There is great value in learning from the best, whether this is in the arts, communication or any other area of life. Being around smart people is in my opinion a smart move. This is also true when learning hypnosis, NLP or therapy. However there is also a time to strike out and to build personal skills to move on from being “magician’s assistant” to become “the magician” in your own right.

In the world of change work and NLP there is a definite “pyramid selling” aspect to some trainings and those “assisting” mostly do so on a voluntary basis. In the world of NLP I chose to assist on a number of events for a few years between 2000 and 2003. I am glad that  I did so as it allowed me to see up close how to run an event and also to really see how skilled some celebrity trainers were, having witnessed these individuals many times over teaching the same material. I noticed that for some assisting on NLP events was a very big deal and in some cases such assistants planned their year’s activities around other trainer’s workshop schedules.  Of course for some aspiring trainers assisting and essentially promoting other people’s events can on the surface appear quite glamorous, but can actually be commercially disadvantageous. Often aspiring trainers who are spending time as volunteers on other people’s events are very limited time wise in what they can run themselves as there are key times of year to consider when hosting events. Typically school holidays, summer breaks, Jan and Dec are not great times for running events. There is also a limited number of people who will attend any kind of event and in recent times assisting staff have been given financial rewards for promoting their chosen trainer’s events. Nothing wrong with that except of course sometimes their own events then suffer and there can be all manner of conflicts of interests that occur.

I have blogged a lot about the balance between entertainment and learning and some of the courses I attended in 2002 and 2003 were great fun, but perhaps not the greatest learning experiences. However my original NLP training was just £499 for 7 days, now the same event can be 300% more expensive. I no longer bother for stock NLP events as they IMO are a bit limited and much of what’s taught is not especially of interest to me.  However I am pleased to be running more and more trainings on my own work in the UK, Europe and USA as well as India as well as releasing some really great products.  I recommend any aspiring trainer to assist on other people’s events for a time, but extensive assisting IMO really can dull skill levels and I have seen many examples of this over the years. One of the reasons is that assistants become very polarized in just one way of working, often not exploring other approaches.

Many training companies that seek volunteers or assistants to help out on courses can be notoriously political in their behaviour and it’s not uncommon to regularly hear the word “persona non grata” as people are considered “in and out of favour” in a similar manner to many corporate business concerns! One NLP colleague was bemused to find that she was skilled enough to run her own NLP courses (and be charged for certification fees by the parent franchise) but curiously not skilled enough to “assist” on courses teaching the same material by those who proclaimed her skills as a trainer.  So yes assisting can be useful for a time in developing skills, for a time…