Neuro-Linguistic Programming is a psycho-scientific subject that was first developed in the early 1970’s by a professor and group of students in America and was then brought into the mainstream by two of those, namely Doctor Richard Bandler (mathematician) and Professor John Grinder (linguist). Interestingly, a lot of their early work included the study of Milton Eriksson, Virginia Satir and Fritz Perls (all iconic names in psychotherapy that my coaching training relates to). There are of course some quite scientific explanations for the topic, but for the purpose of this article, I will express more simply what NLP is and how it is used in psychotherapy etc.
NLP emphasises that as humans, we all have the resources necessary to do what ever we may need to do – and this includes achieve and/or change. The difficult part is that consciously we don’t always know exactly how. They found that the differences in people were not so much the physical, but mostly their mental perceptions of things and how these were represented in their minds. This in turn dictates how we perform in and/or respond to the outside world. This they called the ‘map’ and expressed that the map is not always the reality of the situation. Thus came the famous NLP quote that says: ‘the map is not the territory’.
The formulators of NLP studied hundreds of people in order to understand how they mapped out things in their minds, and why a selection of those achieved different things with such excellence or ease.
Gradually it was found that there were patterns to how the successful people processed information (thoughts, language, etc.) in their minds/brain. Through experiment, they found that if other people modelled and adopted these same mental maps/patterns/strategies, then they too were able to perform and achieve great improvements in the various subjects. Simply you can think of it as the study and modelling of excellence.
Formulas were developed that allowed people to change negative psychological responses to certain stimuli and so overcome many psychological related issues, particularly stress related traumas and phobias. Furthermore, it was discovered that the some principles were fantastic in producing profound improvements in sporting and business performance. It is now widely used in most professional sports, business sales, negotiation and management, military and education.
More recently, there has been some negative coverage of whether NLP is really as powerful as first portrayed by its founders. My personal view is that in reality, nothing works for everybody all of the time. However, in my own experience, I have found NLP to be a very useful toolbox of strategies and use it extensively with great success in my blend of various applications in my coaching practice.