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What is NLP?

DEFINITIONS OF NLP
NLP stands for "Neuro-Linguistic Programming" An often-used explanation is
"The study of the structure of subjective experience",
which some people complete by adding: "and anything that can be derived from it"
Others have called it "An attitude and methodology," to which some people add, "… that leaves behind a trail of techniques."


PRESUPPOSITIONS
NLP is based on some basic fundamental presuppositions, which are:
· The map is not the territory
· Life and mind are systemic processes


FURTHER OPERATIONAL PRESUPPOSITIONS ARE:
Every behaviour serves a positive intention - everyone is always doing what they believe is right, or the only choice available to them given the circumstances as they see it.


Every behaviour is useful in some context - no behaviour is wrong in itself, it is perhaps just not the most appropriate behaviour for the context.


The meaning of your communication is the response that you get -It does not matter what you meant, what matters is what actually results from your words, tone and actions.


There is no failure, only feedback - all results are useful information and can be used to propel us to success.


The person with the most flexibility and choices of behaviour will rule the system. In order to get different results, you need to keep doing different things. If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.


The map is not the territory. Our senses take in raw data from our environment and that raw data has absolutely no meaning whatsoever other than the meaning we choose to give it.


There are no resistant clients only inflexible communicators. Something will work and if you look deep enough and try enough things, you will definitely find the one thing that works.


Resistance is a sign of lack of rapport. We will move heaven and earth for those we love and want to impress. When you have rapport you have massive influence.


If one human has done it, that means it is humanly possible - and if it is humanly possible, any human can learn to do it.


All genius, excellence and amazing achievement has structure and a strategy, and for this reason it can be learned.


We have all the resources we need. All the resources we need are inherent in our own physiology and neurology.


We create our own experience and therefore we are responsible for what happens to us.


Mind and body are part of the same cybernetic system. Anything happening in the mind also happens in the body and visa versa.


Note: The operational presuppositions can be deduced from the 2 basic presuppositions.
They come from asking a basic modelling-question: "What else has to be true for this to hold?" NLP does not claim that the presuppositions are ’true’, only that by living our lives as though they were true, we can afford ourselves a far more glorious and successful existence.


WHAT IS NLP TECHNOLOGY?
NLP is a model about making models of excellence in order to learn for our selves how to do those same excellent things, and to be able to teach others to do them too. These models are made by observing people who are experts in their field.

To observe experts in a way that uncovers the difference that makes the difference, NLP offers some building blocks, such as:

Calibration Techniques such as patterns in the language someone uses (predicates and the meta-model), the internal representations used (eye-patterns and submodalities), and body posture & gestures


Strategy elicitation by examining the order of, and the finer distinctions of, internal representations - submodalities, to discover what the expert is actually doing neurologically.


Models such as TOTE, SCORE, BAGEL and SOAR


Other analytical models: Logical Levels, Meta-programs, perceptual positions, time-frames

How to use these building blocks is taught during NLP trainings.
Apart from the building blocks, some typical skills will be learned during NLP-training, such as

· Rapport skills such as Match-Mismatch and Pacing & Leading
· Anchoring
· Eliciting Strategies
· Psycho-geography
· Meta Model questioning skills
· Milton Model language for persuasion, trance and hypnosis
v Language skills such as Sleight of Mouth Patterns


WHAT WILL LEARNING NLP GIVE ME?
· A way to take control of our lives and direct the course of our own destiny.
· Communication skills.
· Self-help and personal growth.
· A method of learning physical skills quickly and easily.
· Techniques for accelerated learning, spelling strategies and techniques for removing learning disabilities.
· Many sales techniques and persuasion techniques.
· A way of questioning that allows you to understand a vague communication fully.
· Arguing and debating skills, also valuable for negotiation
· An understanding of human subjective experience.
· A set of presuppositions that afford a person a greatly improved quality of life.
· A collection of skills for influencing people and changing minds
· A way to build stronger, more rewarding relationships with all people.
· A detailed understanding of how people learn and how to teach them.
· Ways to improve business behaviours from leadership to conflict management to trust, responsibility and commitment.
· Coaching skills. Helping people fulfil their dreams, aspirations and achieve
· A way to change problematic family patterns and dysfunctional marital patterns.
· Methods and skills for doing hypnosis.
· Techniques for fast and effective therapy and change

WHAT ARE TYPICAL APPLICATIONS?
Often NLP is seen as a bunch of techniques, and is mistaken as being just techniques. NLP is far more than the techniques, it is the attitude and methodology that gave birth to the techniques, and it is a set of building blocks and tools from which more techniques may be created or discovered. Some of these techniques are:

Some therapeutic interventions are -
· Collapsing anchors
· Visual squash
· 6-step reframing
· Fast Phobia cure - V/K dissociation
· Change personal History
· Aligning Logical Levels
· Belief Change Cycle
· Re-imprint
· Hypnosis
. Time Line applications


An NLP-therapist is a therapist using some of the procedures mentioned above.

NLP techniques offer some particularly useful help for business - change management, sales, leadership, dispute management, recruitment and consulting. If you don’t know NLP, you won’t notice when it’s being used, except when complete models are used "as is".

SOME SPECIFIC BUSINESS APPLICATIONS ARE:
· The LABprofile is a question sheet that helps to check for the meta-programs a person is using. It is very useful for recruitment, promotion selection, team building and motivation. Chelle Rose Charvet organises LAB Profile training. Her book on the subject is "Words that change Minds"


· The Belief Assessment Sheet from Robert Dilts.
The sheet is used for checking the week point in the beliefs after a decision is made to reach a goal. It checks the ’want to’, ’how to’ and ’chance to’. The ’want to/how to/chance to’ model itself was created by Joe Yeager.


· For enhancing creativity, Robert Dilts created the Disney Model, and has a video training out called ’strategies of Genius’.


In Learning, you can work on the structure of the 'know nothing' state.

WHAT DOES THE NAME MEAN?
Neuro - brain and nervous system
Linguistic - language skills
Programming - the automatic programs and unconscious habits we run on.
NLP is the study of the three, their interconnection, what that means and what we can do with it.

WHERE DOES NLP COME FROM?
John Grinder, a Professor and Richard Bandler, a graduate student of computer programming and psychology both at the University of Santa Cruise, developed NLP in the mid-70s. Much of early NLP was based on the work of Virginia Satir, a family therapist; Fritz Perls, founder of Gestalt therapy; Gregory Bateson, anthropologist; and Milton Erickson, a psychiatrist hypnotist.
NLP is not about proof, it’s about results. It is totally pragmatic: if a tool works, it’s included in the model, even if there’s no theory to back it up. None of the current NLP developers have done research to "prove" their models correct. The party line is "pretend it works, try it, and notice the results you get. If you don’t get the result you want, try something else."

WHAT ARE THE ROOTS OF NLP?
Richard Bandler doing Gestalt workshops started NLP and John Grinder soon joined him. The group included Judith Delosier. Lesly Cameron, and Robert Dilts. Some of the other early people, pre 1985, are David Gordon, Steve & Connirea Andreas, Stephen Gilligan, Anthony Robbins and Chris Hall - to name a few.

Most everything in NLP came from somewhere else. Tad James has made a list. Here are some of them:
· Anchoring -- Behavioural Psychology -- Pavlov, "Conditioned Reflexes", 1904
· Chunking -- Alfred Korzybski, Erickson, Watzlawick -- General Semantics
· Eye patterns - Stanford University, research on synesthesia in the early 70’s.
· Milton Model -- Milton Erickson, "The Advanced Patterns of MH Erickson, MD", by Jay Haley.
· Meta Model -- Noam Chomsky (applied in therapy: Virginia Satir, "Conjoint Family Therapy")
· Outcome Frames -- Virginia Satir
· Parts -- Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir
· Reframing -- General Semantics, Watzlawick, Keeney,
· Sleight of Mouth -- Patterns of Plausible Inference, G. Polya
· SubModalities -- Work on Synesthesia at Stanford University 1970-1978 suggested this.
· Strategies, TOTE -- Miller, Galanter & Pribram, "Plans and the Structure of Behaviour," 1965
Time Lines -- William James, Principles of Psychology, 1890, the Chapter on Memory.

FILTERS
We all have filters that block out 90% of what is going on around us. We have maps of the territory and often assume our maps represent the territory - in other words, our experience is objective, true, real and valid. No one’s map can possible represent the territory because we interpret everything as we go along according to our unique experience and understanding. Our unique experience and understanding is unique to us, and depends on what we’ve been focusing on and what we interpreted things to mean in the past. We make our maps of the world and then assume this is objective reality or facts.


Step one is to get past this block. NLP refers to blocks as filters, and calls these filters ’behavioural frames’. The first behavioural frame is an orientation towards outcomes rather than problems. Problem frames focus on what is wrong and how to correct wrongs. Outcome frames focus on the desired result or outcome wanted and how best can this be achieved.


The second behavioural frame is asking how questions rather than why questions. How questions give you an understanding of the structure of the ’problem’ and the deeper motivations and thought processes that keep it in place. Why questions will only provide you with streams of justifications and reasons that make the problem seem even worse, or difficult to correct. So, when someone presents their problem to you, you say, "How do you do that?" in other words, how do you succeed at having that problem.


The third frame is feedback instead of failure. There is no such thing as failure, only results or feedback. Look at everything that happens as useful information. You use the feedback to evaluate whether the result (outcome) you wanted is the result (outcome) you got. If not, try something else. All feedback is useful information.

The fourth frame is possibilities instead of necessities. With this shift of focus, you believe that anything is possible and nothing is necessary. This opens up a wide scope for investigation and growth. Believing something is necessary or impossible, removes our creative thinking and freedom.


The fifth frame adopts the attitude of curiosity and fascination in place of making assumptions and clinging to facts. The curiosity and fascination of Albert Einstein, who disregarded what was ’fact’, ’definite’ or ’possible’ and entertained the idea of what if……? And in so doing, changed the scientific world and reframed reality.

Behaviour is only a learned response and has nothing to do with who or what we are, or our ability. It has everything to do with influences, training, conditioning, installed beliefs and assumptions. Behaviour is often taken as evidence of capability or identity. We as humans have a fantastic capacity to learn and achieve. What we actually do achieve and accomplish is limited only by our beliefs and values.


Then you need to gather information. Every behaviour is useful in some context. Find out how any unwanted behaviour is useful. Then the behaviour is freed up and can easily be changed. Less obvious are the underlying reasons for the problem that make it ’necessary’. What does the person have to keep doing to maintain the problem? In NLP, problems are often viewed as skills.