WHAT IS NLP?
NLP stands for neuro-linguistic programming.
PROGRAMMING (FUNCTION)
Seeing your mind as your internal operating system. Programming is the way our past experiences, thoughts and emotions affect all areas of our lives.
NEUROLOGY (NEURO)
The physical, mental and emotional components of our neurology.
LINGUISTICS (LANGUAGE)
Linguistics concerns the language you use and, more specifically, the way you communicate with others and, more importantly, the way you communicate with yourself.
NLP is the practice of understanding how people organize their thoughts, feelings, language and behavior to produce the results they achieve. NLP provides people with a methodology for modeling the exceptional performances achieved by geniuses and leaders in their field. NLP is also used for personal development and business success.
A key element of NLP is that we form our unique internal mental maps of the world as a product of how we filter and perceive the information absorbed by our five senses from the world around us.
NLP gives us the knowledge and tools we need to become the best version of ourselves and achieve the happiness we all deserve.
THE ORIGINS OF NLP
Neuro-linguistic programming was born in the early 1970s, when an associate professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, John Grinder, teamed up with a student, Richard Bandler. Both men were fascinated by human excellence, which led them to model the behavioral patterns of certain geniuses.
Modeling is the core activity of NLP, and involves extracting and reproducing the language structure and behavioral patterns of an individual who excels in a given activity.
Grinder and Bandler began their quest for NLP by modeling three people, Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir and Milton Erickson. These geniuses distinguished themselves as professional change agents, working in the field of therapy. These three geniuses, Perls, Satir and Erickson, worked their magic from a perspective of unconscious excellence. The geniuses did not present Grinder and Bandler with a conscious description of their behavior. The modelers (Grinder and Bandler) unconsciously absorbed the patterns inherent in the geniuses and then provided a description.
With little direct knowledge of the geniuses’ individual specialties, and little knowledge of the field of psychotherapy as a whole, Grinder and Bandler set out for two years, with enthusiasm bordering on fervor, to explain selected parts of the geniuses’ behavior. They encoded the results of their work in language-based models, using transformational grammar models as their descriptive vocabulary. Through NLP modeling, Grinder and Bandler made the tacit skills of geniuses explicit, and NLP was born.
Grinder and Bandler’s company, in those heady days of the 1970s, was a melting pot of curious minds seeking to study human behavior. John Grinder was an associate professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Richard Bandler was a fourth-year undergraduate. World-renowned anthropologist Gregory Bateson had joined the faculty at Kresge College, and Bateson’s interest in the Grinder-Bandler collaboration was such that he introduced Grinder and Bandler to Milton Erickson. Bateson’s support, comments and enthusiasm are partly illustrated in his introduction to the book Structure of Magic, where he declares, “John Grinder and Richard Bandler have done something similar to what my colleagues and I attempted fifteen years ago.”
In 1975, Grinder and Bandler introduced the world to the first two NLP models in the volumes “Structure of Magic I and II.” The volumes published by the respected publishing house “Science and Behaviour Books inc” put NLP on the map, and interest in the new field of NLP spread rapidly. People working in fields related to communication, behavior and change sought to learn how they too could achieve amazing results when working on change. Grinder and Bandler readily offered training courses in the application of their models. Bandler and Grinder’s training courses proved that NLP models were transferable to others, meaning that learners could use NLP models successfully in their own work.
NLP MODELING, NLP TRAINING, NLP APPLICATION
While NLP began life as a means of modeling excellence, training courses soon became a very active part of the NLP adventure, followed by NLP application where NLP-trained people apply their NLP tools for business and personal benefit.