I’ve had a lot of emails over time regarding which is the best book to read to start learning about NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming). For those of you that haven’t emailed, me, have you ever wanted to:
- Communicate with others more effectively?
- Be more persuasive?
- Overcome challenges at work and at home?
- Increase your confidence?
- Get rid of obsessions, compulsions or phobias?
- Break bad habits?
Well all of these are caused in part by how we experience the world, and NLP offers amazing insights in to those perceptions that open up fascinating doors in to how we work, and how we can change. So if any of the above are of interest to you, it is probably worth asking me what the best way to learn a little more about how you can change for the better, isn’t it?
Tough question to answer. Still, just for you I’m going to answer it.
Bear in mind, I’m no expert. And so the books I’m going to recommend are those that I think are the easiest to get in to. I would like to point out though that the best way to introduce yourself to NLP is to do it. Find yourself an introductory course and attend. NLP is at its core about how we experience the world, and the easiest way to learn it is to experience that experiencing, if you know what I mean. You should be able to get a mind-blowing experience from a decent 1 day course, such as Salad’s NLP in a Nutshell, so you don’t need to splash out two grand to decide whether it is for you.
And so on to the books.
Introducing NLP - Joseph O’Connor
Joseph O’Connor’s books are easy to read, well explained, and concise. He covers the main points in a highly readable fashion, and this is a book I still refer to.
Neuro-Linguistic Programming for Dummies - Romilla Ready and Kate Burton
Yes I know that the dummies books have a certain connotation and this book really is an excellent introduction to NLP. It includes a lot of examples of the concepts in application which is handy if you are completely new to many of the presuppositions of NLP.
NLP At Work - Sue Knight
Sue Knight’s book is an engaging and enjoyable read, and demonstrates how useful NLP can be in your job, and we all want to do our job a little better and easier, don’t we all?
None of these are the “classic” texts, those are mostly transcripts of lectures and whilst fascinating and rich texts, they aren’t structured or sorted in a way that makes learning easy. You should be able to pick up any of them for under a tenner on Amazon marketplace. So I suggest trying out one of the above books before moving on. I’ll talk about some of the classic texts in a subsequent post.
