So what is NLP?

Group: NLP in Network Marketing and Home Businesses

Written by Alix Martin on May 10, 2009 10:33 am

Read More: Personal Development

When I started this group I created a post called "So what is NLP?

And the joys........ the title and the first line got posted but not the rest of the post.

So here goes again to post "So what is NLP?"

(Umm now what did I say last time......!)

NLP started in the late 60s and early 70s by two guys called Richard Bandler and John Grinder. They were both at the University of Santa Cruz.

They started NLP by asking the then revolutionary question "How do people do things well?" Prior to this, people had always been interested in "How can something be fixed, or how is someone failing?"

So in other words, they were interested in copying expert practice. Initially they picked three experts -- Milton Eriksson, Virginia Satir and Carl Rogers, all experts in their own right.

With these experts, these two men set about "copying them". They decided to copy and duplicate everything that these experts did -- so no matter whether it was blinking their eyelids at a certain point or mirroring the experts belief systems, they copied it.

Once they had modelled these experts they reviewed the data that they had acquired to see what was essential to gain the same results and what was not. They discovered that by using what they had "modelled" they could achieve exactly the same results as the expert.

Can you imagine how delighted these men must have been upon discovering that human talent can be duplicated? Suddenly, it was not about finding what was wrong with someone, it was about copying expert behaviour and thinking to produce the same results.

Of course the next question was if we can copy or model these experts and produce the same results can we then teach it to someone else and will they produce the same results? They found that they could and the study of NLP was born.

Over the years that NLP has been around, a slew of tools, techniques, presuppositions and strategies have been developed to enable anyone to be their own best expert.

So, for instance one of the techniques that was developed was to do with spelling. NLP practitioners asked the question "How do people spell well?" and they discovered that all good spellers (of the English language) always see the word they are spelling in their mind's eye, or they need to write it down ie. they need to "see" it. Conversely, people who do not spell well try to sound out the word or spell words with a phonetic strategy which does not work in the English language (British English or American English) Try it for yourself. If you are a good speller think of a word that would be a challenge for you and observe what you do. I bet you "see" the work in your mind's eye and you will flick your eyes upward very fast to "see" it.

If anyone is interested in the spelling strategy please contact me and I'll explain more.

I hope here I have been able to give you a small taste of what is available in NLP. I really look forward to further discussions from both practitioners and newbies to this subject.

For anyone interested in researching more about NLP a great place to start is in Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming and Robert Dilt's site www.nlpu.com