Thought Labs & ANLP
The standard we share
ANLP is the professional body for NLP, and it holds the finest standards in this field anywhere in the world. Thought Labs is a member organisation, and Nishith Shah serves as ANLP’s International Ambassador for India & Switzerland.
There is a great deal of NLP in the world right now, and very little agreement about what it should mean. Some training takes twelve days. Some takes an hour. Both hand you a certificate at the end, and from the outside they can look remarkably alike.
ANLP is the reason that difference is visible at all. Since 1985 they have held a line on what NLP training has to be — a code of ethics, a complaints procedure, and the validation of every single certificate that comes through their doors, checked for authenticity and for lineage. Somebody who has done an hour online and arrives with a certificate does not get in. Their members work across every continent, and the standard is the same for all of them.
We hold these standards because they are ours, and we found in ANLP a home where they are held in common. That is what a professional body is for. It is the place where people who care about the same things find each other, hold each other to it, and make it visible to the world.
So we sat down with Karen Falconer, the CEO of ANLP, for a conversation about what those standards are and why they matter. Her answers are below, in short pieces, so you can go straight to the one you came for.
Karen Falconer has led ANLP since 2005, and there are three of them running the whole of it. Three people, members on every continent, a quarterly magazine that has not missed an issue in twenty years, and a standard that has held while the field around it filled up with shortcuts.
You get to hear from her directly here — on what professionalism actually means, on why an hour of training is not a qualification, on how a certificate gets checked, and on where she believes NLP is going.
Clip 1 · 0:35
ANLP is the professional body for NLP. It has existed since 1985, within ten years of the beginning of NLP itself, and Karen Falconer has led it since 2005. It represents professional practice in NLP — the code of ethics, the standards, the complaints procedure and the validation that sit underneath a credible training organisation. Its members work across every continent.
It means holding an attitude of professionalism, and holding others to it. Karen describes it as showing up for your clients and your students, keeping professional boundaries in place, and presenting yourself in a way that gives someone the confidence to invest in you. Underneath all of it sits a simple thing: you feel safe with the person you are learning from, because they know what they are doing and they know what they are talking about.
Karen Falconer · CEO, ANLP
Because NLP works, and anything that works can be done badly. A single incisive question, asked without awareness of where it might land, can send someone into a spiral they did not choose. A trainer who has understood that, been taught it and practised it will hold the room differently from someone who watched a video.
Karen puts it plainly: she would not take her children to a doctor who trained for an hour online, and she would not hand her books to an accountant who did the same. That is the whole reason standards exist. It has nothing to do with gatekeeping and everything to do with what happens in the room.
Karen Falconer · CEO, ANLP
That NLP becomes one of the mainstream things you reach for. May it be weight loss or stopping smoking, a career you want to move, parenting you want to do better, communication you want to change — Karen wants NLP to be one of the options that occurs to you. She describes it as a well-kept secret, and her dream is that one day you know you need NLP the way you know you need food.
Karen Falconer · CEO, ANLP
Every single one, by hand. When you apply to ANLP for membership, they validate your certificate — they check its authenticity, they check its lineage, they check that the training behind it meets the core requirements. Somebody who completed an hour of online training and arrives with a certificate does not get through the doors. Membership is a privilege, and it is treated as one.
Alongside that sit a code of ethics, a complaints procedure, and a public profile for every member that anybody can look at.
It gives the person sitting across from you a reason to feel safe. They are investing in someone who has met a standard set by an independent body, who works to a code of ethics, and who can be complained about if something goes wrong. That is the professional underpinning behind the work — and it is what turns a certificate into something a client can rely on.
“We know, Nishith, because you’re our ambassador, yours are easy to verify, because you’ve trained them — and we already know that you meet the core criteria, core requirements.”
Karen Falconer · CEO, ANLP
No, and that is the point. The team at ANLP are all NLP trained, and they deliberately take no personal clients and run no NLP trainings of their own. Karen describes doing this as a conflict of interest with the people they serve. It is why their validation of a trainer means something — they have nothing to sell you and no course of their own to protect.
How can you check that a trainer is genuinely ANLP registered?
Ask for a link to their ANLP profile, and follow it. It is easy for anyone to copy a logo and claim membership — ANLP has taken cases like that to Trading Standards and the Advertising Standards Authority. A live profile on the ANLP site cannot be copied. If it is there, they are a member. If a trainer sends you to the ANLP homepage and leaves you to search, or sends you nothing at all, you have your answer.
Here is ours
Since Karen has just told you how to check a trainer, here is where you will find us.
Our ANLP profile: https://anlp.org/people/nishith-shah
Master Trainer List: https://anlp.org/master-trainers-list
Do the same with anyone you are considering training with, anywhere in the world. It takes about a minute, and it is the single fastest way to know what you are looking at. Choosing well matters more to us than being chosen.
Becoming an NLP trainer is not a course you pass once. Nishith completed Practitioner three or four times and Master Practitioner several times over before training as a trainer, and then joined ANLP as a trainer and later as a Master Trainer. Hours, repetition and evaluation — because you do not get to skip the part where you actually learn it.
Karen describes the same thing from her side: the evaluation she almost didn’t sit, the person asked to leave her Master Practitioner, the panic of wondering whether she’d pass. You put the hours in because it is worth something.
Karen Falconer · CEO, ANLP
What is an ANLP accredited trainer?
A further step beyond trainer membership. To become accredited, ANLP goes through your actual course content — not just your certificate, but what you teach and how you teach it. It is the one place where the training itself is examined rather than the paperwork behind it.
These words get used loosely, so here is what each one means and where we sit.
You have completed genuine NLP training, your certificate has been validated by ANLP, and you appear in their directory.
You have completed Trainer’s Training and passed evaluation, and you are certified to train others.
ANLP has reviewed your course content and confirmed it meets their standards.
When you complete Trainer’s Training with us, you receive:
Karen Falkner · CEO, ANLP
ANLP Ambassador — Nishith Shah, India & Switzerland
ANLP is based in the UK and its members work across every continent. Our own community sits in India, Switzerland, the UK, Ireland, Colombia and beyond, and the standard applied to a certificate is the same wherever the training happened. Nishith serves as ANLP’s International Ambassador for India and Switzerland, which exists so that the standard travels rather than stopping at a border.
Yes, and ANLP will build it with you. Karen is open to running community cafés timed for specific countries — India, Colombia, Switzerland — rather than expecting you to join a call at two in the morning. Somebody described talking to ANLP recently as always being a conversation about how to make something happen. That is our experience of them too.
Rapport, ANLP’s quarterly magazine, has been running since 2005, and the full archive is searchable by subject — education, business, health, whatever you are working on. There are members-only resources, community cafés, a separate café for trainers, professional forums twice a month and virtual workshops. You will find articles, modelling projects, hints, tools and a group of people doing the same work you are doing.
Access to every resource, the private groups on LinkedIn and Facebook, the community cafés, the full article archive, and the opportunity to publish your own work in Rapport. You can add case studies to your profile and invite clients to review your services, so that what people find when they look you up is a real picture of how you work.
Treat it like a gym membership you actually use. Complete your profile, add a photograph, add a short video. Then link your own website and social media directly to your ANLP profile, so that anyone considering working with you can verify you in one click rather than searching for you.
Karen Falconer · CEO, ANLP
Official qualifications in NLP are in development, and ANLP is working towards recognition by a government body in the UK.
Beyond that, Karen holds a larger picture: fewer conflicts, because more people have the resources to handle things without reaching for one.
Clip 2 · 1:28
It means holding an attitude of professionalism, and holding others to it. Karen describes it as showing up for your clients and your students, keeping professional boundaries in place, and presenting yourself in a way that gives someone the confidence to invest in you. Underneath all of it sits a simple thing: you feel safe with the person you are learning from, because they know what they are doing and they know what they are talking about.
Karen Falconer · CEO, ANLP
Karen Falconer · CEO, ANLP
You have watched a lot about standards. Here is exactly what you hold at the end.
A great starting point for your journey to learn NLP to create deep & impactful change with self and others.
At this stage you will take NLP at a whole new level. Embody it. Master it. Make it natural & effortless.
And if NLP has made a difference to you, you can do the same for others. Become a trainer to run certified NLP programs of your own.
Your certificate can be submitted to ANLP as part of an application for membership. They will validate it — checking authenticity, lineage and whether the training behind it meets their core requirements. Because we are already known to ANLP, that validation is straightforward. Once you are a member you have your own profile in their directory, which means anyone considering working with you can verify you in a click.
We asked Karen at the end whether there was anything else she wanted to say. This is what she said.
Karen Falconer · CEO, ANLP
We would love to have you with us.
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