NLP

Introduction

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) is a way of thinking about how the world works. It is the study of excellence – and how you can achieve it. This book explains what Neuro-Linguistic Programming has to offer and how you can use it for success in your everyday life.

Why read this book?

Whatever you do for a living and whatever stage you are at in your life, whether young, middle aged or elderly, Neuro-Linguistic Programming can help you achieve more. If you are a business person, if you are in a relationship, if you want to improve a sport, get rid of a phobia, have greater satisfaction in your social life or change a habit, there are NLP techniques that you can use to create new results.

It may be that you would like to be a better communicator, have smoother relationships, greater career success, more money or just know yourself better. Perhaps you are very successful in conventional terms but there are still things you would like to change within yourself. N LP can show you how.

In your personal life, NLP can show you ways to create a personally fulfilling and happy life. In other words, you can use NLP to coach yourself. In business, you can use NLP to coach your colleagues, for sales, for presentations and for improved communication and management. You can also use NLP for personal coaching – for example, to help a person to get rid of a limiting belief or an unwanted habit, to refine his goals or to work with a series of issues.

How does NLP work?

NLP is concerned with how the top people in any area consistently achieve results. It is more than a way of thinking about success, though – it also provides a series of practical techniques that can be easily learned and applied to any area of life.

The belief that lies behind NLP is that each person who achieves outstanding results has a method, process and structure by which he does so. NLP analyses that person’s thinking and behaviour to make a ‘model’ of excellence that anybody can use to replicate his success. Next, NLP takes this model and shows you how you can apply it not only to replicate the successful methods of others but also to create your own successes. NLP can also be used as a way of understanding the methods by which you achieve good results and how you can reproduce them on a consistent basis.

Thousands of people all over the world have already found NLP can create improved results in many areas of their life. In any of these areas, NLP can help you to make use of your inner potential, create a vision and purpose, set effective goals and achieve them.

How to use this book

This book is for anyone who wants to explore what NLP is about or who wants to know more about the techniques – anyone who wants to learn a process that can improve his quality of life.

Chapters 1 to 5 explain the basic principles of NLP. The following chapters go into detail about the different techniques that you can use to remove barriers and move towards success. Chapter 11 brings everything together and looks at how you might work with another person. There is also a useful glossary of NLP terms and a bibliography at the end of the book.

The aim of the book is that you will be able to use your new skills to improve your life. You can begin to use these skills straightaway. They are all tried, tested and highly practical. The more you are able to practise them, the better. You may find it useful to find opportunities to practise them as you go through the book, as you will find this helps your understanding grow. So do take the time to try them out with yourself or others.

Most importantly, NLP is about experimenting and enjoying new things, so have fun!

1 The basics of NLP

NLP is a way of thinking and a method for achieving excellence in your life. Its structure comes from modelling people who have already achieved success in many different areas. You can transfer these ways of thinking, doing and being to your life to achieve results. This chapter sets out the groundwork you need to know before you can start to apply NLP to your daily life. Whatever you have and are doing or being in your life is because of what you believe is true about the world. What would happen if you changed some of those beliefs?

What’s in the name?

The name ‘Neuro-Linguistic Programming’ refers to the unconscious processes each person uses to produce behaviour – and therefore results. If you are not achieving the results you want, change your thinking and your behaviour will change.

Neuro

Each component of the name is important. The word ‘neuro’ refers to the nervous system. Our direct experience of the world comes to the brain via the nervous system and the five senses. The senses are the means by which we interact with the world:

• the visual sense – seeing

• the auditory sense – hearing

• the kinaesthetic sense – touch

• the olfactory sense – smell

• the gustatory sense – taste

One of the first things that NLP is concerned with is how we process this sensory experience and translate it into conscious and unconscious thought.

Linguistic

The second word in Neuro Linguistic Programming refers to language. Specifically it means the way in which we use language to order and give meaning to what we have experienced through the senses.

must know

It’s not what happens to you that’s important. It’s what you do with what happens that makes the difference.

Communication – both verbal and non-verbal types – is the medium by which you express the unconscious and conscious thoughts you have about yourself, other people and the world around you as a whole.

Programming

The third word in Neuro Linguistic Programming looks at the consistent ways in which we think or behave. Just like a computer, each of us runs specific programmes to produce our behaviour. Programmes consist of a series of steps that automatically produce certain results in different circumstances.

You can use NLP to find out what particular programmes you run and what results they produce. It also gives you the means to change your own and other people’s programmes to produce exactly the results you want.

The core of NLP

At the heart of NLP is a particular way of thinking. This holds that anyone can achieve success by learning how other people get their results. This is called modelling.

Modelling

To model someone, you identify a person who does something excellently and you observe how he does it, specifically by looking at, questioning and analysing him to discover:

• that person’s language, i.e. the words he uses and the structure of his language

• his physiology, i.e. how he uses his body

• his thinking, beliefs and values, unconscious and conscious.

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In essence, NLP consists of:

• a methodology – modelling

• a series of techniques

By copying what that person does in these three areas, you can also achieve excellent results. NLP has an efficient toolkit of techniques to help you do this.

The history of NLP

Given the technical-sounding name, it is not surprising that Neuro-Linguistic Programming was invented by two academics. John Grinder, an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Santa Cruz, California, and Richard Bandler, who had studied a range of subjects from Gestalt therapy to maths and computing, came together to see what they could learn about how people became effective.

Their influences

Bandler and Grinder drew on existing concepts and ways of thinking. Grinder was already experienced in modelling, as he had learned several languages through this method. The words ‘Neuro Linguistic’ came from Alfred Korsybski, ‘thinker’ and founder/author of General Semantics.

Another influential academic was the British anthropologist Gregory Bateson. He proposed that there was no such thing as reality. Instead he suggested each person unconsciously edited that person’s perceptions of the world to fit his own beliefs. So he decided that if people could change their beliefs, they could produce different ways of acting in the world.

must know

Anything one person can do another person can do too. If one person can learn to do something well, so can another. It is simply a question of working out how someone else does it and learning the same strategies.

The models for NLP

Grinder and Bandler modelled three successful therapists who produced excellent results. What they were really interested in finding out was the difference that made the difference. In other words, what was it that set these people apart from the average? What was different about their thinking?

did you know?

Over the years NLP has grown enormously. What was once an academic study is now far more widely used.

What was different about the way they behaved? How did this set up the successful results they achieved? The therapists whose work they looked at were Milton Erickson, Virginia Satir and Fritz Perls.

Milton Erickson

Milton Erickson (1901–80) had been a psychiatrist and was at the time a highly successful hypnotherapist. The way in which he used language and hypnosis has become known as ‘Ericksonian hypnosis’.

NLP ‘modelled’ all Erickson’s language to produce the Milton Model of language patterns. These can be used to put another person into a light ‘trance’ – a useful state in which NLP techniques can produce change.

Virginia Satir

Virginia Satir (1916–88) was a family therapist who developed a new approach to working with families. She developed the idea of five key personality areas found in people’s behaviour. These are known as ‘Satir categories’. Many of her ideas have become common currency since her death.

Fritz Perls

Fritz Perls (1893–1970) is known as the founder of Gestalt Therapy, which he co-developed into a general therapeutic tool. He moved away from the psychoanalytical model in which the past is analysed and saw what was happening in the present as the key to change.

Taking it further

Out of the models that Bandler and Grinder produced came a series of techniques, and these form the strategies that can be used to change behaviour. They are outlined in the following chapters.

Where you are now and where you want to be

Change is a journey between where you are now and where you will be in the future. The way NLP expresses this is as the journey between the present state and the desired state.

Blocks to change

What stands between where you are now and where you want to be is an issue or problem to tackle. It may be a habit or particular behaviour you want to change. NLP discovers the programmes you are running and helps you reprogramme your unconscious mind to change that behaviour. The instruction to change comes from your conscious mind. But it is the unconscious mind that learns the new way of doing things and produces new behaviour.

The unconscious mind

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All change is unconscious. Change doesn’t happen as a result of will power. Changes in behaviour happen as a result of changes that are going on internally.

So what is the unconscious mind? (NLP tends to refer to the unconscious rather than the subconscious mind, but both terms are generally used to mean the same thing.) The unconscious is everything that is not part of your conscious awareness. It is the home of your beliefs, motivations and behaviour. It acts in habitual, repeated ways.

You can give your conscious mind an instruction to change, but it is your unconscious mind that carries out the instruction. For example, imagine sitting down in a chair. You may tell yourself consciously to sit down, but it is your unconscious that relays the instructions to each individual muscle in your body at the same time and allows you to take that action.

How we learn and change

There are four levels of change in learning:

Unconscious incompetence

At this stage, you don’t know how to do something but you don’t even realize that you don’t know how to do it. This is the blissful ignorance stage. For example, if you had never thought about driving, you would have no notion of what it would be like if you were to drive.

Conscious incompetence

At this stage, you become aware that you don’t know something. When you try to drive for the first time you realise just how much there is to learn. The positive thing at this stage is that you can make rapid progress because you have so much to learn.

Conscious competence

By this stage, you have learned some skills. You are conscious that you have the skills needed for the task you are performing and are relatively competent. Progress is likely to be slower from now on, but that’s only because there is less to learn now and what’s left may be not as easy to acquire.

Your skills are not yet automatic, though. Take the driving example: as a new driver, if a passenger in the back seat talks too much, you may be put off a little. That’s because you’re still thinking about what you’re doing. But you have still acquired the basics and can use them pretty well.

Unconscious competence – mastery

Now your skills have become unconscious. You can talk or listen to music while driving safely – your basic driving skills, looking in the mirror, changing gears and being aware of other cars on the road is done unconsciously, freeing up your conscious mind to focus on other things. This is the level at which you acquire mastery of a skill. The beliefs you have about what you are doing are also unconscious. By this stage, you simply believe that you are a driver – it has become part of your identity.

The four rules for success

Out of all the work done by the different developers of NLP a set of four rules has evolved that are sound principles for getting success. These four rules can be used to get what you want in any area of your life.

must know

The four rules for success:

Know what you want.

Take action to get it.

Be flexible.

Be aware.

Know what you want

NLP always starts with the final goal in mind because its core belief is that you will get whatever you focus on in life. If you don’t know what you want, you are essentially acting like a boat without oars. Although you are going to get somewhere eventually, it won’t be a place of your choosing. If you know where you want to go, you will know in which direction you should steer yourself. Always set out on