What is Neurolinguistic Programming?

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The study of the structure of subjective experience

Within subjective experience each of us creates our own ideas, images, soundscapes, views  and beliefs about the world, based on how we interpret the information we receive via our senses. What we see, what we hear, what we sense and feel, as well as what we smell, taste and touch. 

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We create our own world from the experiences we have and our interpretation of those experiences. This receiving and interpreting of information can be defined as neurological. By applying language to our experience we linguistically define our own unique perspective. Programming refers to the patterns and structure of how we interpret and express our experience.

 

How did Neurolinguistic Programming develop?

Neurolinguistic programming (NLP) was developed mainly by Richard Bandler and John Grinder in the early 1970s. Bandler was a statistician and Grinder a linguist. Together, they studied how successful psychotherapists work effectively with people, analysing examples of excellence in the field for which there were consistently positive results for the people who needed help. The approach is the study of excellence in how people can gain clarity for themselves about who they are, what they are doing, and what their life can come to mean. 

 

To find out what people were doing and how each managed to achieve excellent results, Bandler and Grinder listened to what people said, how they said it, what they believed, and what happened as a consequence. In this way, the pair were able to create models of how those psychotherapists worked and codified elements of what those people did well – whether or not they were conscious of what they were doing. 

 

What does Neurolinguistic Programming mean to me?

NLP is an ongoing open enquiry into what it means to be me. What am I capable of? What do I do well? What would I like to improve on? How can I change? What do I want to change? What do I not want to change? A therapeutic self-referential process for determining how I act, noticing what I do, what works for me, what holds me back, what I need to learn to move forward, and how I can be honest with myself and others. 

 

As an NLP practitioner, neurolinguistic programming for me is more than a framework. It is an expression of truth I can follow, I can move in, be part of and be held by – a way of looking at the world with an understanding of some of the universal truths about who we are. To understand what it means to be human and what is possible within that. There are many ways of thinking about who we are and what we do that are covered by NLP. Like a cap, NLP has me covered for what life is like! 

 

How does Neurolinguistic Programming work?

NLP works through individual neurolinguistic programming courses during which I listen keenly to the structure of what a client says. Whether this relates to a challenge, an opportunity, a desire or a problem, whatever is being explored in the conversation, the way in which the client uses language and the patterns of use of language are challenged and clarified. 

 

Universal human possibilities of how we think about time, space and beliefs, who we are and what our purpose is – by listening to structures of experience expressed verbally, neurolinguistic programming techniques offer the means to recalibrate the relationship between the way we have come to define ourselves and our real life experience. NLP can highlight new possibilities for what we experience and who we are, as well as reveal ways in which we can see ourselves moving forward. 

 

For me, one of the greatest benefits of neurolinguistic programming is that NLP techniques can help uncover the truth. Asking questions and listening to their answers can help facilitate change in our minds around beliefs we have that we might know not to be true, as well as help to demonstrate that something that happens in one context may not necessarily also happen in a different context.

 

To mark out generalisations, distortions and deletions in our language can help us to let go of misleading, unhelpful or false beliefs. NLP can help to redefine what we truly think, and so, who and what we actually are.

 

What can Neurolinguistic Programming do?

Neurolinguistic programming exercises can help change our relationship to the language we use, with ourselves and others, and encourage us to develop language and strategies for how we relate to ourselves and the world. Previously considered impossibilities become achievable for us and new possibilities arise.