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The Anticult
By they way, Abe-Hicks tour the country in some type of massive motorhome.
You can be 100% certain, that Abe-Hicks do not hold their assets in their own names either, they probably lease the motorhome from their own company as a tax-write off, and keep their corps in the red as well.
Abe-Hicks started with Amway, and then went where the REAL serious money is, New Wage hocus-pocus channeling. The most credulous demographic on earth, a license to print profits.

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Stoic
The whole area of NLP seems to me to be a classic sales bubble.
How do I sell, for very big bucks, something that tells my customers to find a good role model and copy their techniques?

Traditionally this was done through the apprentice system. A recognised painter would take on apprentices who copied his works brush-stroke by brush-stroke. Once the master painters style had been absorbed to become second nature the apprentice became a journeyman-competent but not original in style. The apprentice was only recognised as a master painter in his own right when he went beyond competence to develop his own style-grounded in his teachers style but essentially his own interpretation.

You can't sell that in a book or through an expensive seminar or LGAT, (largely because you have no power to change anyone--it is down to the person himself to put in the decades of work, or not) so you have to develop a myth or story about discovering some magical secret, becoming a superman in the process and conning the public at large that you can transmit the secret of becoming a superman.

Essentially you are selling nothing, the myth, the promise, so you have to come up with a catchy new name for the myth and convince the public that it exists as an entity in its own right.
Self-help, personal growth, spiritual progress, NLP, all intangibles being packaged and sold as an implicitly sure-fire method to becoming a superman---or your money back, (most definitely not.)

Which is not to say that some of the techniques coralled under the umbrella of NLP are not effective, just that they are by no means new and by no means create supermen.

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The Anticult
That is totally correct, and it also applies to post-NLP, that is, people who do variants of NLP but call it another names, there are dozens of them.
The NLPers in seminars get people hyped up to think they can do basically anything with their tech, and then sign them up to more expensive trainings.
They take fairly naive and credulous people in the audience, and sell them on the idea that "mastering" NLP or its variants is going to allow them to do and get basically anything very rapidly. So its essentially the same pitch as many scams, but done in a more sophisticated way.

They then upsell those folks to more seminar trainings, products, DVD sets, and they also have personal coaching with NLP, and people get scammed bigtime. Thousands and tens of thousands, its heartbreaking to see those NLPers in action.
They charge many thousands in an escalating series of NLP training seminars, sound familiar? There is no end to it, always another expensive seminar or coaching.
And once people spend thousands on training, they NEED to make that money back, and start doing it to others! Those are the people selling NLP all over the internet. Do a search for "NLP training" and there are thousands of links. It really is a jungle of trying to cash-in.

Many of them superfically sell the classic NLP type tech, but at the exact same time are RUNNING the more advanced persuasion tech from other areas of NLP. That is how it started, and the LGAT experts copied that and refined it.
So even if there are parts of NLP that might be ok, there are so many scammers running around in the field, it can't be recommended to a newbie.
From this perspective, it does seem like the NLP sales-system is the most complex and confusing mess of any of the systems out there.
A metaphor might be that the current NLP and related fields are like the harshest jungle on earth, and sending an untrained credulous newbie into that jungle, they are not going to survive one night, or even survive a few hours. Its about as bad as it can get.


And of course, now they are totally disguising the tech, and blending it into New Age and other packages, with the tech artfully embedded inside. That is why Stever Robbins loves Byron Katie so much, that is the future, that is where the action is at.

And Tony Robbins still does most of those ancient NLP techniques. For example, as stated above in this thread, where Tony Robbins is pretending to magically cure people of suicide from the stage.
[Tony Robbins trying to link suicide to orgasm] [forum.culteducation.com]
All he is trying to do is what Richard Bandler taught about writing over one pattern with a new pattern, pattern interrupt, Anchoring, etc. Does that work, to write over and link a chronic "suicide pattern" with a "fake orgasm" pattern in a live seminar? Of course not, its absurd, the human brain does not work like that, even though they say it does without proof.
But its entertainment at the expense of the victim, and is a salespitch of rapid Miracle Cures.
The bigger the sales claim, the bigger the price.

James Ray was telling his victims they could achieve supreme Christ consciousness, and do anything including overcoming life and death.
So that is taking making a huge sales claim to its limit, and once people believe that, he could charge them literally every dollar they have.

Again, that is not speculation, there are specific advanced sales manuals that teach exactly how to make these outrageous Big Claims and how to extract maximum money for them. It does not take much imagination to take them one step further and tell people you can teach them to be a superman for a superprice.

Some of this advanced sales info is contained in the program called:
[The Power To Influence by Tony Robbins]
There are many Torrents out there with the PDF's of the manual and audio, but the material is too tricky for a direct link. A very serious warning and caution is in order, its very easy to get sucked into the system, that is how its designed.

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Stoic
The whole area of NLP seems to me to be a classic sales bubble.
How do I sell, for very big bucks, something that tells my customers to find a good role model and copy their techniques?

...

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The Anticult
That was some sarcasm about being a victim of the government!

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buffman
@Anticult,

Maybe I'm living under a rock, but I haven't seen a lot of this activity going on in NLP besides Tony Robbins who does more of a standard LGAT format (with a lot of NLP techniques thrown in of course). Seems to me that most NLP trainers are poorly organized and don't really do a good job with sales amidst a handful of hardcore salespeople.

Can you give some specific examples for research? We can start a different thread if need be, since this should be more about JAR. I have other examples of NLP trainers and companies that don't seem to use any upselling, coaching, hard sales, etc. and would like your perspective.