NLP Resources Austin

• 'Neuro-Linguistic Programming.'

• A collection of communication skills.
• A set of change techniques that can be added to a therapeutic model.
• A self-help discipline.
• A method of learning athletic skills quickly and easily.
• A series of sales techniques.
• A way of questioning that allows you to uncover information that is missing, unconscious or hidden, so that you can understand a communication fully.
• A model of human subjective experience.
• A set of presuppositions that allow humans to grow.
• A collection of skills for influencing people while maintaining your integrity and respecting theirs.
• A way to build stronger, more enjoyable relationships.
• A detailed understanding of how people learn and how to teach them.
• A model for business behaviors: coaching skills, leading by example and open, authentic communication that builds and maintains trust, commitment and responsibility between employees.
• A way to recognize and change problematic family patterns.
• A model of how to induce hypnosis.
• The art of changing another person by changing yourself. -- John Grinder

NLP stands for Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Please refer to books by Richard Bandler (computer scientist and systems theorist) and/or John Grinder (Professor of Liguistics). In the early '70s these two men along with Leslie Cameron (a psychologist) and Judith DeLozier (a cultural anthropologist) began studying what made really effective therapists better than average.

Rather than approach that question from the perspective of psychological theory, however, they used the disciplines at which they were already skilled: Transformational Linguistics (see Noam Chomsky), Systems Analysis, Family Systems Theory, and Cultural Anthropology. They studied therapists such as Milton Erickson, Virginia Satir, and Fritz Perls, who were known to be therapeutic wizards. Therapist's therapists, if you will.

Because the founders of NLP came from other disciplines and were not bound by the models of psychology, they were able to notice distinctions that the therapeutic community had missed or thought were not important. They used videotape and reductionist methods to take apart the micro-behaviors of these super people-helpers. And they were extraordinarily successful at it. In many cases they were able to teach new councilors to be better clinicians than they could learn to be in traditional university settings or even from the therapists whom the NLP's built their models.

Out of this research came not only models of how to help people change but also models of how to build models of peoples behavior: Meta-models. These skills of modeling the difference that created the difference between excellence and mediocrity are the heart of NLP. Although most NLP trainings today tend to teach therapeutic techniques and call that NLP, the core of NLP remains those skills that allow you to find out how someone thinks and acts, and replicate that person's success in yourself or other people.