Neuro-linguistic Programming is a commonsense system of everyday psychology that has enhanced the lives of millions of people around the world.

It has been described as the ‘manual for the brain’ that can liberate you from negative thoughts and associated patterns of restricted behaviour.  It helps you to cultivate new and enabling beliefs about yourself and the world in which you live.  It also helps you to gain freedom from the past as well as to reshape other key areas of your life including personal relationships, career development and public speaking.

Neuro refers to your neurological system; the way you use your sense of sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell to translate your experience of your environment into thought processes, both conscious and subconscious.  It relates to your physiology as well as your mind and examines how the two function as one system.  Much of NLP is about increasing your awareness of your neurological system and learning to manage it more effectively.

Linguistic refers to the way you use language to make sense of your experience and how you communicate that experience to yourself and others.  Your particular language patterns are a reflection of how you see yourself, life’s experiences, others with whom you interact and the world around you.

Programming is the way you code your experience.  A programme is a series of steps designed to achieve a specific result.  The results you achieve in life and the impact you have on those around you, are the consequences of your personal programmes.  There is a sequence to your thought patterns that results in your particular pattern of behaviours.  Through an understanding of these sequences you can learn to code (and re-code) the structure of your own and other people’s experiences.

Neuro - the mind and how we think.
Linguistic - how we use language and how it affects us.
Programming - how we sequence our actions to achieve our outcomes.


NLP’s Origins

NLP has its origins in the 1970’s through the collaboration of John Grinder; assistant professor of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Richard Bandler who was a student of psychology at the same university.

Together they studied and modelled three therapists who had a reputation for assisting their clients to achieve effective change in various areas of their lives.

Fritz Perls - an innovative psychotherapist and the originator of the Gestalt school of therapy.

Virginia Satir - a family therapist who was consistently able to resolve difficult family relationships that other therapists found intractable.

Milton Erickson - a medic, psychiatrist and an innovator who brought hypnosis back from the stage into his therapy practice.

In addition, the works of the following have contributed to the development of NLP.

Gregory Bateson; a British anthropologist and writer on communication and systems theory who headed up important research the work of Milton Erickson, linguistic double binds, schizophrenia and levels of change.

Korzybski; who developed a model illustrating the ‘logical levels of abstraction’.  He also noted the effect of a culture’s language on the nervous system.