can offer you many things, but it helps if you are willing to be adventurous, open to change and fascinated by life and all that it brings. NLP’s main aim is to help people get better at what they do. Its focus on performance has a number of principles, some of which are as follows:
Excellence in performance can be modelled (analysed) and transferred from one person to another.
High performance requires both the development of skills and development of corresponding mental and physical states.
Mental and physical states can be broken down into small measurable elements and modified to achieve desired results.
What distinguishes NLP from many other disciplines is its focus on modelling (see Chapter 3). Briefly, modelling is the elicitation of sets of patterns; in NLP, patterns which demonstrate how people achieve excellence in performance. These patterns can be copied by others in order to replicate the achievements of high performers. Characteristic features of NLP are its specific techniques for analysing the components of performance, especially how the mind processes information and installs strategies for achievement. It can do this across all areas of personal and professional performance, including motivation, learning, maintaining good health, sports performance, communication, negotiating, public speaking, teambuilding and change management.
NLP’s processes of modelling are distinct from NLP’s applications (for example techniques for enhancing sales, negotiating, teaching and so forth). Many people believe that NLP is its techniques, but the techniques are simply a minor part of a field of study which is, in essence, a holistic and systemic approach to understanding personal and organizational effectiveness.
Richard Bandler, a co-founder of NLP, has been quoted as saying that, to master NLP, it is necessary to ‘let it completely permeate your thinking and feeling’ and that it involves ‘a ferocious spirit of “going for it” – characteristics of “excitement”, “curiosity”, “high-level state management of your own moods”, “passion” and “commitment”’ (Michael L. Hall, The Spirit of NLP, The Anglo-American Book Co Ltd, 1996). John Grinder, another co-founder of NLP, says that people wanting to train or represent NLP in any way ‘need to possess qualities of personal congruity, sparkling intelligence, a deep bottomless curiosity, a driving desire to discover new patterning, a phobic class response to repeating themselves, a continuous scanning for evidence that they are mistaken in every aspect of their personal and professional beliefs, solid personal ethics, physical fitness, actual real world experience in any field in which they intend to present NLP and an excellent sense of humour’ (Internet interview – Inspirative 1996).
NLP provides ways of helping anyone become more competent at what they do, more in control of their thoughts, feelings and actions, more positive in their approach to life and better able to achieve results. If people do not have, within themselves, the knowledge or resources to achieve what they want, NLP makes it possible for them to adapt other people’s skills and ways of thinking and incorporate them within their own lives in order to be more successful. NLP is, as one definition has succinctly put it, ‘the Art and Science of Excellence’.
DEFINITIONS
Because of its nature, different people perceive different things in NLP and gain different things from it; definitions of NLP, therefore, are numerous and varied. As well as the one given above, they have included the following:
‘an attitude which is an insatiable curiosity about human beings with a methodology that leaves behind it a trail of techniques’ (Richard Bandler)
‘an owner’s guide to the mind’
‘the study of subjective experience’
‘the study of the structure of subjectivity’ (Dilts, Bandler, Grinder, DeLozier, Neuro-Linguistic Programming: Volume 1)
‘software for the brain’
‘a new Science of Achievement’
‘the study of human excellence’
‘the ability to be your best more often’
‘the science that teaches how to use the neurological and linguistic resources in order to follow the program of self preservation, health and happiness in union with other people and nature’ (Luis Jorge Gonzales)
‘a manual for the structured use of creativity’ (Roz Carroll)
‘how to think positively so you can enhance your performance’
‘an adventure in experience’
As most of these definitions focus on personal improvement, one way of thinking of NLP is to consider it as providing a way of helping people move from situations which could be improved to situations which are better. Whereas other disciplines, such as psychology, give insights into human behaviour and motivation, NLP actually provides practical ways of improving performance. So it incorporates a technology for bringing about change in people, a set of approaches and tools which combine to offer ideas and skills for enhancing how people do things.
This can be summed up by saying that NLP helps people identify their present states (how they think and feel, what they do and the results they achieve), consider their desired states (what they would really like instead) and learn how to move from one to the other. It is not prescriptive about what the desired states should be, leaving that to the individual. For example, two people might both wish to become better at responding to other people’s criticism. The first person might become upset when criticized (their ‘present state’) and wish to ‘be able to accept criticism in a positive way’, while the second person might become defensive when criticized and wish to ‘be able to be receptive and use the criticism to bring about personal change’. Both people could be helped to achieve their aims using NLP techniques, but NLP does not tell them that one aim is ‘correct’ or ‘more desirable’ than another (although it can help them consider the advantages and disadvantages of each).
To achieve the transition from present state to desired state, there are three elements which NLP considers: you (your own situation and disposition); others (those with whom you are dealing) and flexibility (the possibility of varying what you do in order to be effective).
ORIGINS
We will be covering the history of NLP in the next chapter; the following is just a very brief outline to put the rest of this chapter into context.
NLP in its present form originated in the early 1970s in the USA, although much of it was based on concepts and approaches that were considerably older. The contribution of the founders to NLP as a discrete field of study was twofold: first, the codification, enlargement and extension of previously existing concepts into a practically useful developmental tool; and second, the promotion of ‘modelling’ (see Chapter 3) to replicate excellence in performance.
NLP stands for Neuro-Linguistic Programming, a title given to it by two of its major founders, Richard Bandler and John Grinder, although the term ‘neuro-linguistic’ had been coined by Alfred Korzybski much earlier and appeared in print in his book Science and Sanity in 1933. Neuro relates to the mind and how it works; linguistic relates to the ways in which people express or communicate their experience of the world; programming relates to the fact that people behave according to personal ‘programmes’ which govern their ways of being in the world. So NLP encompasses the ways in which people think and act in their everyday lives.
California in the 1970s was a hotbed of ideas and activities. Richard Bandler and John Grinder (see Chapter 2) began exploring how really effective people achieved their results. They turned their attention to a number of individuals, each of whom