What’s NLP?
Describing a chicken so that someone who has never seen one can understand what it looks, sounds and acts like can be a challenge. All the descriptions above are true, but none individually begins to give a sense of what a chicken really is.
NLP is equally as difficult. It has so many different facets that the best we can do at this stage is to give you a glimpse of it from some of the ways it has been defined or described over the years. Let’s consider some of them…
As you ‘walked around the chicken’ by reading the NLP descriptions above you will have started to get a sense of what NLP is all about.
It is our intention by the time you read each tab of this section, you have an good understanding of the basic NLP concept. You are also welcome to contact our customer service team at anytime.
The name ‘Neuro Linguistic Programming’ refers to the unconscious processes each person follows to produce behaviour - and therefore results. If you are not achieving results you want, change your thinking and your behaviour will change.
Neuro
Each component of the name is important. The word ‘neuro’ refers to the nervous system. Our direct experience of the world comes to the brain via the nervous system and the five senses. The senses are the means by which we interact with the world:
One of the first things the NLP is concerned with is how we process this sensory experience and translate it into conscious and unconscious thought.
Linguistic
The second word in Neuro Linguistic Programming refers to language. Specifically it means the way in which we use language to order and give meaning to what we have experienced through our senses.
Communication - both verbal and non-verbal types - is the medium by which you express the unconscious and conscious thoughts you have about yourself, other people and the world around you as a whole.
Programming
The third word in Neuro Linguistic Programming looks at the consistent ways in which we think or behave. Just like a computer, each of us runs specific programmes to produce our behaviour. Programmes consist of a series of steps that automatically produce certain results in different circumstances.
You can use NLP to find out what particular programmes you run and what results they produce. It also gives you the means to change your own and other people’s programmes to produce exactly the results you want.
Each individual has established their own unique mental filtering system for processing the millions of bits of data being absorbed through the senses. Our first mental map of the world is constituted of internal images, sounds, tactile awareness, internal sensations, tastes and smells that form as result of the neurological filtering process. The first mental map is called ‘First Access’ in NLP.
We then assign personal meaning to the information being received from the world outside. We form our second mental map by assigning language to the internal images, sounds and feelings, tastes and smells, thus forming everyday conscious awareness. The second mental map is called the Linguistic Map (sometimes known as Linguistic Representation).
The behavioural response that occurs as a result of neurological filtering processes and the subsequent linguistic map.
People are natural modellers. From the moment we were born we started to copy others, developing a multitude of skills and capabilities along the way.
Somehow we internalise the rules of grammar and syntax simply by listening to our parents and siblings talk. In the playground and at home we watched others and imitated their behaviours.
NLP modelling is more purposeful and structured than the natural modelling process we all take for granted, which can be haphazard, and as a result NLP modelling produces accurate and reliable results.
When you undertake NLP Practitioner training, you may find yourself following a student around for 20 minutes, trying to walk, and move like them. It’s a simple but effective way of learning the principles and methodology of modelling.
This is called implicit modelling, which involves acting like your model and building intuitions about their internal experience. It’s similar to the apprentice / master relationship in martial arts where the simple act of being with the master allows the apprentice to absorb what the master does.
But why not simply ask the person what they’re doing and why?
That may sometimes be useful, but one of the hurdles we have to overcome when modelling is that many people don’t know what makes them successful. Or they may think they know, but are wrong. Once we become accomplished at doing something, we no longer pay attention on how we do it, it becomes unconscious competence.
Below we summarise the modelling process, this will be explained in depth during our NLP Practitioner course.
Grinder and Bandler used the process of modelling to extract ‘patterns of excellence’ from the following exceptional therapists in the mid 1970s; all 3 therapists were respected worldwide for their genius.
Grinder and Bandler put their initial findings into 2 books following their modelling experience. They are entitled ‘Structure of Magic 1′ and ‘Structure of Magic 2′.
You can use NLP techniques in every area of your own life, you can use it to influence others and apply it in a business environment.
Because NLP is about modelling excellence, the ‘applications’ that were created (in NLP we sometimes call this ‘coded’) through Grinder and Bandler’s NLP modelling process can be used as tools in any situation that involves people. Therefore, the possibilities are truly endless.
Here are just a small selection of some NLP ‘applications’ or ‘tools’:
