Last night, unpacking my bag, I opened my training notebook and found something odd. Half of it holds NLP diagrams. The other half holds couplets I could not stop writing down. That, in one image, is what five days with Anil Thomas does to you. I went to Mumbai to earn an International Practitioner’s Certification in Neuro-Linguistic Programming, and I came back with sharper tools, a steadier nervous system, and a rekindled love affair with poetry I did not see coming.
The Room at Vinayalaya
The course ran for five full days, noon to 10 pm, at Vinayalaya Retreat House in Andheri. If you know Mumbai, you know how rare that kind of quiet is. A retreat house forces a different pace on you. Phones lose their grip. Attention thickens. Around sixty of us gathered, some in the room and some online, from every profession you can imagine: therapists, founders, HR heads, doctors, a few fellow coaches.
What I did not anticipate was how quickly strangers become people you trust. When you practise deep work on each other for ten hours a day, small talk dies early, and something more honest takes its place. I left with genuine new friends, Sapna, Meghna, Vinay and Khyati among them, the kind you know you will still be speaking to long after the certificates have been framed. Any programme that produces both skills and friendships is doing something right with human connection.
Ten hours a day sounds punishing. It was not, and that is the first thing worth saying about the trainer. Energy in a learning room is not an accident. It is engineered, and it leaks from the person at the front.
Anil Thomas, the Trainer
Anil Thomas is a pro in his craft, and I do not use that phrase loosely. I have sat through more trainings than I can count, on both sides of the room, and I watch trainers the way a chef eats at other restaurants. What sets him apart is not volume or theatrics. It is articulation. He has a beautiful, almost surgical relationship with words. He can take a slippery psychological idea and land it in one clean sentence, then hold the silence long enough for it to settle in your body.
He is also genuinely witty. Not the rehearsed one-liner kind of wit, but the alive kind that notices what is happening in the room and plays with it. Wit matters in deep work because laughter drops defences faster than any technique. A room that laughs together discloses together.
His lineage runs through Dr Richard (Dick) McHugh, and through learning with NLP’s co-creators such as John Grinder, Judith DeLozier and Robert Dilts, which you can feel in the teaching. Nothing was second-hand. You can explore his training and the Fellowship to see the breadth of the work.
What the NLP Actually Does
For readers new to it, NLP studies how language, thought and behaviour shape one another. Three ideas from the five days will stay in my coaching room permanently.
Reframing, which simply means changing the frame around an experience so its meaning changes, the way the same painting looks different on a different wall. Anchoring, the pairing of a chosen internal state with a small trigger, so calm or confidence becomes retrievable on demand rather than accidental. And the meta model, a set of precise questions that catch the deletions and generalisations in our speech, the “always”, the “everyone”, the “I can’t”, and gently ask, really?
None of this is magic. It is applied attention. As I often say, until death, every success and failure is psychological, and NLP gives that truth a working toolkit. For anyone considering the path of a life coach, this certification is a serious foundation stone.
The Night Poetry Came Back
Now for the part I did not expect. Anil Thomas loves poems. He loves sher and shayari the way some trainers love flowcharts, and he uses them the same way, as precision instruments. Mid-concept, he would pause, recite two lines of Urdu verse, and the entire room, offline and online, would go still. Sixty adults, many of whom had not read a poem since school, fell in love with poetry again in five days. I watched participants scribbling down couplets during breaks like students passing notes.
I was one of them. In those five days, I followed ten or fifteen poets on Instagram, Gulzar, Rumi, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Ghalib among them, and I have been reading verse each night since.
I have started calling this experience a linguistic homecoming: the moment precisely chosen words return you to a part of yourself you had stopped visiting. Neuroscience offers a clue about why it happens. The brain is a prediction machine, and poetry works by breaking prediction beautifully. An unexpected word arrives, attention spikes, emotion binds to memory. A good sher does in twelve words what a lecture cannot do in an hour.
Sit with this for a moment. When did a sentence last stop you completely? Whose words do you keep, and why those? And what part of you goes unvisited because nobody, including you, speaks to it precisely anymore?
That is the deeper lesson beneath the certification. Language is not decoration on top of experience. It is the architecture of it.
Precision is not the enemy of poetry. The most therapeutic thing you can do with language is mean it. The right word does not decorate a feeling. It unlocks it.
My Honest Verdict
Would I recommend the programme? Yes, with clarity about who it serves. If you want passive listening, this is not it. The days are long, experiential and personal. You will practise on real material from your own life, which is precisely why it works. Behavioural change lives in experience, not in notes.
If you are a coach, a leader, a therapist, or simply someone who works with people, the return is immediate. My own practice sits at the intersection of leadership, psychology and neuroscience, and I could feel these tools slotting straight into my executive coaching work, particularly around emotional intelligence and self-regulation. And Anil Thomas himself is the rarest kind of teacher, one who makes you better at your craft while quietly reminding you why you loved it.
One Door
Five days, one retreat house, sixty people, and a notebook half full of poems. My linguistic homecoming is still unfolding, one Gulzar post at a time.
If something in this piece touched a part of you that has gone quiet, I would be glad to explore it with you. Book a fifteen-minute consultation with me, and let us find the words for it together.
Leave a Reply