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What Is NLP Or Neuro-Linguistic Programming?

NLP or Neuro-Linguistic Programming is the study of excellence. NLP studies the behaviours of people who are highly successful to uncover how they use their minds and body to achieve the outcomes they do, so we can teach their success patterns to others.


NLP has been used by millions of people all over the world.

A brief history of NLP

NLP or Neuro-Linguistic Programming was created by Dr Richard Bandler and John Grinder in the 1970s.


Initially, the co-creators were interested in discovering how renowned therapists like Virginia Satir, Milton Erickson and Fritz Perls, were able to achieve incredible transformations with their clients. Richard was a maths wizard and John a professor of linguistics. Combined these two innovators developed models of how Virginia, Milton and Fritz were able to achieve such breakthrough results.


This was the beginnings of the field of NLP, as it has become known today. NLP started in the area of therapy but quickly spread its wings in to many other disciplines, becoming a meta-discipline, a discipline of disciplines that is focused on studying the structure of subjective experience and what can be calculated from it.


That's a bit of a mouthful, so let's take a step back and show you how it all connects to things you do every day.

How NLP connects...

Human beings are learning machines. From birth to death, we constantly need to adapt to our experience of living in the world. What worked for us one day, fails to work the next. We each develop and learn new skills and patterns of behaviour to adapt to the world. ​​And the cool thing is, the experience each of us has, varies from person to person. Your experience of being alive will differ from mine.

No two humans experience the world in exactly the same way. We all experience life differently. We may share many common life experiences and beliefs. But in the end, our experience of life is highly subjective.


Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) is the study of successful behaviours. It's concerned with how a person uses their mind and body to organize their perceptions and actions. That is a fancy way for saying how do you think, feel and use your body to produce a specific result is impacted by how you use your senses, the way you use your thoughts, move and use language, all have a huge impact on the results (the effects) that you create. 

How you...


  • use, move and engage your body
  • use language things (both inside your head and with others)
  • repeat thoughts in a specific way to the point where they become pre-programmed habits... impacts the results you get.


For example, a trader will have a very different outlook on what different movements in the economy mean vs. a mom or a scientist. And because they are able to make better distinctions about this new information they can perform much better in the pursuit of some goal, in this case, to make his company a lot of money.


NLP shows us that it is not just what you know but how you think about something that really matters.​ NLP gives us the tools to control our own brain, make a better decision, have more choices. It has opened up a whole new world of possibilities to help you improve any area of your life, by working on your mind.


Because the meaning and distinctions someone can make about any given subject or experience depend on who is looking, how they are looking at it and what filters they are looking at it from, as practitioners of NLP we say we are interested in the structure of a person's subjective experience ... and what can be calculated from it. Subjective experience is just a fancy way of saying how you as an individual organize your senses about the world.

What does all this mean in practice?

It means that you don't have to stay stuck with constraints and difficulties that you may have whether they are thoughts, feelings or unhelpful behaviours. You don't have to be stuck with some label or poorer than wanted performance if you don't want to. It means you can create and have more of the things and experiences you want in your life, much quicker, whether that is a feeling of greater confidence, a sense of peace, or the capability to produce great successes in any area of your life.


NLP at its root is also concerned about helping people have more choice in their life. Through its series of powerful techniques anyone can re-educate their brain and body to act differently ... which will lead to new and much better results.

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