What is NLP?

5Feb/091

In the last post we mentioned that we intend to post a foundation set of posts on "NLP". So for those who don't know what NLP is, here is a quick introduction. NLP is the brain child of two men named John Grinder and Richard Bandler in the early 1970s?

Let's be clear up front.

NLP is not "science" even though its name might suggest it (John Grinder has called it an 'ill-named endeavor'). It also never pretended to be science. NLP techniques have been studied by scientists with somewhat mixed results. Many of its ideas have also filtered into the mainstream and are now commonly accepted wisdom and show up in a variety of business, sales, education trainings (often relabeled or renamed without attribution).

Richard Bandler and John Grinder continue to teach their own brands of NLP and went their separate ways in the late 1970s. By far the most famous and successful trainer (speaking of $$$) is Tony Robbins. His original book "Unlimited Power" (link) describes many of the basic and original NLP patterns quite clearly. In later work he re-named what he did to be Neuro-Associative Conditioning System (NACS). A whole industry has sprung up to certify people as practitioners and trainers of NLP and has made more than a few people quite wealthy. There is nothing wrong with that, but a field training new trainers creates constant competition and many different factions have sprung up over the years with widely varying views of "What is NLP?". If you look deeper into NLP be prepared to sift through a lot of marketing hype. An outsider looking in at the field may rightfully be dismayed, confused, disgusted, or turned off, which is unfortunate because there is some real value there.

For the purposes of this blog, we have no agenda or intention to promote NLP, but we will be presenting a series of 10-20 posts that explain basic NLP material because we find it so useful. We hope this will be useful for those who want to learn the best of what NLP has to offer, but don't have time to sift the wheat from chaff. Although thoroughly trained in NLP, we are not trainers of NLP, do not certify and don't derive any significant income from NLP.

As with anything we strongly recommend approaching the material with skepticism. We also strongly encourage resolving that skepticism by testing the concepts, techniques and patterns with full belief that they work. Only after you have fully engaged in testing them out, determine if they have value for you or not. We will frequently include exercises or activities in the articles that will help you do this.

So back to the definition, what is it really?

We will define it as really two things: First it is an accelerated learning methodology. The primary technique of which is called modeling. In overly simplistic terms its the ability to learn and replicate skills like any baby can do - or monkey-see monkey-do. Yet since so few people are able to truly replicate the skills of genius it seems worthwhile to examine.

In early 1970's Richard Bandler had a job working for a company doing audio/video recordings of some well known therapists in the Santa Cruz area, in particular Fritz Perls, developer of Gestalt Therapy, and Virginia Perls, a highly regarded family therapist.

Richard and his friend Frank Pucelik, began running their own groups replicating what they were seeing Fritz Perls do. In fact they were quite successful at doing so - Richard in particular. However, what Richard was unable to do was transfer those skills to the others in the group. He could not explain what he was doing. He approached John Grinder, then a Professor of Linguistics at UC Santa Cruz to join and help figure out how to describe what was being done. They began working together with wild abandon on a wide range of topics within the theraputic domain, leading to the modelling of Virginia Satir and Milton Ericson, M.D. a well known hypnotherapist who could produce amazing results. They were brash and arrogant, and rapidly achieved a following around the country. They produced a number of early books and claimed to be able to treat patients no one else could cure, even though they had little formal therapeutic training. The books and seminars were attempting to convey models that would enable anyone desiring to, to achieve results similar to the original model (i.e. Perls, Satir, Ericson),

So our first definition of NLP is really the ability to observe a genius in action and replicate their skills, and provide a transferrable model that allows others to also achieve similar results.

That is the least common definition of NLP. What is more frequently taught are the models themselves (our 2nd definition). There are a large number of patterns developed in NLP for resolving trauma, grief, generating hypnotic trance, curing phobias, building rapport, etc. However, more broadly and more usefully there are a set of general patterns for communications that are broadly applicable to all communications in personal relationships, business, education, etc.

A few interesting additional developments have been made over the past 20 years, but the vast majority of patterns were identified early on in the development during that fruitful partnership between Bandler and Grinder.

Until next week...

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