What is NLP?

NLP was developed in the mid-70s by John Grinder, a Professor at UC Santa Cruz and Richard Bandler, a graduate student. NLP, as most people use the term today, is a set of models of how communication impacts and is impacted by subjective experience. It's more a collection of tools than any overarching theory. NLP is heavily pragmatic: if a tool works, it's included in the model, even if there's no theory to back it up. None of the current NLP developers have done research to "prove" their models correct. The party line is "pretend it works, try it, and notice the results you get. If you don't get the result you want, try something else."

Much of early NLP was based on the work of Virginia Satir, a family therapist; Fritz Perls, founder of Gestalt therapy; Gregory Bateson, anthropologist; and Milton Erickson, hypnotist. It was Erickson's work that formed the foundation for a lot of NLP, thus the tight connection with hypnosis. Bandler and Grinder's book "Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H. Erickson, Volume I" is one of the best books I've ever read on how language influences mental states.

NLP consists of a number of models, and then techniques based on those models. The major models usually associated with NLP are:

Sensory acuity and physiology.

Thinking is tied closely to physiology. People's thought processes change their physiological state. Sufficiently sensitive sensory acuity will help a communicator fine-tune their communication to a person in ways over and above mere linguistics.

The "meta-model."

A set of linguistic challenges for uncovering the "deep structure" underneath someone's "surface structure" sentences. [Sorry for the transformational grammar lingo.]

Representational systems.

These actually appeared in Erickson's work and the work of others, though Bandler and Grinder took them much further. Different people seem to represent knowledge in different sensory modalities. Their language reveals their representation. Often, communication difficulties are little more than two people speaking in incompatible representation systems.

For example, the "same" sentence might be expressed differently by different people:
Auditory: "I really hear what you're saying."
Visual: "I see what you mean."
Kinesthetic: "I've got a handle on that."

The "Milton-model."

This is a set of linguistic patterns Milton Erickson used to induce trance and other states in people. It is the inverse of the meta-model; it teaches you how to be artfully vague, which is what you use to do therapeutic hypnosis with someone.

Eye accessing cues.

When people access different representational systems, their eyes move in certain ways. Lots of research has been done on accessing cues, because it seems easy to test. Most research has "proven" they don't exist. My thesis was on accessing cues and concluded the same thing. My real conclusion was that a person is too complex a black box to test this effectively. Also, eyes move in ways that are not related to information accessing. While I can visually tell the difference between an "accessing cue" and a non-accessing movement, I can't quantify the difference enough to base research on it.

Submodalities.

The structure of internal representations determines your response to the content. For example, picture someone you really like. Make the colors more intense, as if you were turning up the color knob on a TV. Now turn the color down, until it's black and white. For most people, high color intensifies the feeling, and B&W neutralizes it. The degree of color, part of the STRUCTURE of the representation, affects the intensity of your feelings about the content.

Metaprograms.

These are aspects about how people process information and make decisions. For example, some people are motivated TOWARDS GOALS, while others are motivated AWAY FROM non-goals. TOWARDS or AWAY-FROM tells how they respond to their world; which one a person prefers in a given context will dramatically change how they behave.

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