NLP's history is the history of an unlikely society that created an unexpected synergy that resulted in a world of changes. At the beginning of years 70, the future co-founder of NLP, Richard Bandler, studied mathematics in University of California, in Santa Cruz. At the beginning, he passed most of his time studying computation. Inspired by a family friend that knew several of the innovative therapists at that time, he decided to attend psychology. After studying carefully some of the famous therapists, Richard discovered that repeating totally the personal patterns of their behavior he could get similar positive results with other people. This discovery became the basis of NLP’s well-known initial approach to Human Excellence Modeling. Afterwards, he found other co-founder of NLP, Dr. John Grinder, a linguistics adjunctive teacher. John Grinder's career was so singular as Richard’s. His ability to learn idioms quickly, to acquire accents and to assimilate behaviors had been refined in the Special Force of the American Army in the Europe of the 60’s and later when he was a member of the intelligence services operating in Europe. John's interest in psychology, aligned with the linguistics basic goal, reveal the hidden grammar of thought and action.

Discovering the likeness of their interests, they decided to combine their respective knowledge of computation and linguistics with the ability to copy non-verbal behaviors, with the intention of developing one "change language".

At the beginning, in nights of Tuesday, Richard Bandler drove a therapy Gestalt group constituted of students and members of the local community. He used as a model his iconoclast founder, the German psychiatrist Fritz Perls. To imitate Dr. Perls, Richard ended up to let grow the beard, smoke a cigarette behind the other and to talk English with German accent. In Thursday nights, Grinder drove another group using the verbal and non-verbal models of Dr. Perls he had seen and heard Richard use on Tuesday. Systematically, they started to omit what they found to be irrelevant behaviors (the German accent, the habit of smoking) until they discover the essence of the techniques of Perls - what made Perls different of other less effective therapists. They had begun the Modeling of Human Excellence discipline.

Encouraged by their successes, they proceeded studying one of the family therapy big founders, Virginia Satir, and the systems innovative philosopher and thinker, Gregory Bateson. Richard gathered his original verifications in his master thesis, later published as the first volume of The Structure of Magic. Bandler and Grinder had become a team, and their researches continued to be done with determination.

What differentiated them from many schools of alternative psychological thinking, more and more numerous in California at that time, was the search for the change essence. When Bandler and Grinder started to study people with varied difficulties, they noted that every person that suffered of phobias thought in the object of their fear as if they had been passing through that experience at the present moment. When they studied people that had already freed themselves of phobias, they saw that all of them now thought of this fear experience as if they had happen with another person, in a way similar to observe a amusement park at distance. With this simple but profound discovery, Bandler and Grinder decided to teach systematically phobic people to try their fears as if they were observing their phobias happen with another person at distance. The phobic sensations disappeared instantly. A fundamental discovery of NLP had been made. The way people think about a thing does an enormous difference in the way they experience it.

When seeking the change essence in the best masters they could find, Bandler and Grinder questioned what to change first, what was more important to change, and where it would be more important to start. Due to their ability and increasing reputation, they managed quickly to be introduced to some of the greater human excellence examples in the world, including Dr. Milton H. Erickson, M.D., founder of Clinical Hypnosis American Society, and widely recognized as the world most notable hypnotist.

Dr. Erickson was a person as eccentric as Bandler and Grinder. Young and robust farmer of Wisconsin, in decade of 1920, he was attacked by poliomyelitis at the age of eighteen. Unable of breathing alone, he passed more than one year lain inside a steel lung in the kitchen of his house. Though for any another person it could have meant a prison sentence, Erickson was fascinated by the human behavior and distracted himself observing as the family and the friends reacted to each other, conscious and unconsciously. He built comments that would provoke immediate or delayed answers in the people around him, all the time improving his observation and language capacity.

Recovering enough to get out of the steel lung, he learned again how to walk by himself, observing his little sister give her first steps. Though he stayed needing crutches, he took part of a canoeing race before leaving to faculty, where he finished graduating in medicine and then in psychology. His experiences and previous personal probations made him very sensitive to subtle influence of language and behavior. Still studying medicine, he started to be very interested in hypnosis, going beyond the simple pendulum observation and of the sleepiness monotonous suggestions. He noted that his patients, when reminding some thoughts or sensations, entered naturally in a brief state similar to a trance and that these thoughts and sensations could be used to induce hypnotic state. Older, he became well known as the indirect hypnosis master, a man that could induce a profound trance just counting histories.

In decade of 1970, Dr. Erickson was already very well known among medicine professionals and was even subject of several books, but few of his students succeeded to reproduce his work or to repeat his results. Dr. Erickson was frequently called "wounded healer", since a lot of his colleagues thought that their personal sufferings were responsible for he had become a skilful and famous therapist worldwide.

When Richard Bandler called asking for an interview, it happened that Dr. Erickson answered personally the phone. Although Gregory Bateson had recommended Bandler and Grinder, Erickson answered that he was a very busy man. Bandler reacted saying, "Some people, Dr. Erickson, know how to find time", emphasizing well "Dr. Erickson" and both last words. The answer was, "Come when you want", emphasizing also both lasts words especially. Yet, to the eyes of Dr. Erickson, the lack of a psychology diploma had been a disadvantage for Bandler and Grinder, the fact of these two young men perhaps were able to discover what so many others hadn't realized let him bestirred. After all, one of them had talked to him using one of his own discoveries of hypnosis, today well known as a built-in language command. When emphasizing the words "Dr. Erickson, find time", he had made a sentence separated within another that has had the effect of a hypnotic command.

Bandler and Grinder arrived to Dr. Erickson’s consultation room/house in Phoenix, in Arizona, to apply their technical of modeling, recently developed, to the talented hypnotist work. The combination of the legendary techniques of Dr. Erickson and the modeling techniques of Bandler and Grinder supplied the base for a new therapeutic techniques explosion. Their work with Dr. Erickson confirmed that they had found a form of comprehending and to reproduce the human excellence.

At this time, the faculty groups and the nighttime groups driven for Grinder and Bandler were attracting an increasing number of students anxious to learn this new technology of change. In the next years, several of them, including Leslie Cameron-Bandler, Judith DeLozier, Robert Dilts and David Gordon would give their own important contributions. Vocally, this new approach of communication and change started to be spread for the whole country. Steve Andreas, at that time a well-known therapist of Gestalt, let aside what he was doing to study it. Quickly, he decided that NLP was a so important novelty that, with his wife and partner, Connirae Andreas, recorded Bandler and Grinder’s seminars and transcribed them in several books. The first, Frogs Into Princes, would become the first best seller about NLP. In 1979, a widespread article about NLP was published in the magazine Psychology Today, entitled "People Who Read People". NLP spread quickly.

Today, NLP is the essence of many approaches to communication and to change. Popularized by Anthony Robbins, John Bradshaw and others, NLP's particles were inserted in sales training, seminars about communication, classrooms and conversations. When someone talks of Human Excellence Modeling, stay in form, create rapport, create an attractive future or how "visual" someone is, it is using NLP's concepts. We are enchanted that NLP is finally becoming better known. The fact is just that a little of knowledge can be dangerous or can mean nothing. Know about Human Excellence Modeling is very different from being able to do that. Know a little bit of NLP is different of having the chance to make it yours. That’s why we wrote this book.

What is NLP

"'Neuro' (from Greek neuron for nerve) represents the fundamental principle that all behavior is the result of neurological processes. 'Linguistics' (from Latin lingua that means language) indicates that neural processes are represented, organized and sequenced in models and strategies through the communication language and systems. ''Programming' refers to the process of organizing the components of a system (sensory representations in this case) to achieve specific results". (Dilts, Grinder, Bandler and DeLozier, Neuro-linguistic Programming, Volume I).

"NLP is an educational tool, not a therapy form. We teach people some things on how their brains work and they use this information to change." (Richard Bandler)

"NLP is practical. It is a set of models, abilities and techniques that allow us to think and to act with more efficiency in the world. NLP's goal is to be useful, to offer more options of choice and to improve life quality. The most important questions of this book are: 'Is it useful? Does it give results?'. Discover what is useful and what works through experience. And, what it is more important, discover what doesn't work and modify it until it gives results. This is NLP's spirit." (O'Connor and Seymour, Introduction to NLP).

"Neuro-linguistic is the art and the science of excellence, that is, of personal qualities. It is art because each person prints his personality and his style to what he does, something that can never be apprehended through words and technical. And it is science because it uses a method and a process to determine the patterns that people use to obtain exceptional results therein what they do. This process is called modeling, and the standards, abilities and techniques discovered through it are being more and more used in therapy, in education and professional field, to create a more effective communication level, a better personal development and a faster learning.

Have you already done something with such efficiency to the point of being impressed? Have it happened already to you to be admired with what you did and keep thinking about how you got that? Neuro-linguistic Programming teaches us to understand and to model our successes, so we can repeat them." (idem)

"Neuro-linguistic Programming is the discipline whose domain is the structure of subjective experience. It doesn't have commitment with theory, but on the other side it has the characteristics of a model – a procedure set whose utility, and not veracity, is the measure of its value. NLP introduces specific tools that can be applied effectively in any human interaction. It offers specific techniques by means of which a practitioner can organize and reorganize in a useful form his experience or the experience of other person to define and subsequently assure any behavioral result". (Dilts, Grinder, Bandler and DeLozier, Neuro-linguistic Programming, Volume I).

Results already obtained with NLP

NLP's countless models developed until this moment allowed, among others results:

1. Phobia fast cure (up to 10 minutes).

2. Vices and bad habits fast cure, like smoking and gnawing nails.

3. Strategies and people's capacities modeling and teaching, including:

- Decision

- Learning

- Reading

- Memorization

- Motivation

- Sales

- Empathy establishment with people

Robert Dilts has modeled the creativity strategies of great geniuses like Einstein, Mozart, Leonardo da Vinci, Nikola Tesla, Walt Disney and even Sherlock Holmes, publishing them in the three volumes of Genius Strategies. Using NLP techniques. You can also model strategies of somebody you know.

4. Conflicts resolution.

5. Intense trauma cure, like of rape.

6. Allergy cure without medications.

7. Cancer cure (told by Robert Dilts in the book Beliefs).

8. Change of limiting beliefs and convictions.

9. Improvement of objective definition strategies and increase of the flexibility to reach them.

10. Improvement of the use of language in communication and information representation.

11. Hypnosis standardization for practical use, focused in results.

Your first experiences with NLP

To have a little "proof", an initial taste of NLP, you can do what is described below.

Think in a pleasing experience as if it had been a film. Perhaps you’ll want to close your eyes to do it better. You see yourself there in the scenes, the experience happens almost as if it had been with other person. Now enter in the film. See what you were seeing, hear what you were hearing, feel it as happening now. Any difference?

Open your eyes and look around to erase your mental screen. Now think of an insect, as a spider or an ant. Increase its size, put real colors in this imagination. Increase even more the size. Any difference? Now say to himself: "That’s an illusion". Does anything change? Make the insect get back to normal and remove or simply erase it.

You had the opportunity of entering in touch with some of your internal processes. These processes are related to senses: see, hear, feel and talking to ourselves (internal dialog). When visualizing internally, we can be remembering or constructing images, the same occurring with the sounds. One of the more used resources in NLP is the relation discovered between internal processes of a person and the eye movement or scanning. The external indication of what we are doing is the eyes position. Typically, when constructing images, we move eyes up and right. When captivating a sensation, we typically look downwards, to the right. See in the illustration the corresponding eye position of each kind of access. These positions correspond to the patterns of up to 90% of people, and in the others they appear inverted laterally.

(from Encyclopedia of Systemic NLP and NLP New Coding – see link below)

To verify these patterns, ask for someone to answer the questions below and observe his eyes.

Visual memory – What is the color in the front door of your house or apartment? What is the color of your mother's eyes? How high is the building where you live?
Visual imagination – How would you appear to me from my point of view? How would you look with purple hair? What if a dog's eyes got out of their orbits? See this from above and from one side.
Auditory memory – Which is your preferred kind of music? How would be your voice under water? Which would be the sound of an electric saw cutting a steel plate?
Auditory imagination – Can you hear a parrot telling your name affectionately in your right ear? And in the left ear? How is it to press a key of a piano and to hear a bark?
Kinesthetic (feelings) – What is the sensation of the water in your body when you swim? How is the sensation of pressing one finger in the door? How is the hair of a cat? Which of your hands at this time have more sensations?
Internal dialog – In what voice tone do you tell something to himself when you verify that you did a good work? What do you tell to yourself when you do something wrong? When you talk with yourself, where comes the sound from?

The visual signals and others, called accessing cues, are used for example to detect what a person is doing internally and what he is paying attention at, that is, the thinking strategies that he is applying.

These small experiments evidence the work field of NLP, which is your subjective experience, your interior world, with all its unexplored wealth and potential. NLP's fundamental differences to other disciplines and methodologies are: vision of the mind as constituted of dynamic processes, in which it is possible to intervene, the body-mind integration and a systemic and ecological approach, in which there is a profound respect to people's goals and beliefs. In this context, NLP inserts itself exactly as an attitude and a tool to support people in the definition and achievement of their own objectives.

Books and sites

Suggested books and sites for initiation to NLP:

Introduction to Neuro-linguistic Programming - Joseph O'Connor and John Seymour.

Using your Mind – for a change - Richard Bandler.

Encyclopedia of Systemic NLP and NLP New Coding - Robert Dilts e Judith DeLozier. Essential for practitioners.

See also a list of English (and others) NLP links at http://www.golfinho.com.br. Also books, articles, parabolas (called metaphors), forum and other resources in Portugues.

V. V. Vilela

Suggest this page to a friend