Last night, Amazon recommended a new NLP book to me: Essentials of NLP: 150 Questions & Answers.

The description boldly claimed:

“It provides all the information you’d get in those $3,000, one-week training programs.”

That got me thinking—what is real NLP? It’s certainly not a series of questions and answers. True NLP is, first and foremost, a mindset. It’s about recognizing the structure of a problem rather than getting caught up in its content. Instead of asking “Why don’t you do X?”, an NLP practitioner asks “When does this pattern occur?”

More than just a way of thinking, NLP is also a set of skills:

• The ability to be fully present and observe what’s truly happening (being in uptime).
• Knowing when to associate with an experience and when to step back (dissociate).
• Managing emotional states—shifting into or out of them as needed.
• Learning from past experiences rather than feeling defeated by them.
• Using mental rehearsal as a tool for success rather than self-sabotage.
• Persuading and influencing at an unconscious level—both yourself and others.
• Asking insightful, open-ended questions that lead to discovery, rather than seeking pre-set answers.

This brings me back to the way we often approach learning. Traditional education encourages students to memorize facts and answer exam questions correctly. If you can recall a date—like 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue—does that mean you understand history?

Teaching facts is easy to measure; it provides a clear way to rank students. That’s why many teachers focus on test preparation—so their students score well, making them look good to administrators. But genuine understanding goes beyond rote memorization.

How do you assess whether someone truly understands history? Can they analyze the deeper causes of a war? Can they recognize historical patterns in today’s world? Measuring these skills is much harder, so we often fall back on keyword-driven grading—rewarding students for repeating the expected phrases rather than demonstrating real insight.

This bias carries over to NLP training as well. Many people study NLP to improve their lives, but often, they have to jump through the same academic hoops—memorizing answers and passing practitioner exams—just as they did in school.

But true NLP isn’t about answering test questions. It’s about developing skills that allow you to think differently, take control of your mind, and create meaningful change.