Neuro-Linguistic Programming

Neuro-Linguistic Programming deals with showing how we structure our subjective experience—how we organise what we see, hear and feel, and how we edit and filter the outside world through our senses. Being aware of our subjective proclivities of reasoning and representation can lead to our rising above them as well as expanding them, and in turn helping others, in our case the learner, in achieving the same.

NLP was developed in the 1970’s jointly by Richard Bandler, a mathematician and a graduate student of psychology, and John Grinder, a linguist, originating in their attempt to model excellent communication by investigating the communicative behaviour of reputed communicators in the field of psychotherapy. The latter included names such as Fritz Perls, the innovative psychotherapist and originator of the Gestalt school of therapy, Virginia Satir, one of the key figures in the development of family therapy, and Milton Erickson, a psychiatrist who specialised in medical hypnosis. Bandler & Grinder initially explored in these excellent communicators their patterns of language and behaviour, their thinking processes and their core beliefs.

All three of them had different personalities but Bandler & Grinder found that they all followed similar patterns in relating to their clients, in the language they used, and in the beliefs they held about themselves and what they were doing (Revell & Norman 1999). Bandler & Grinder’s aim was to produce a model of successful therapy that worked in practice,and could be learned. The underlying assumption of their research was that all human beings have the same neurology and, therefore, the behaviour of effective communicators can be modelled, learned and taught.