Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) is a synthesis of the work of Milton Erickson, and Virginia Satir. Add the work of Fritz Perls, Abraham Maslow, Gregory Bateson, Buckminster Fuller, then add the synergistic skill of John Grinder, Richard Bandler, and several others who in the late nineteen-sixties created an explosion of creativity and innovation, and you have a recipe for confusion and misunderstanding!
Forty years after its creation, NLP still does not fit into any easily recognizable category, and continues to develop in new and exciting ways that are often misrepresented, and even more often misunderstood.
What distinguishes NLP from conventional forms of psychotherapy, (itself so diverse that it’s hardly possible to speak of it as a singular field) is that it begins by asking an unusual question.
Rather than asking why things happen or why people behave in certain ways, NLP asks, “How?” Knowing why you do certain things, or why you have a certain problem, can be very helpful in effecting change; or it might be of merely academic interest.
By ask how you arrive at questions such as:
- How can I develop motivation, focus, clarity?
- How can I loose weight and keep it off?
- How can I become a non-smoker forever?
- How you I act, think, feel differently to achieve better results?
- How can I model excellence in others to achieve it in myself?
- How can I fulfill my goals?
- How can I communicate more effectively?
Simple enough! Why then are there so many misunderstandings about NLP?
Neurolinguistic programming explores and models
- effective communication
- optimimum internal representations and perceptions to achieve excellence.
It has become very effective at both. Which is why some people have come to see that NLP is nothing more than a way to help unscrupulous sale people sell to unwilling customers even more effectively. Or else it has come to be seen as a series of patterns and techniques that automatically produce magical results.
Unfortunately, NLP has been so impressive in achieving results, and so enthusiastically received by some, that it has come to be perceived as something of a cult. Also, because some of the patterns and techniques are relatively easy to learn, it is often practiced without the skill that is required for it to achieve the best results.
NLP is more than clever sales techniques, more than procedures and techniques learned by rote. It is more that a system for person change because it is infinitely adaptable, continually asking how certain results are achieved, drawing as few fixed conclusions as possible. Because is asks how and explores patterns you might call it a meta system, a lens to explore other systems, and to change the behaviors, attitudes, and emotions that have limited you from achieving the results you want.
There are those who make change in their lives willingly – because of restlessness, because of inspiration, or through curiosity. They begin by changing their habits, or their external circumstances, or the meanings they give to things. And once they truly change any one of those things, the others change too.
