Lakkana Komkai spent years as editor in chief of Thailand’s leading women’s magazine, responsible for fashion, beauty, lifestyle, health and food. It is a role built almost entirely on judgement about language: what to say, how to say it, and what a particular audience will actually receive.
She had never heard the term NLP.
What strikes me about her story is not the size of the career change, though it is considerable. It is that the thing which pulled her in was the thing she had already spent her professional life inside. She did not discover a new interest. She found a more precise version of the one she already had.
Who Lakkana Is
Lakkana is a coach and trainer based in Bangkok, known in Thailand as Coach Lakkana. Her work centres on two things: helping people identify their own career values so they can move toward what actually matters to them, and training teams to communicate well with each other.
That second area is more specific than it sounds. Her training focuses on establishing genuine collaboration, building understanding between team members, and handling conflict, which is the point where most organisational communication quietly fails.
| Stage | What Happened |
| Before NLP | Editor in chief, Thailand’s leading women’s magazine |
| First encounter | Took a single class while thinking about her own career development |
| What caught her | The Milton Model and the Meta Model, because of her existing interest in language |
| Master Practitioner | Advanced submodalities, presupposition, parts integration, values elicitation |
| The decision | Committed to NLP Trainer’s Training before her Master Practitioner had even finished |
| Today | Coach and trainer in Bangkok, certifying NLP Practitioners |
The Language Door
She came to that first class the way a great many capable people do, which is to say sideways. She was thinking about her own career development, took a class, and found something unexpected in it.
What caught her was not the promise of transformation. It was the linguistics.
NLP examines the language you use with yourself, and Lakkana had built a career on the effect of language on people. The Milton Model and the Meta Model, two of the core linguistic tools, were the specific things she names as where she fell in love with the field. One works with deliberately artful, permissive language. The other recovers the specific information missing from a vague statement. Both are, at root, the study of what words do.
For someone who had spent years deciding how a sentence would land with hundreds of thousands of readers, this was familiar territory examined at a resolution she had not seen before.
Insider Tip From Dr Adriana James: The people who take to NLP fastest are almost never the ones with the most relevant background on paper. They are the ones who find their existing expertise reflected back at a finer grain. A magazine editor already knows that word choice changes outcomes. What she does not have is a model for why, or a way to work with it deliberately. Give someone that and they move very quickly, because the intuition was already built. They are learning the mechanism behind something they could already do.
What Master Practitioner Opened Up
Lakkana describes being surprised by how much more there was, which is a common experience and worth taking seriously as a signal.
The specific things she names are advanced submodalities, the presupposition work, parts integration, and values elicitation, hierarchy and utilisation. Those are not beginner techniques and they are not general concepts. They are precise tools for particular problems, and her interest in them is notably technical.
What she describes is the moment the toolkit becomes genuinely deep. At Practitioner level you learn that change is possible and how to produce it. At NLP Master Practitioner certification you start working at the level of values and identity, and the range of what you can help someone with expands substantially.
Her reaction to that expansion tells you something about her. She did not finish the certification and consider her options. She decided, before the training had even ended, to continue into NLP Trainer’s Training.
Why She Wanted to Train, Not Just Practise
Her reasoning here is unusually clear, and I would put it in front of anyone weighing the same decision.
She had techniques that worked. She could use them on herself and with clients, one to one. What she wanted was to take the same knowledge to another level, and by another level she meant something specific: becoming the person who communicates these concepts to a group of people who want to learn them, rather than only applying them.
And beyond teaching, certifying. The capacity to certify others as NLP Practitioners was, to her, a genuine advance in what her career could be.
That distinction between practising a body of knowledge and being qualified to transmit it is the whole subject of NLP Trainer’s Training. Most people arrive understanding it vaguely. Lakkana arrived having thought it through.
Did You Know? The shift from practitioner to trainer is an identity change before it is a skills change. A practitioner asks what this person in front of me needs. A trainer asks what this group needs to be able to do by the end, which reorganises how you prepare, how you explain, and where your attention goes while you work. This is why NLP Trainer’s Training works at the level of trainer identity rather than only on delivery technique.
What Changed After Certification
Two things, by her account.
Her confidence rose sharply. She uses the word soar. She could teach this material to people, and she could describe herself as an NLP trainer, which she had not been able to do before.
She found her signature. This is the part I find most interesting. Before, she taught a range of topics. This training, then that one. All of it interesting, and none of it hers. What she describes wanting was something specific to her, something with her name on it, and the trainer certification is what gave her that.
Teaching NLP Practitioner training for the first time was, in her account, the confirmation that the decision had been right.
I would note that Lakkana’s professional outcomes are hers, arrived at through her own work in her own market. What the certification provides is the capability and the standing. What anyone builds with those is separate, and it depends on a great deal more than the training.
On Learning From the Origins
Lakkana is direct about why she trained where she did, and it comes down to two things.
She describes wanting to learn from a “model of excellence,” which is NLP language for studying the person who does the thing best and learning the structure of how they do it.
And she wanted the origin rather than an interpretation. Time Line Therapy® came from The Tad James Company, and learning it at source mattered to her. She describes feeling proud of what she was learning, proud of herself, and proud of the people teaching her, and says that mattered a great deal.
That third one is worth pausing on. Pride in your lineage is not vanity. In a field where anyone can claim anything, being able to trace your training back to where the work originated is what allows you to stand in front of a room and teach it without reservation.
Her Experience of Time Line Therapy®
Lakkana speaks at length about her own experience with Time Line Therapy®, and I want to present it as exactly that: her personal account.
She describes revisiting something from the past and seeing a different meaning in it, and the physical sense of lightness and hopefulness that followed. What she emphasises afterwards is options. Coming back to the present and noticing alternatives she had not previously been able to see, and finding that how she looked at things, spoke to people and approached her work felt different from before.
She now works with the technique with her own clients and describes that as something she is proud of.
Every person’s experience of this work is their own, and I would not present one account as a prediction of anyone else’s.
Perception Is Projection
She closes on an NLP presupposition, “perception is projection,” and applies it to herself rather than to her clients.
Her observation is that the more she learns and the more she practises with clients, the better she gets, and not only technically. Watching someone become free of something they have carried, watching them become a better version of themselves, produces something in the practitioner as well. She describes it as a kind of healing, and as revisiting things for herself through the work she does for others.
This is a real feature of the work and it is rarely mentioned in course descriptions. Trainers and practitioners are not neutral instruments. You cannot facilitate change repeatedly without it acting on you, and most people who stay in this field long term do so because of that rather than despite it.
What Her Story Illustrates
- Existing expertise accelerates rather than competes. Her editorial background was not something to leave behind. It was the reason the linguistics caught her so quickly.
- The pull matters more than the plan. She was drawn in by the Meta Model, not by a career strategy. The strategy came later.
- Depth creates its own momentum. She committed to trainer training before Master Practitioner had finished, because the expanding toolkit made the next step obvious.
- Certification enables a signature. She had been teaching capably without having anything that was distinctly hers.
- Lineage is not decoration. Learning at the origin is what let her teach with complete confidence in the material.
- Career change does not require starting over. She did not abandon a career in communication. She went further into one.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I become an NLP trainer without a background in psychology or coaching?
Yes. Participants come from journalism, business, human resources, education, healthcare and many other fields. What tends to matter is genuine interest in how people work, not a particular credential.
What qualification do I need for NLP Trainer’s Training?
The programme is designed for people who already hold NLP Master Practitioner certification. Our team can map your existing qualifications against the NLP Training pathway if you are unsure where you sit.
What does trainer certification allow me to do that Master Practitioner does not?
It qualifies you to teach NLP to a recognised standard and to certify others as Practitioners, which is a different professional position from working with clients individually.
Can I train from outside Australia?
Yes. Lakkana trains from Bangkok. Programmes are delivered live online and regularly include participants from across the world.
What is the Meta Model in NLP?
A set of precise questions that recover the specific information missing from a general statement. It is a core linguistic tool taught from Practitioner level and developed considerably at Master Practitioner.
Is it worth going straight from Master Practitioner into trainer training?
Some participants do exactly that, as Lakkana did. What matters more than timing is whether the core processes have become automatic, because trainer development asks you to run them while also holding a group.
Hear It In Her Own Words
Lakkana tells her story better than I can, particularly the part about language.
Watch Lakkana’s graduate story, or explore more graduate stories from across the international community.
Next Intake: NLP Trainer’s Training runs 1 to 18 October 2026, live online, taught by Dr Adriana James. Enrollment closes Sunday, 20 September 2026.