WHAT IS NLP ALL ABOUT?

 

There are lots and lots of pieces of NLP.  When you speak about NLP, you
could be speaking about one of two dozen things.  Some years ago a young man
told me, "I can't do NLP on myself."  To that statement, you could go in one
of dozens and dozens of directions.  So I asked,, "What part of NLP can you
not apply to yourself?"  It turned out to be matching a client, but not
merely any client, only those of a particular ethnic group.

 

Speak about NLP and you might be speaking about representation systems,
language, sensory awareness, sensory acuity, matching, mirroring, pacing,
anchoring, collapsing anchors, transderivational search, the Meta-Model, any
one of the linguistic distinctions, sub-modalities in any one of the VAK
systems, synesthesias, meta-programs, time-lines, modeling, strategies, and
on and on and on.

 

The bottom line-there are a lot of pieces or components that go into what we
call NLP.  Now the question of the title, "What is NLP all about?" is asking
for how do you tie all of them together?  Yet over the years, there's been
numerous answers:

Communication, linguistics, change, therapy, personal development,
psychology, hypnosis, modeling, new age, learning, etc.

 

Amazingly, whatever a person concludes "What it is all about" that then
becomes that person's definition of NLP.  It operates as his overall
classification.  Even the first NLP book's subtitle contribute to the
confusion, "A book about language and therapy." And even today, you will
find different trainers emphasizing these different aspects of NLP which
leads to the controversy over What is it really?

 

True enough, NLP arose from the field of therapy.  It emerged from studying
the language patterns of the therapeutic communications of Perls and Satir.
Yet NLP was never thought of or confused with, Gestalt Therapy or Family
Systems Therapy.  NLP also was built from many of the concepts in Cognitive
Psychology (Transformation Grammar, the TOTE model) and from Korzybski's
General Semantics, yet it is not and has never been confused with either of
these.

 

Now over the past 50 years, probably 90 percent of the field has come to
think of NLP as primarily a Communication Model.  This is the consistent
theme that you will find in books, manuals, videos, podcasts, etc.
Accordingly, all of the above components of NLP are positioned as an aspect
of communication, and they are or at least they can legitimately be framed
in that way.

 

In revising and updating the NLP practitioner course, I began seeing it in
terms of something more fundamental, namely, as a model of thinking and of
the mind.  After all, what was the most unique discovery of the founders?
It was that people think in five modes-they think visually as they make
pictures, they think auditorially as they hear sounds, they think
kinesthetically as they feel sensations, they also think in terms of smells
and tastes, and then they think linguistically as by using words for
thinking (the meta-representation system).

 

Now other psychologists had mentioned and used the sensory systems going all
the way back to Tichner, but no one had ever proposed that thinking goes to
how we represent the senses.  That put the power of communicating, changing,
therapy, creativity, etc. back to a much simpler mechanism, a mechanism
every person has access to.

 

The result?  For one thing it cut out thousands of years of trying to guess
what mind, consciousness, and personality is comprised of.  As Bateson noted
in his Introduction:

"Psychologists accepted all sorts of internal explanatory entities (ego,
anxiety, aggression, instinct, conflict, etc.) in a way reminiscent of
medieval psycho-theology. ... Psychiatrists dabbled in all these methods of
exlanation ... they created statistical samples of morbidity.  They wallowed
in internal and mythical entities, ids and archetypes." (The Structure of
Magic, p. ix)

 

The phenomena of re-presenting to ourselves in our minds what we see, hear,
feel, smell and taste on the outside and then code it in words as we
classify things, allowed NLP to create a model of the mind which opened up
the fields of change, communication, therapy, linguistics, etc.  Yet what
the founders failed to recognize, which was much more significant, was the
model of the mind or of thinking which they had discovered.

 

Today we know a lot about the brain and simultaneous we still know very
little about the mind.  But we know this-the mind thinks.  That's what it
does.  It represents, it edits, it perceives, it attends, it languages, it
draws conclusions, it values, it remembers, it imagines, it intends, and on
and on.  And in my opinion-that's what NLP is truly all about.  And when you
know that- it opens up everything else which the mind creates in human
experience-which is the whole world.  Additionally and most importantly, the
quality of your thinking is the quality of your life.

 

 

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