What is NLP?
Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), at its heart is about understanding how we experience. That is, how our minds deal with information that we receive.
You see, we don’t perceive reality directly, our perception of reality runs through many filters and sorting algorithms before it reaches our conscious minds or even our memories.
Aspects such as our beliefs, our current mood and our experience and knowledge all act upon raw data to make sense of it.
Understanding how people make sense of information frees us to do many things such as:
- Communicate more effectively
- Change the meaning of painful or unhelpful experiences
- Delete or change obsessions, compulsions and phobias
And so NLP is in essence a belief about how we experience reality, combined with a set of tools and techniques that leverage on that belief to help people make new choices.
So what does this mean to me? Well as an NLP practitioner I am still learning many things about the subject and to date these have manifested in many ways, some of which are exampled here:
- My “inner critic” voice has long since gone quiet, freeing me to make changes and do new things that I was always too self-critical to even do
- I’ve helped people quit smoking without patches or drugs, in only a couple of hours
- “Cured” phobias such as fear of public speaking, using the telephone, and spiders (urgh!)
- Helped people “discover” confidence that they didn’t think that they had
- Helped people to overcome painful memories such that they can now think about them without getting upset
- Coached a director to change his use of language so he can communicate the same things without seeming to be a dictator
- Helped a guy turn paralysing fear in to boundless enthusiasm
NLP is a term coined by “originators” Richard Bandler and John Grinder in the 70s. It builds upon the work of many psychologists and packages it with a set of presuppositions that form the basis for the beliefs that enables all of the tools to function. If you are interested in the history I recommend the pages on wikipedia. If you are interested in reading more about the presuppositions and techniques, then head over to this page for more info.
This is an explanation of what NLP means to me. There’s no right answer, this is just my experience. I hope that you find it useful.
