ZMasterNCreator,
If you were so far ahead of your peers at school, why did you ever bother getting into personal development? If things worked out instinctively for you, you did not have to learn them through a certain technique, like NLP.
It's the integration process that matters, as MagicTerm, correctly mentioned. Unless you want to become an NLP trainer, then it's only how you apply the technique that matters. If you focus on it too closely, the technique remains the center of your attention and the rest slows down.
