So, are you interested in learning NLP? Would you like to discover some of the possibilities that NLP has to offer?

How do you go about choosing a good NLP training - after all not all NLP trainings are the same.Over the recent years there are more and more companies offering NLP trainings, so how do you know which one to choose?

There are many good courses around and there are probably more around which are not so great. If you choose a good course with a good trainer, then you be left feeling empowered with a range of principles and techniques that can make an incredible different in your life and other peoples'.

If you choose the 'wrong' course, people are sometimes left feeling that NLP is not the incredible technology that it is.

So choosing the right course is vital to your success in mastering and using NLP.

There are several things to consider - the content of the training, the length of the course and the trainer running the training.

The trainer is perhaps one of the first things that you should consider, becuase there are many different trainers out there and only a few of them may understand NLP and have the teaching skills to allow you to achieve the highest level of integration. So how do you find a good trainer?

The best way will be either to have heard them speak, talk to them before the training to establish the level of rapport, have them recommended by someone else, for example a reputable NLP register like INLPTA or an organisation like SNLP. Ideally you want to know some of the experience of the trainer - would you prefer to learn with someone who has been working in NLP for 10 years or more, or with someone who started NLP less than a year ago?

Different trainers will also have different levels of understanding of NLP and an experienced INLPTA certified trainer is a good grounding to start with. An INLPTA Master Trainer is the very highest level of certification and may be the best way to guarantee that the trainer has a good level of knowledge, experience and presentation skills to allow you to gain the very best from your NLP training.

The content of trainings may also vary, and a way to check on recommended content is to look on the INLPTA website.

There are many different organisations out there claiming to be some sort of official representatives of NLP, however many of them are in fact privately run, often by trainers who also run NLP trainings, which can hardly be unbiased opinions. For example, there has been a lot of controversy about the organisation BBNLP and GONLP which sound like some sort of official NLP register, however have no authority whatsoever to accredit or recognise trainings. Anyone who pays the membership can join these organisations, so recommendations from them may well not be carefully vetted.

The Association of NLP (ANLP) is an older organisation which has recently been 'reborn' and seems to be independent and maintaining some good standards of membership.

So for independent advice, it could be good to approach an organisation like INLPTA, ANLP, SNLP for a training organisation that maintains high standards.

The length of trainings may also vary, and there is a wide debate about how long a training should be. Most people would recommend a minimum of 120 hours of training to reach Practitioner level. This is done in a variety of ways - either by at least 15 days in the classroom, or by a combination of home study and classroom based training, where there would be at least 7 days in the classroom to put things into practice. The home study is usually in the form of audio cds or tapes and some reading and writing.

If you do a shorter training (eg minimum of 7 days) you will probably want to join a practice group and assist on trainings to get more experience. Assisting is a great way to build great experience in NLP.

Some short 7 day courses offer a lot of certificates as part of the training, for example including hypnosis and other certifications - you might get introduced to hypnosis this way, however would you want to go to a hypnotherapist who had trained in one day?

Another great resource on the internet is Andy Austin's site www.23nlpeople.com