What is NLP – The Quick and Easy Guide

NLP stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming. Neuro relate to the brain and your 5 senses, Linguistic referres to our methods of communication, both verbal and non verbal and Programming relations to our ability as humans to form and learn new habits and behaviors.

NLP is about studying the subjective experience. It is about figuring out how people are creating their experiences inside their mind and how we can go about improving, changing or learning those internal states of mind.

NLP is unique, compared to all other fields studying human behavior, NLP is focused on modeling and studying talent.

In the 1970? S John Grinder and Richard Bandler came together to study the work of some of the most effective therapists at the time. Grinder was a Prof of linguistics and Bandler a computer scientist. Grinder was interested in how language worked and effected behavior and Bandler? S skill was in modeling behavior for computer systems. They started out together to see if they could build a model and set of instructions that would explain in some way, how such effective therapists were able to get results and change in people where others were not. They studied Virginia Satir, Milton Erickson and Fritz Perls and began to build models of communication from their study.

They found common communication patterns among these therapists and were able to expose some of the methods that these people were using naturally. They then began to take their lessons and teach it to others and found that the people they thought were able to get similar results with clients.

NLP is concerned with excellence and talent. Bandler and Grinder had developed a way to model human behavior at the subjective level. Where other therapists were asking why someone had a problem, NLP asked how. How were they constructing the images and movies in their mind, how people were talking to themselves and how they are feeling. They took things literally and noticed that if one was to change the pictures inside their mind, played around with the tones of voice that they could get difference changes in people. They discovered that by changing the way the memories and traumatic events were processed and imagined, they would literally be changing the thought processes at the Neuro Synaptic level. They could re encode the information so that it was no longer a problem and so that the brain could no longer access the old thought pattern.

Bandler expresses that not only only NLP a powerful technology to bring about change, but is also an attitude. It is an attitude of curiosity mixed with a sense of adventure to figure out how people do what they do. It is about taking life as a rare and unpresented opportunity to learn.

NLP is a methodology based on the overall operational presupposition that all behavior has a structure and that structure can be modeled, learned, taught and changed. And that it can be done so far sooner than previously thought. Phobias now can be cured in a matter of minutes instead of a matter of years.

This should not come as a shock to anyone since over the last 100 years our world has been transformed with new advances in technology.

I can now fly to America in a matter of hours, where once it would have taken me months on a dangerously overcrowded and infected ship. I can get a message to the other side of the world from a device in my hand, that 100 years ago could not even have been imagined.

NLP is a behavioral technology that is giving quantum leaps in the field of personal change and self improvement.

NLP is built upon a core set of values ​​and assumptions and they are:

  • The ability to change the process by which we experience reality is often more valuable than changing the content of our experience of reality.
  • The meaning of the communication is the response you get.
  • All distinctions human beings can make concern our environment and our behavior can be usefully represented through the visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, olfactory and gustatory senses.
  • The resources an individual needs to effect a change are already within them.
  • The map is not the territory.
  • The positive worth of an individual is held constant while the value and appropriateness of internal and / or external behavior is questioned.
  • There is a positive intention stimulating each behavior and a context in which every behavior has value.
  • Feedback Vs Failure: all results and behaviors are achievements, whether they are desired outcomes for a given task / context or not.

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