There is a moment every therapist knows. You are sitting with a client, you have listened to their story, and you realize with a sinking feeling that nothing you learned in school covers this.

I see this often in our field. I meet certified NLP Master Practitioners and clinical psychologists with years of university training and walls covered in framed degrees. On paper, they are experts. Internally, they often feel like imposters.

This isn’t because they aren’t smart. It is because they learned the hard way that a certificate is not competence.

A certificate means you memorized a script. It means you passed a test where the answers were aligned (more often than not) with your teacher’s expectations. It means you practiced techniques on fellow students who were trying to pass the same class too.

Competence is what happens when the memorized script fails.

Competence is what you need when a client isn’t suffering from textbook anxiety, but is a combat veteran prone to violent outbursts. It is what keeps you grounded when a client looks you in the eye and tells you they plan to end their life.

Early in my career, I worked in a high-volume environment where I saw between 35 and 50 clients a week. My “training ground” wasn’t a comfortable classroom; it was a room filled with PTSD survivors, violent offenders fresh out of prison, and victims of severe trauma.

I didn’t learn competence in a seminar room. I forged it the hard way: pushing past the fear while sitting across from a suicidal client. Then another. And another. Day in and day out. I remember the panic of those early weeks. I remember waking up in a cold sweat, praying to God that I hadn’t said the wrong thing, terrified that the morning would bring an obituary.

When you are sitting across from someone in that much pain, you cannot ask them to “wait a moment” while you frantically check the manual (like The Big Book of NLP). You either have the clinical instinct to handle the energy in the room, or you don’t.

That clinical instinct is what I focus on now. This is what training with me is all about.

Many of the professionals I mentor are already highly qualified. They don’t need more theory. They are stuck because real human beings are messy and don’t follow the linear steps of a technique. They know the theory of change, but they haven’t yet mastered the mechanics of it.

Your training with me isn’t about giving you another piece of paper to hang on your wall (no worries, I’ll give them to you at the end). But this training is always about giving you the “flight hours” necessary to handle the turbulence.

We move past the scripts and get into the reality of the work. We stop memorizing maps and start walking the territory.

When a client is falling apart in your office, or looking at you with a desperate need for real change, they don’t care about your certificate.

They only care about your competence.

Who is this training actually for?

How long does the training take?

How soon can I start making a living from this?

If my approach fits your personality, let’s simply begin with a single training session, so you can feel the difference.