So my wife was googling herself today (come on, who doesn’t do it occasionally), and she came across an old testimonial she once gave to her life coach, Lisa, in Australia. She then noticed the next google result , which was for a company called nlpexperts.co.uk, was her testimonial, only the name Lisa had been changed to John. Otherwise it was verbatim:

Original:

“Lisa draws on her own experiences to connect with me on levels not easily reached, teaching me how to live life with verve, passion and direction. I look forward to our sessions which are always injected with laughter, wisdom and love.” - Marie Cawood

Sad copy:

“John draws on his own experiences to connect with me on levels not easily reached, teaching me how to live life with verve, passion and direction. I look forward to my daily session on the way to work which are always injected with laughter, wisdom and powerful ideas.” - Marie Cawood

The Internet Archive is a wonderful resource people may or may not be aware of. One of the things it does is archive old copies of websites. Of particular interest to this rant, is the archive copy it has of Marie’s original testimonial, from 11th January 2005. The Archive.org has no archived copy of nlpexperts.co.uk, however a quick “whois” of the domain shows the following:

jay@mobility:~/Desktop$ whois nlpexperts.co.uk

Domain name:
nlpexperts.co.uk

Registrant:
thaleus mesmomorph

Relevant dates:
Registered on: 22-Oct-2007
Renewal date: 22-Oct-2009
Last updated: 06-Feb-2008

I’ll leave it to your imagination to draw the relevance from the dates…

I had a look and noticed some of the other testimonials had been “borrowed” as well, one of them they didn’t even bother to change Lisa to John.

Original:

“When I approached Lisa for life coaching, I was aware that, while I’d made a lot of important changes to my life on my own, regular action oriented coaching would help me tackle some of the things that had kept me ‘stuck’ for a long time. From the first session, I found Lisa was able to tap into where I was up to, adapt a a range of tools, techniques and thinking into practical exercises and set the pace of my learning so that I was always moving forward. As I wrestled my bad habits into submission, chipped away at my destructive thinking and peeled back the layers to release a fresh new way of being, Lisa was with me every step of the way, and I remember how our conversations were full of laughter and love even when our sessions were tackling some of the things that made me feel most frightened and vulnerable. ” -Tara ( Canberra )

Blatant copy:

“When I approached this course, I was aware that, while I’d made a lot of important changes to my life on my own, regular action oriented coaching would help me tackle some of the things that had kept me ‘stuck’ for a long time. From the first session, I found Lisa was able to tap into where I was up to, adapt a a range of tools, techniques and thinking into practical exercises and set the pace of my learning so that I was always moving forward. As I wrestled my bad habits into submission, chipped away at my destructive thinking and peeled back the layers to release a fresh new way of being, Lisa was with me every step of the way, and I remember how our conversations were full of laughter and love even when our sessions were tackling some of the things that made me feel most frightened and vulnerable. ” -Tara ( Canberra )

There are more testimonials than the two detailed above, but you can amuse yourself reading them, I think I’ve made the picture clear :)

Perhaps the most ironic thing, coming from a website which has obviously pinched someone else’s testimonials, is the fact that the slogan “nlp you can trust” appears on their website.

I hope that testimonials don’t count as “claims”, because this gem appears on their disclaimer page:

“Any claims by NLP Experts have fully been evaluated by a 3r Legal analyst and have at least 1 external source that is willing to verify them in a court of law.”

My advice to anyone who’s considering coaching/counselling is to do some research before deciding on who to use, there are many very good coaches out there.

My wife highly recommends Lisa and one of my close friends Rachael gets my seal of approval!

</rant> –Jay