The beauty of NLP™

NLP™ stands for Neuro-Linguistic Programming™. It was first developed by two Americans, Richard Bandler and John Grinder in the early 1970's. Richard Bandler had a talent for modelling human excellence, which he used to learn from two of the most successful psychotherapists of the day, Virginia Satir (Family Systems therapy) and Fritz perls (Gestalt Awareness therapy). John Grinder became Richard's academic supervisor and his linguistic modeling skills complemented Richard's behavioural modeling ability, resulting in the field of NLP™. Their studies then extended to the models of Gregory Bateson, the anthropologist and Milton Erickson the hypnotherapist. One of the earliest outputs of their work was the ten minute phobia cure. When you put this in its historical context, up until then, curing a phobia had typically taken many sessions of psychotherapy to cure, and suddenly there was a method to do it in ten minutes that worked. This simple example demonstrates how effective the model of NLP™ was at that time and continues to be. Since then Bandler and Grinder have been followed by numerous other NLPers, many more examples of human excellence have been studied, from sportsmen and business leaders to mystics and healers, creating what is a very wide field of insight into personal excellence.

Lets take a simple example of what's possible. Perhaps you want to feel happy more of the time, and be able to be happy at will. For most people, following these steps will allow them to do that:
1) Imagine a button in your mind that says 'Happy'.
2) Remember a time in your life when you were truly happy. Notice the image and make it three dimensional, and step into it - see it as if you were actually there. Make the image as large as possible, as bright as possible, and as colourful as possible. Notice how happy you feel and only make changes that increase your happiness.
3) Notice any sounds associated with this memory. Turn up the volume and again, notice any increases in your happiness.
4) Notice any tastes or smells associated with your happiness and turn them up, again only when they make you feel increasingly happy.
5) Notice the feelings of being happy. Turn them up, perhaps by spinning them around, or just making them bigger.
6) Keep changing these things in ways that increase your feeling of happiness. When you're as happy as you can be, press the button in your mind and say to yourself 'Happy'
7) After pressing the button, think of something like doing the laundry until you no longer feel as happy.
8) Press your happy button and/or say 'Happy' The state of happiness will return.
9) Practice this a few times until it is always available to you.

If one were to describe the presuppositions underpinning NLP™, then a simple way to describe it is to see the human organism, both mind and body together, as something that records its experiences and learns from them. The way it records its experiences is in terms of five main representational systems -
- visual,
- auditory,
- olfactory (smell),
- gustatory (taste) and
- kinesthetic (both sensory and emotional feelings and posture).
These are all connected together to form a single experience (in our example, this was the a memory of a happy time). There are distinctions in how the experiences are stored which help the mind to interpret them. For example, visualise where you went on holiday last year (or at some time in the past). Next visualise a picture of where you will go on holiday in the future (or something else you will do in the future). For most people, these images will be slightly different, perhaps in location or brightness or colour, and this is how your mind knows which is in the future and which the past.

What NLP™ provides is a set of tools to:
- Determine how you are storing your experiences and how you create new experiences (e.g. imagining what it will be like to do something new)
- Determining your strategies for doing certain things (a series of experiences being recalled or generated)
- Making changes to how your experiences are stored or your strategies to give you the behavioural changes you want
- Testing the changes to make sure that they will work and that any side-effects have been taken into account. A side effect might be something like if you stop smoking, you could put on weight, so a successful change might include helping your unconscious mind to control weight.

The tools for doing this are:
- The use of language, both by the client and the NLP™ Practitioner, often requesting that the client re-access certain experiences.
- The use of movement to portray certain changes.
- Heightened sensory acuity to notice changes in body physiology.

NLP™ is a very safe and fast way to make behavioural changes. The client is fully aware at all times and the unconscious only allows those changes in behaviour that are totally beneficial.

Ian Gregory, 2004

NLP™ and Neuro-Linguistic Programming are trademarks of Richard Bandler.