Out-frames by Kurusheva Julia & Bolstad Richard

Author:Kurusheva, Julia & Bolstad, Richard [Kurusheva, Julia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unknown
Published: 2013-02-17T16:00:00+00:00

Cultural, Gender and Relationships in NLP Coaching

A. Culture and Gender in NLP Based Coaching

Culture and Belief Systems

Over the last decades I have taught NLP in a number of cultural settings in Europe, America, Australasia and Asia. I am an NLP trainer and I am deeply committed to promoting the tools, methodology and deeper values of NLP as I understand it. It is quite clear to me also that NLP emerged from a particular cultural background in the United States of America. It also has gender biases built into it, and it deals inadequately with the issues of relationships and cooperation (as a glance at the personal history of the co-developers of NLP shows, including their many years in litigation as they argued about the ownership of “NLP”). In this chapter I want to encourage us to develop a more inclusive and co-operative NLP.

Chicago Professor of Geography James Blaut has been interested in the way that our "science" is shaped by our culture and history. He points out that much of North American and European writing presents "western" ideas as rational and not needing explanation. Meanwhile, "eastern" ideas can be dismissed as if they are merely superstitions adopted in response to the social climate of "oriental despotism". Blaut continues "Interestingly, we experience no discomfort and sense no threat when we read an account written by some anthropologist or cultural geographer about the beliefs, values, myths and so on, of some small and obscure society in some far corner of the earth. Indeed we expect an anthropologist to tell us more about the social or cultural reason why the "natives" hold to these ideas than about the validity of the ideas…. But when this ethnographic approach is applied to what are called "Western" ideas, in the realms of science, history and the like, the results are disturbing and the enterprise itself seems somehow improper. Ideas are, so to speak, surrounded by culture, and we can examine the surroundings and the ways ideas are imbedded in their surroundings." (Blaut, 1993, p 31-32)

Anthropologically then, we would expect that even a radical reframing of science such as NLP will retain certain characteristics from its source culture. I believe that the understandable reluctance to examine our own cultural context (referred to by James Blaut above) is present in the NLP community as well. There are a number of subtle cultural assumptions in the way NLP is usually taught. Here I will simply give a few examples from my own teaching experience. Japan is a country I have taught in most summers over the last ten years and provides some clear instances of cultural difference from New Zealand where I teach most of the year.

Goalsetting: Collective and Individual

On the first day I taught NLP in Japan, I introduced the notion of goalsetting. As people wrote out "wellformed" goals, I went around to check that they had understood the process. "What goal are you working on?" I asked one man. "I'm setting the goal to live by myself." He explained.

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