the Central London nlp group

Articles written by Group members and non-members

Secrets of Running a Successful NLP Group
by Andy Smith and Nick Driscoll

The Richmond NLP Group is in its third year now, and it's all been relatively effortless. Because we would like everyone to have the opportunity to find out about NLP, we would like to share some of the things we've learned about setting up a group and making it work.

1. Keep it simple.
To run a successful group you need a minimum of two people - so there is cover if one is ill or away - and probably a maximum of three! Any more than that and you get into a committee, which is a recipe for disagreement and bureaucracy.

Keep the work involved to a minimum. You need a place to meet, a programme, and some form of publicity to let people know about it. Anything else - membership, a library, even refreshments - is extra work, and you'll get fed up with it sooner or later.

Decide how often you want to run the group. Weekly, fortnightly or monthly? If the group has a reasonable catchment area, you won't have trouble getting an audience - it comes down to how often you can face running it. Every week is a big commitment - we eventually (after two years) settled on fortnightly.

2. Agree on the aims of the group.
This is very important. Why do you want to start a group? What are you going to get out of it? Is it a front for publicising your own courses - in which case your audience will rapidly see through, and you'll have trouble getting guest presenters, so it would be better to publicise yourself overtly. Is it a practice group for experienced NLP'ers - in which case you'll have a smaller turnout, and it's probably easier to run it informally in someone's living room - or are you going to let beginners in, in which case it becomes a showcase and could become very big indeed.

We decided to go the showcase route from the start. If we'd only been running the group for love of NLP, that might have worn thin pretty quickly. We have benefited so much from NLP, personally and professionally, that we would like everyone to be able to experience it. But we also realised it was a way to see a wealth of different NLP trainers for free, to keep our skills sharp, keep abreast of new developments and fill in any gaps in our practitioner training.

The social side is also great - you meet and work with a wide range of people and get a real sense of how diverse their maps of the world are!

It's also important that the organisers of the group have similar values, at least in the area of running an NLP group. If there are serious values clashes, sort them out or forget it - they will only surface later. We have recently recruited a third organiser to bring some fresh thinking and contacts to the group, but we checked him out for months beforehand.

3. The group takes its tone from you, the organiser
For many people you will be their first contact with NLP, so to them you 'are' NLP in the same way that Keef Richards 'is' rock'n'roll. Factors such as how you publicise the group, the state of your venue, how you greet people when they arrive, and how you introduce your speakers will attract a particular kind of audience. Consider what internal representation you want to project. For a 'showcase' group such as ours, which attracts a lot of beginners and people who are just curious about NLP, we never forget that the first experience of NLP should be a positive one. We have heard of first-time visitors to some other groups coming in the door, taking one look around the shabby venue, thinking "who are these people - what a dysfunctional looking bunch!", and turning straight round again.

It seems to be working. Our guest speakers almost invariably tell us what a lovely group we have attracted. We agree!

4. Publicise your group electronically as much as you can.
Have an easy-to-navigate web site with your group's programme on it. Set up reciprocal links with as many other NLP sites as you can. That way people will just stumble across you.

The ideal mailing list would be entirely electronic. This is now possible as more and more people have an email address - in two years time everyone will have one, like a phone number. You can then send out your programme to hundreds of people at the push of a key - so much easier than stuffing envelopes. And it's free! The rapidly-growing NLPlay group in London has been publicised almost entirely by email.

5. Quality control your presenters.
This is really the same point as number three. Imagine if your first experience of NLP had been watching a hopeless presenter - wouldn't it have put you off? Invite presenters who you rate yourself, or those recommended by people you trust.

Tell your presenters what you want from them. In a group with any number of beginners, it's important to keep the presentation jargon-free. This is a useful discipline for the presenter, and needn't limit the subject matter. We have seen leading-edge master practitioner material presented in a way that beginners can understand it easily.

6. Look after your presenters.
Be nice to them - they're doing this for free. Buy them a meal if they want, and offer them petrol money. Then you can invite the good ones back next year. Word gets around.

7. Be prepared to fill in for a missing presenter at a moment's notice.
Sometimes (thankfully rarely) your guest presenter will get ill at very short notice, or get irretrievably stuck in traffic on their way over. In these circumstances it's a good idea to have a session prepared that you can run for the people who have turned up. Alternatively, you can give them their money back and take them down the pub, but it's good to have a choice.

Ultimately, though, there's only one way to run a successful NLP group, and that's your own.

Andy Smith and Nick Driscoll set up the Richmond NLP Group in 1996 (that's Richmond, Surrey rather than Yorkshire or Virginia) and now co-organise it with Peter Robinson. We would love to hear about your experiences of running a group, or your questions about setting one up - just email us on trance@dircon.co.uk. The Richmond NLP Group programme can be found at www.trance.dircon.co.uk/richmond.html.