I’ve heard amazing things about it, but what is NLP?

While it has been around for 35 odd years, Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) is still largely misunderstood.  Want to know what it is really about?

Thought you would.  The field is concerned with exceptional performance and the components that make that performance exceptional (in a given context).  John Grinder and Richard Bandler got together in the mid 1970’s and armed with a massive dose of curiosity decided to find out why people like Milton Erickson (hypnotherapist), Virginia Satir (family therapist) and Fritz Pearls (Gestalt therapist) produced such amazing results with their clients.

What Grinder and Bandler did was distil the essence of the expertise of these therapists through observation, mimicry, questioning and constant practice.  They noticed behaviours and strategies of everyday people (other than the experts they were studying) and saw patterns in how people communicated with others.

One of these observations was that people used visual, auditory and kinaesthetic words to describe their experiences both to themselves and others.  There are also other types of words, but these are the main three.  What has occurred since then is that this observation is now the basis of a well-accepted learning theory.  Never mind that the theory is a bit too general.

They also discovered that we have all sorts of strategies (also known as habits of thinking and behaviour) to make sense of our world.  These strategies also generalise our experience so we don’t have to cope with the bombardment of information coming at us every second.  Problem is, if the information that is the focus of the strategy is not going to support and nurture us and the information we ignore does support and nurture us, then we are unable to operate optimally. 
An example of this is could be where a golfer performs poorly in a round or tournament and decides that they will never ‘make it’.  In doing this they are attending almost exclusively to the poor shots and rounds in the past and expect this pattern will continue.  Another golfer in exactly the same position could acknowledge that he had a poor round, but also that he did score some birdies and had improved a lot over the previous year.  

NLP is concerned with how we can best make sense of our experiences.  If what we currently do is not serving us well, then NLP strategies can make a significant difference.  Because of this NLP is now used extensively in sport, business and life.

Visit the resources page to find articles on NLP and how you can apply some of the processes to benefit the way you work in the world.

I want to share some of these ideas in more detail, so I have a gift for you.  It is a mini e-book on modelling your personal best. 

Send an email to me at performance @ golfpossibilities.com.au and I’ll send you a copy of the e-book modelling your personal best.  Also read the articles I have posted under NLP on the resources page.