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John Grinder and Richard Bandler, who invented it, call NLP the study of subjective experience. The letters stand for neuro-linguistic programming. I think of it as influencing people's imaginations through language to help them change anything about themselves in an instant.
Back in the 70's NLP started as a meta-model, or a model for making and changing other models. The NLP meta-model focuses on verbal models, and how language both shapes and reflects human thought. The two explained their meta model in The Structure of Magic. They first used the meta-model to find how highly successful therapists like Milton Erickson and Virginia Satir managed to help so many people. They wanted to know:
Bandler and Grinder wanted to package this knowledge so that anyone could use it to produce the same results - influence human behavior, induce trances, and change their own lives. These studies produced a slew of distinctions and techniques such as pacing and leading, slight-of-mouth patterns, anchors, rep systems, and the Milton model (all of which I will cover in future articles). Throughout it all, the NLP attitude has said that if one person can get a result, so can anyone else - if they have a detailed enough model of what the first person's strategy.
NLP took a quantum leap with the discovery of submodalities. Human experience comes in at least five modalities: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory, and gustatory. These correspond to the five senses: sight, hearing, feeling, smell, and taste. But within each modality is a wide range of experience. Noises can sound loud, soft, high-pitched, or low-pitched. Qualities such as these correspond to adjectives in language: "I heard a loud sound to my left."
Bandler, Grinder, and their students found that submodalities controlled a great deal of our behavior. Consider: if you can remember what you had for breakfast yesterday, and you can imagine what you might have for breakfast tomorrow, how can your brain tell these two apart? How do you tell the future from the past, things you like from things you don't, things you believe in from things you feel uncertain about?
Obviously, these pairs of thoughts have contrasts, qualities that differ between them. Suppose that by applying meta- model questions, you found that you imagine your beliefs off to your left, and uncertainties to your right. What would happen if you imagined something you believed and something you felt uncertain about and then switched their positions? It turned out that most people would feel less certain about their old belief, and more certain whatever they had been uncertain about.
About that time, a kid named Tony Robbins, who studied under Bandler and Grinder, decided to demonstrate to the world how this simple but powerful information could change anyone's life. Robbins started as a janitor in a cramped little apartment, and within a few short years made millions of dollars, bought his own castle, and taught thousands of people about NLP.
NLP changes people's lives - for better or worse. Whatever your lifestyle, you have created it through a lifetime of beliefs, attitude, and actions. Because NLP focuses on just these topics, everyone uses its techniques and patterns every single day. When we learn to use NLP consciously, we give ourselves the power to create new lives for ourselves, and get any outcome we desire.
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