations and colleges.

6. Humility and respect for other disciplines.

7. Pacing the action chains, or social and business rituals of the host culture.

For this article, I will give a short biographical version of how I came to France, and will deal specifically with the contextualizing and language problems of teaching NLP in a foreign country.

                                       *        *        *     

I took my first NLP course in 1979. A girlfriend had been getting "magic buttons"-happy anchors from Dr. Genie Laborde, who had just finished her practitioner at Santa Cruz.  I had been working at Stanford Research Institute as a consultant to their Values and Lifestyles Program.  I had seen the logo of the Society of NLP on the old Division of Training and Research building, and had thought it was just another California craziness.

I asked Genie, just what is this NLP? She asked if I wanted a demonstration instead of an explanation.  Was there something I wanted to change? I said I'd like to stop smoking.  In about 40 minutes, she chained me some resource anchors. I stopped smoking for seven years. 

That got my attention. 

By 1983 I was managing the NLP Center for Advanced Studies in the San Francisco Bay area for Lynne Conwell, then director.  Our trainers were Leslie Cameron-Bandler, David Gordon, Michael Lebeau, Barbara Whitney and others.  I was leading introductions, study groups and learning how to become a trainer.

Gene Early, based in Copenhagen, had been teaching NLP in France from time to time since 1982.  Our Center would send him trainers, so it was no surprise when a group of French psychologists called up the Center one day and asked if someone could give them half a day of NLP training.  I had taken two years of French in high school, another in college, so I was volunteered. 

Thank god they were travelling with a simultaneous translator. Three years of French had only given me some vocabulary and verb declensions.   I quickly learned that University French is not spoken by living French. I gave the standard presentation and demonstrated a six-step reframe.  They invited me to come to Paris. I was impressed with how easy it was to work with a translator. More than 70% of the words in English and French are the same, I told myself. The major difference is the spelling, as in the difference between er and re, and in pronunciation.  So I thought it would be easy to translate NLP into French.   I can do this, I said to myself.

Three months later I was giving a presentation to around 125 people in the Hotel California, just off the Champs-Elysées, in Paris. After another three months, my sponsoring group of psychologists put together another San Francisco junket. Twenty-five people arrived, and I gave them two weeks of NLP training at the Hotel California, just off Union Square in San Francisco.  This group now included human resources and development executives as well as dentists, doctors and the core group of shrinks. They invited me back to Paris to do six weeks of training.

Notice the amount of personal contact I went through-and this is the short version-to get an invitation to train in France.  This is one of the first cultural differences I began to perceive.  I should have guessed it from my rudimentary command of French.  The root of their word for knowledge-savoir-is savorer, or to savour gustatory.  They have more cooking metaphors is their language than any other category.  When a Frenchman wants to do business with someone, he has to establish a relationship first.  A kinaesthetic connection.  The whole culture is more kinaesthetic (including olfactory and gustatory) than any other I've worked with. 

My sponsor had sent my trainer's fees by wire to my bank in San Francisco.  The way French banks work, the payment arrived six weeks after I arrived home. My credit card companies began to cancel my cards, because I had not received my expenses to cover what I had laid out for my travel in Europe.  A wire transfer normally takes 36 hours in the States.  I kept calling and calling, my sponsor decided the relationship was strained, and decided not to pursue the business.  I could not believe the red tape the French went through.  He could not take that I questioned his inability to change the slow payment. Because the relationship did not work-no business was possible.  This is quite different from the US, where often we will do business with someone even when the relationship is not optimal.

Fortunately, another student decided to sponsor my seminars, and we decided to take care of our relationship first.  We formed a partnership with another student, and launched our company. 

At this time, there were two other companies training NLP in France.  Both had been started by former therapists.  When we started our company, we made a basic policy decision that, in my mind, changed the course of NLP in this country.

We decided to teach NLP only to professionals.  We decided against giving NLP seminars as self-development, come and cure all your ills, get better and do this instead of therapy programs.  We decided to teach NLP only to those people who already had a serious professional commitment-a job to which they could apply NLP.

We also turned away those who wanted to become NLP Therapists.  We would say to those in search of a profession, "What you want does not exist.  There are NLP practitioners and then there are therapists.  NLP and therapy are two different professions.  Here is a list of schools that teach how to become a therapist.  If you want to become a therapist, go see them.  Then come back to us and we can teach you how to apply NLP to therapy."

We also decided to be a trainers' training organization.  About 40% of our students have been people who already teach in business, medical, or educational contexts.  We also decided to train more NLP trainers.

Two of the other NLP trainers in France questioned me about the wisdom of training trainers. I told him that I thought my job was to train my students to be better than I was.  Wasn't this the job of all teachers?

But this risks getting out of hand, he warned me.  He had some concerns about the market place. Oh, you mean competition?

I told him my take on competition is that

A. Competition exists because you are doing something valuable.

B. Competitors are your teachers in how to get better at what you do.

C. If you are a teacher, your job is to teach people to be better at what you do than you are.

D. If you are successful in the preceding, your own students will be your own competition within three years.

E.  You want to have competition that is at least as good as you so that you can handle your overflow with integrity. If you are good at what you do, there will always be an overflow.

I can vouch for the effectiveness of these presuppositions.  Half of the NLP books now in French are the products of former students-as are the competing organizations.