What is NLP?

Have you ever seen someone do something really well? It might be a mother calming a child, a teacher igniting enthusiasm in a class, or the way a friend, by use of skilful questions and language helped you at a bad time for you, making you feel so much better. How did they do that? NLP is about just that, how you can understand and model excellence.

There are many explanations for what NLP is; each sheds a light on its many facets.

NLP studies brilliance and quality, how outstanding individuals and organisations get there results. In studying the strategies used to produce change and results NLP endeavours to make this available to learn by others, in manageable steps, so that the same class of results are obtainable. This process, which is at the heart of NLP, is called modelling.

To have a chance of replicating others’ outstanding results, NLP points to means by which we model not only external behaviour, but also what is happening on the inside.

To model someone else, we not only need to know about their behaviour, but also their thoughts, beliefs and internal dialogue with themselves.

That awful title.

The rather forbidding title Neuro-Linguistic-Programming comes from three areas that it brings together.

Pattering might be a better word. In other words, the order and sequence of internal representations that leads to a particular behaviour, good or bad.

Key Components

NLP is based around a number of key components. Starting with you, it aims to put you and your state at the centre of things. NLP can be used as a tool well or badly and it depends on your degree of congruence and skill. It’s based on a set of principles, ideas and beliefs, or presuppositions.

It relies on you having rapport with yourself and others which can be built on and may evolve, over time, into trust.

A basic skill in NLP is knowing your outcome: what you want, and being able to elicit from others what they really want. So you, or they, know where you are now, where you want to be, and how and what resources you will need to get there.

If you know at any time what your outcome is, in other words what you want from any situation, then another skill you need is sensory awareness. This is the ability by looking, listening and feeling to know what you are getting from others or yourself in the way of feedback. This high quality information from your senses lets you know what you are getting from the world.

Finally the more flexibility you have in emotional states, communication styles and perspective, the better your results are likely to be.

NLP is designed to bring about self-development and change. It’s not something to do to other people, but rather a method of understanding and helping ourselves to grow and expand to become the person we really want and can be. To the extent we can do this, with ourselves, we may be able to use our insights to help and influence others.

Roots of NLP

The brain-child of Richard Bandler & John Grinder, NLP has roots in many streams of psychology, as well as systems theory and linguistics.

The people most influential in Bandler & Grinder’s development of NLP were Gregory Bateson, an American based British anthropologist, Frederick ‘Fritz’ Pearls, the founder of Gestalt Therapy, Milton Eriksson, perhaps the most famous medical hypnotherapist and Virginia Satir, an outstanding family therapist. These four world-renowned anthropologists, doctors, psychiatrists and psychotherapists were noted for their skills in producing profound and beneficial change with others.

Since its creation in the 1970s, NLP has grown and evolved and been used with great success in a wide variety of fields such as education, business, psychotherapy, coaching, law and medicine. Literally hundreds of books have been published on the subject and trainings can be undertaken all round the world. Joseph O’Connor, one of the most gifted and prolific writers of NLP, ( see for example: The NLP Workbook: The Practical Guide to Achieving the Results You Want. 2001) gives us an idea of the field by giving us several different definitions.

• NLP is a study of the structure of subjective experience.


• NLP is an accelerated learning strategy for the detection and utilisation of patterns in the world (John Grinder).


• NLP is the epistemology of returning to what we have lost a state of grace (John Grinder).


• NLP is whatever works (Robert Dilts).


• NLP is an attitude and a methodology, which leaves behind a trail of techniques (Richard Bandler).


• NLP is the influence of language on our mind and subsequent behaviour.


• NLP is the systemic study of human communication (Alex von Uhde).


• NLP is the method for modelling excellence, so it can be duplicated.

In conclusion, O’Connor tells us a nice story which sums up what NLP might be:

A wise man rode into a desert village one evening as the sun was setting. Dismounting from his camel, he asked one of the villagers for a drink of water.

"Of course", said the villager, and gave him a cup of water. The traveller drank the whole cupful.

"Thank you", he said, "Can I help you at all before I travel on?"

"Yes", said the young man. We have a dispute in our family. I am the youngest of three brothers. Our father died recently, God rest his soul, and all he possessed was a small herd of camels, seventeen, to be exact. He decreed in his will that one half of the herd was to go to my eldest brother, one third to the middle brother and one-ninth to me, but how can we divide a herd of seventeen? We do not want to chop up any camels; they’re worth far more alive.

"Take me to your house", said the sage. When he entered the house he saw the other two brothers and the man’s widow sitting around the fire arguing. The youngest son introduced the traveller.

"Wait", said the wise man, "I think I can help you. Here, I give you my camel as a gift. Now you have eighteen camels. One half goes to the eldest, that’s nine camels. One third goes to the middle son, that’s 6 camels. And one-ninth goes to my friend here, the youngest son. That’s two."

"That’s only seventeen all together", said the youngest son.

"Yes. By a happy coincidence, the camel left over is the one I gave you. If you could possibly give it back to me, I will continue on my journey."

And he did.

As O’Connor says, how is NLP like the eighteenth camel? It could be that it’s brought into the situation by a wise man, solves the problem quickly and then disappears as if it had never been there.