Background to NLP

The various elements of NLP were developed around 25 years ago by Americans Richard Bandler and John Grinder.  They studied the work of three master practitioners of personal change in the areas of hypnotherapy, psychology and family therapy, trying to understand how they achieved their formidable results.

Fritz Perls championed Gestalt Therapy… At Gestalt Therapy's core is the promotion of awareness, the awareness of the unity of all present feelings and behaviours, and the contact between the self and its environment.

Virginia Satir focused on family therapy…. encouraging focus on families instead of individual patients. Another novel approach she developed was that "the presenting issue itself was seldom the real problem; rather, how people coped with the issue created the problem."  Satir also offered insights into the particular problems that low self-esteem could cause in relationships.

Milton Erickson often used unconventional approaches to psychotherapy. An extensive use of therapeutic metaphor and story as well as hypnosis and coining the term Brief Therapy for his approach of addressing therapeutic changes in relatively few sessions. He conceptualized the unconscious as highly separate from the conscious mind, with its own awareness, interests, responses, and learnings. For Erickson, the unconscious mind was creative, solution-generating, and often positive. He also had a famed ability to "utilize" anything about a patient to help them change, including their beliefs, favourite words, cultural background, personal history, or even their neurotic habits.

The result of Bandler and Grinder’s enquiries is a set of principles and techniques which help people change behaviours, take control of their emotional states and essentially achieve excellent results in every area of their lives.  These tools often produce transformations that seem to happen quite dramatically from the point of view of efficiency and effectiveness. You will often hear the watchwords ‘easily and effortlessly’ applied to NLP methods; their main interest was simply ’what works best’.

More about NLP

So what is NLP?  NLP stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming…

Neuro… the language of the mind, how the sensory information is processed…

Linguistic… verbal and non verbal communication systems, within ourselves and with others….

Programming… the ways we run, install and modify our mental programmes or internal strategies to achieve particular outcomes….

Many people suffer from debilitating held negative emotions, limiting beliefs, and inability to set goals.  NLP offers the highly effective and efficient Time Line therapy method for dealing with these situations, quickly getting to the root causes and ensuring easy resolution.  It is amazing to see how quickly people can gain release from issues that have dogged them for years. When one considers that persistent states of negative emotion such as anger, fear, anxiety and jealousy often lead to physical symptoms, some of which can be life threatening, it is wonderful that NLP offers such efficient methods to deal with these residual states.

Inner conflicts are often a source of  significant psychological and sometimes physiological stress….one part of ourselves wants one thing, but another part of ourselves seems hell bent on another path.  The tension caused can be very painful and quite debilitating.  A powerful NLP technique known as parts integration is designed to deal with these situations and the outcome of it is often most impressive, leading to rapid and lasting change. We can actually stop wearing ourselves out pulling in opposing directions!

Do you have unwanted habits or emotions?  I have witnessed some people lose their  desire for a particular kind of food in just ten minutes using a method called sub-modality change. Habits like nail biting can effectively be dealt a blow with another technique called the ‘Swish’ technique, or the Six Step Reframe, which, again works in minutes for most people and can also be very effective for eating issues and smoking.

Phobias are another realm where NLP can be most effective.  The ‘Fast Phobia Technique’ can be stunning in its effectiveness and the ease with which clients release the bonds to these kinds of limiting and frightening behaviours.

Many people suffer from an inability to ‘move on’ in their lives…steering an appropriate course can seem an impossibility.  NLP offers quality methods for setting goals that are in harmony with the client’s aims in life, as well as ways of  empowering their realisation in the future.

Often, what seems like a negative behaviour is actually being played out by the client with an underlying, often hidden, positive intention behind it.  NLP has a number of assumptions as it’s foundation.  One is that we always do the best we can with the resources we have available at the time. Also that any behaviour has an underlying positive intention.  Thus, in NLP, we work to uncover the positive intent of any seemingly negative behaviour pattern, and find alternative behaviours that will provide the client with new, positive ways to achieve the same outcome.

Another very efficient NLP method is the ‘meta-model’. It is used to aid a client in becoming clear about what they want, provide more choice and flexibility and untangle confusion.

Ever feared an interview or public speaking or being in particular ‘dreaded’ situations? Many  people are happy on some days but on other days are in less than resourceful states and don't seem to have any control over that. NLP can help with tools that enable a person to call upon any desired resourceful state, be in control of their emotions and thought processes at any time. So instead of being at the whim of whatever state you happen to be in at ‘that’ critical moment, you can use these methods to ensure you are in control and resourceful when you need to be.