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Sep 21 2017

NLP - What is it?

Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) sounds daunting at first, but it’s actually a brilliant practice for developing yourself both professionally and personally. It’s a practice which is all about how people do things, rather than why they do them, and seeks to understand how people organise their thinking, feelings, language, and behaviours.

The history

NLP emerged in the 1970s thanks to Computer Programmer and Psychology student Richard Bandler, and Assistant Professor of Linguistics John Grinder. The American pals wanted to understand the behavioural patterns of ‘geniuses’, so they worked together and closely studied three successful people.

They ‘modelled’ Fritz Perls, an innovative psychologist; Virginia Satir, the prime force behind family therapy; and Milton Erickson, a famous hypnotherapist. The findings from this research then turned into a set of tools and techniques which formed the foundations of NLP.

Putting it into practice

The easiest way to understand NLP is to think of it as a manual for the brain which can be broken down into three parts:

Neuro – this refers to the mind and how we organise our mental life. It recognises that behaviours are neurological processes and that we all use different channels of perception.

Linguistic – this part is all about how we use both verbal and non verbal language and how it affects us. It looks at how we use language to structure our thoughts and its influence upon us.

Programming – this is a series of steps designed to achieve a specific result, it’s all about our sequences of repetitive behaviour and how we act with purpose. It puts us in control and says that we can choose to organise our minds to produce the results that we want.

The results