Hi everyone,

A few years ago I read Bad Astronomy, which took a bunch of popularly promulgated "science" that is actually tosh and de-bunk it. Things like that toilets flush in one direction in the northern hemisphere and in another in the southern hemisphere because of the coriolis effect.

The queue at the supermarket was long this morning so I entertained myself imagining a similarly styled book called Bad NLP, an inoculation against some of the bad, misquoted and misapplied NLP that is out there.

I thought of things like "You should calibrate someone's preferred representation system and then communicate to that person only in that system." (I still see this one being taught in management development courses.) And the classic one of using Meta Programs as static Myers-Briggs-esque personality types. (Something that was discussed very articulately on NLP connections recently.) I imagined it containing Eric Robbie's recent writings putting a few things right on the topic of negation. I also imagined it containing a caution of the dangers of becoming a sycophant, the kind of person who stops getting invited to parties because everyone's fed up of "hearing about that bloody PNL thing all the time."

I actually think such a book would be good. Certainly more useful than yet another NLP practitioner text book. If it were written by someone like Eric, it'd probably add a new dimension to everyone's understanding of NLP.

Anyway, after I had this thought, I thought of NLP connections. I thought it might be fun and maybe even useful to bring the thought here.

So, ladies and gentlemen, if Bad NLP existed, what would it say? What bad, misquoted and misapplied NLP do you see out there that needs to be de-bunked? What needs to be understood better? What records need to be set straight?

(NB: for the avoidance of doubt, this is something I created purely as something to entertain my imagination. I am not compiling such a book and have no intention of doing so. I'm not in the book writing league of NLP anyway.)

Cheers