My ThinkRightNow!

An Introduction to NLP; What is NLP?

Select the crème de la crème of therapists and counsellors and study them for several years distilling the very essence of their success. Analyse that essence till you know exactly what they do and how they do it. Combine all those skills into one system, and write the manual. That’s NLP!

Here it is in action…………..

Derren Brown NLP BMX Bike.

Most people are familiar with the statistic that we only use about 10% of our brains… or so the scientists tell us… and the contribution of the other 90% has been the subject of much research and debate (all inconclusive). However what I find even more interesting is that we even take the 10% almost totally for granted, with little or no attempt to at least make the best of that.

Sure, we stuff it with information from school days onward, or distract it with tv, computer games, books etc, yet for the most part we are not educated about how our brain functions, how it controls our behaviour, our emotions, our health, relationships, fears, phobias etc etc. And we’re certainly not taught how to actively take control and get it to behave the way we want it to behave!

There are a few ways in which we can start to do this; meditation was popular in the sixties and to some extent has shed its hippy image and moved into respectability, hypnosis is another though it is often viewed as meddling, however if we really wish to get into the drivers seat we have to turn to something called Neuro Linguistic Programming, or NLP for short.

This is the rather intimidating name given to a system evolved back in the seventies by its creators Richard Bandler and John Grinder. They became aware that although there were many clever and effective counsellors and therapists around, for the most part they had no idea exactly why and how what they did worked. Additionally there were clearly many different approaches with seemingly no links and in many cases each person thought that theirs was the right (if not the only!) way. B & G set out to find out how the major players did what they did, and to explain it in a way such that anyone could learn to use it effectively, often combining skills and talents from the different disciplines.

They called this “modelling”, examining what someone was doing, breaking it down into its component parts, and learning the precise reasons why it worked, then documenting and teaching it to others. They were phenomenally successful, and within a few years had the most complete workshop manual of the mind available, but still knew that they had barely scratched the surface of what was possible. Over the course of the last 30 years the system has been revised and expanded and continues to grow in stature and uses.

OK, by now I’m sure you’re thinking “So what! What I want to know is what can it do for me?” The short answer is almost anything. If you can identify an area of your life that either isn’t working the way you want it to, or where there’s room for improvement, NLP can help.

For the most part people only think of getting help when they have a serious problem - weight, smoking, phobias, etc - and have tried unsuccessfully to solve it with willpower, medicine, complimentary therapy etc. But NLP can do all that and more; it can be used to improve sports performance, sales techniques, communication skills, and even creativity.

Best of all, NLP is not a dry intellectual system, full of psychobabble and complex theory; indeed for the most part B&G have done the tricky bit and NLP in use is a simple practical system that just gets on with the job in hand with a minimum of fuss or intrusion. In most cases it isn’t even necessary to disclose the actual problem; instructions can be given that allow the client to put things right without ever revealing that!

It can also be very reassuring - starting as it does with the basic assumption that we are all doing the very best we can with our lives given the experience we have and the tools at our disposal. It then offers us the equivalent of a full suite of power tools complete with step by step instructions.

Perhaps best of all is that it cannot “go wrong” since one of its basic tenets is that it always adds choice (i.e. freedom) to our lives, taking nothing away except the chains that bind us to our old behaviour and limitations.