What is NLP and How Can it Benefit my Life?

When people ask "what is nlp?" a reply of "it's Neuro Linguistic Programming" doesn't always make things clearer! NLP is a wide ranging field that has such amazing applications in many areas that people don't always know how to describe it easily.

So, what is it? Simply described, it is a manual for your brain. Did you ever consider that you can buy a wrist watch for £2 and it comes with a 17 page instruction manual of how to use it. Yet, it only has 2 buttons and just tells the time. Human being are vastly more complex than a wrist watch and science is still finding out how we work, and yet, none of us gets a manual for how to run our minds and bodies. NLP allows you to gain control of your emotions, thinking, behaviours and teaches you how to think differently in order to get what you want.

How can neuro linguistic programming help you?  A few of the benefits are:

• Discovering what it is that makes people successful - the differences that makes the difference
   
• Learning simple and powerful ways of making changes for yourself and others
   
• Enjoying relationships with others more
   
• Communicating and influencing more effectively, precisely and meaningfully
   
• Handling people whom you might experience as 'difficult' more successfully
   
• Creating and achieving your own personal and professional goals
   
• Developing and increasing your emotional intelligence
   
• Finding new levels of excellence in coaching, managing, teaching, training and leading others.

So how does NLP do this?

NLP can be described as the study of what makes up our experience of the world, the pictures, sounds, feelings, smells and tastes that we experience and how these interface with our use of language to communicate and, in turn, how this affect body and physiology. NLP consists of various models of the structure of human experience (such as the NLP Communication Model) and the resulting techniques derived from those models.

At it's heart, NLP is a way of exploring 'how' people think and applying this in ways which work. NLP is very pragmatic and if a tool or model  works in practice, uses it. Typically, provided a model actually delivers results then NLP developers are generally unconcerned with "proving" why. A summary of this approach is "pretend it works, try it, and notice the results you get. If you don't get the result you want, try something else".

So, what is NLP and how did it begin?

It began when two people, Grinder and Bandler, became interested in modeling excellence, working with exceptional people (therapists and powerful communicators) and building models of how these people did what they did. Modelling is at the heart of NLP, in fact, Richard Bander says "NLP is an attitude and a methodology that leaves behind a trail of techniques".

This attitude would be one of curiosity and wanton experimentation, perhaps similar to how a child might experience the world, observing with acute sensory awareness (called sensory acuity in nlp) and questioning with a belief in all things being possible. The methodology of NLP is the process of discovering how a person does something.  Finally the trail of techniques, things like the swish pattern, rapport skills, hypnotic language patterns and embedded commands are all the results of this modeling.

What is a real example of nlp modeling?

One example is the phobia model or what is sometimes called the phobia cure (one of the methods which are taught in our nlp coaching models. Bandler says that he liked the fact that phobias are so easy to test. If a person arrives with a fear of heights it's pretty easy to take them up an elevator at the end of the session to be test the effectiveness of the change. Phobias were also interesting because many people involved in psychology had been unsuccessful in getting results with their clients. In fact, clinicians had interviewed phobics for years to try and discover why they had their phobia in the hope it would help them remove it.

At best this created a client who not only had a phobia but a really good in depth understanding of where it came from - not a lot of comfort when panicking at the sight of a spider! While clinicians had effectively been modeling phobics, Bandler realised that it would be much more productive to model people who used to be phobic and then applying that learning to people with phobias (for those interested in learning more about modeling then the NLP Creations NLP Practitioner and NLP Master Practitioner training will provide opportunities to develop skills through a number of NLP exercises and nlp tutorials).

How is NLP still advancing?

Having defined 'what is nlp'?, it is important to acknowledge that NLP continues to develop and evolve. Since it's creation in the 1970s, Richard Bandler created Design Human Engineering, John Grinder has developed New Code NLP and many other contributors like Robert Dilts, Tad James, Wyatt Woodsmall, John Overdurf and Juile Silverthorn have made brilliant additions and developments. NLP is a field that has changed many people,  and is continuing to do so even more effectively today and grow in ways that make it even more applicable for today's world.