neuro linguistic programming

NLP is the science of how your brain (neurology) codes your learning and experiences and provides you with your perception and understanding of the world. While it may be new to you, NLP has been around for over 20 years now and has been successfully used in business and government around the world.

It's a way of thinking about thinking, and then being able to do something useful with that. For example, did you know that visual-type words like: vision, see, perceive, colour, picture etc help some people get your meaning, but are unhelpful for others. Perhaps you know people who don't read their emails, preferring a phone call instead. Maybe you've wondered why you can communicate effectively with some people, and not others. All of this and more is the realm of NLP.

Can NLP benefit your business. Unless you have a specific need for NLP itself, we tend to use it transparently as the need arises. It's in our tool kit of consulting resources, and one that we find quite useful in many situations.

More detail on NLP's origins (in case you need to know!)
NLP was founded in 1975 at the University of California (Santa Cruz) by a psychologist and linguist, Dr. John Grinder, and a psychology student and psychotherapist, Richard Bandler - you can blame them for the long name - hence NLP. While having some similar origins and approaches to cognitive and behavioural psychology, NLP is not interested in psycho-analysing people.

Initially drawing from the theory of transformational grammar (words that produce change), Bandler and Grinder produced a linguistic model that identified and replicated the communication patterns of a few recognised "behavioural change experts" such as the hypnotherapist Milton Erickson M.D., Fritz Perls of Gestalt therapy, anthropologist and cybernetician Gregory Bateson and Virginia Satir of family-systems therapy. Such was their skill in modelling these excellent practitioners, Bandler and Grinder also became excellent practitioners and then, more importantly, were able to teach others to become excellent practitioners. Such is the power of NLP. Imagine being able to model your star performers and then teach that to the others.

NLP also grew out of General Semantics (Korzybski), Transformational Grammar (Noam Chomsky) and Reframing (Watzalawick et al) and many others too numerous to mention. The synthesis of these findings, plus a blend of cognitive and behavioural science, resulted in the beginnings of NLP as a separate field of study. Since then NLP has continued to evolve, sometimes for the better and sometimes not, but always producing some very powerful business tools and skills for communication and change along the way with more to come. We remain indebted to Richard Bandler and John Grinder, plus those who came before them, and those subsequent.

The ability of a person to change their thinking, and thereby their life, continues to have been our greatest discovery. - adapted from an original quote of William James, Philosopher (circa 1890)