NLP Institutes and NLP Trainers follow the NLP Global Standards as a guideline for excellence and NLP Accreditation. These guidelines are listed below for each level of training.
NLP Institutes worldwide present their NLP trainings in a variety of styles. The presentation style varies in length because technology allows learning NLP in person as well as multi-media learning options, which may include books, audio recordings and/or video. NLP Institutes may also include pre-study material before attending a live training and/or require a written review, test, or exam as part of the requirements for certification.
It is important to know following these standards for NLP Accreditation is voluntary. So you will find people teaching NLP who are not Certified Trainers and trainers who do not follow these NLP Accreditation standards.
An example of not following the NLP Global Standards would be offering an NLP Practitioner Certification with 10 videos and a manual to complete in 3 days.
(Also, beware of the name change some trainers use to make it appear you are getting an Official Certified NLP Training. e.g., NLP Practitioner Associate or other variations of Certified NLP Practitioner.)
So you may get some NLP knowledge, but it will not be a complete NLP Practitioner Certification meeting the NLP Global Standards for NLP Accreditation.
NLP is a complex topic and needs adequate time to learn and practice these NLP Techniques and processes. To ensure your NLP Training meets the high level of Global Standards recognized by other associations worldwide, see the guidelines listed below.
NLP Practitioner Certification Level
(NLP Accreditation)
A: Duration of Training: Minimum of 120 hours of training in the basics of NLP patterns taught by a Certified Trainer or a Certified Master Practitioner under the supervision of a trainer.
B: Demonstration of ability to identify the following basic skills, techniques, patterns, and concepts of NLP and utilize them competently with self and others.
1. Behavioral integration of the basic presuppositions of NLP, including:
- Outcome orientation with respect for others’ models of the world and the system’s ecology. (Respect each person’s model of the world)
- The distinction between map and territory. (The map is not the territory)
- There is only feedback – no failure. (All outcomes are achievements; there is only feedback)
- The meaning of your communication is the response you get.
- Adaptive intent of all behaviour. (Every behaviour is motivated by positive intention. People make the best choices they can with the resources they have available)
- Everyone has the necessary resources to succeed. (Individuals have all of the resources they need to achieve their desired outcomes)
- Resistance is a signal of insufficient pacing. (Effective communicators accept and utilize all communication presented to them)
- Law of requisite variety. (The element in a system that has the most flexibility will be the catalyst of that system)
2. Rapport, establishment and maintenance of
3. Pacing and Leading (verbal and non-verbal)
4. Calibration (sensory-based experience)
5. Representational systems (predicates and accessing cues)
6. Meta-Model
7. Milton-Model
8. Elicitation of well-formed ecological outcomes and structures of the present state
9. Overlap and Translation
10. Metaphor creation
11. Frames; contrast, relevancy, As If, Backtrack
12. Anchoring (VAK) Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic
13. Anchoring Techniques (contextualized to the field of application)
14. Ability to shift consciousness to external or internal, as required by the moment’s task
15. Dissociation and Association
16. Chunking
17. Sub-modalities
18. Verbal and non-verbal elicitation of responses
19. Accessing and building resources
20. Reframing (Context and Meaning)
21. Strategies; detection, elicitation, utilization, & installation
22. Demonstration of behavioural flexibility
NLP Master Practitioner Level
(NLP Accreditation)
A. Duration of Training: Minimum of 120 hours of advanced training taught by a Certified Trainer.
B. Demonstrating the ability to identify the following basic skills, techniques, patterns, and concepts of NLP and utilize these competently with self and others.
1. All practitioner-level skills, singly and in combination
2. Design individualized interventions (generative and remedial)
3. Ecological change work
4. Shifting easily back and forth between content and form, and experience and label
5. Specific Master Practitioner Skills:
- Meta Programs
- Values / Criteria
- – identification and utilization
- – criteria ladder
- – elicitation of complex equivalence and adjustment of criteria
- Sleight of Mouth (16 Language Reframes)
- Installation and utilization of strategies
- Refined use of sub-modalities
- Deliberate multi-level communication
- Negotiations
- Presentation skills
- Modelling
- Utilization and transformation of beliefs and presuppositions
NLP Trainer Level
(NLP Accreditation)
A. Duration of Training: Minimum of 120 hours of advanced training taught by a Certified Trainer. A minimum of 15 hours of direct trainer supervision.
B. Satisfactory demonstration of the following behavioural competencies:
1. Complete behavioural competence in all Practitioner and Master Practitioner level skills, ability to do any and all practitioner and master practitioner techniques simultaneously, both overtly and covertly
2. Demonstrate facility to shift between content and form (IE: between experience and labelling)
3. Ability to do (demonstrate the behaviour of) what one is teaching and to teach what one is doing — and to label it linguistically (i.e. Model Self)
4. Demonstration of Presentation and Teaching skills:
- Pacing and leading
- Respect for the audience (i.e. at least keeping separate your and other’s model of the world and responding to these congruently; considering and responding ecologically to others; conscious and unconscious processes
- Ability to answer questions (including discerning the level and intent of questions and generating level-appropriate responses)
- Design of presentation: At the least, setting opening and closing frames, setting outcomes, chunking and sequencing of information and experience, balancing information–giving and occasions for discovery, facilitating generalization of information and skills across context and time
- Design of exercises: At the least, providing for both overt and covert learning in each exercise, including previously learned material for cumulative learning, specifying outcomes of exercises, providing a task for all involved persons ensuring behavioural learning, including a future pace
- Explanation of exercises, including the ability to explain an exercise behaviorally without the use of notes or printed aids
- Use of deep and shallow metaphor
- Utilization of multi-level feedback; ongoing re-evaluation and incorporation of overt and covert information from individuals and group
- Graceful intervention in groups: at the least maintaining rapport and giving specific sensory grounded feedback via questions that appropriately direct search to facilitate people’s discovery for themselves, demonstration, or, if necessary, overtly telling them what to do
- Tasking; creating a task that presupposes that a person behaves differently that expands their world model.
- Ability to do demonstrations