Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP)

NLP is the study of the structure of subjective experience. NLP makes explicit patterns of behaviour and change that have previously been only understandable intuitively. It is the basis for a particular approach to therapy, although, in terms of the NLP perspective, each school of psychotherapy is a metaphor designed to help and expand the limitations of a client's personal metaphors. And just as the form and organization of an individual's map of existence deeply affect his experience so too do the different treatments metaphors offer limitations as ways to learn and grow. But when a metaphor of personality becomes so wordy and entrancing that the graceful art of change is buried by concepts and analysis, then a reorientation, such as that facilitated by NLP, is called for. Continuing to embrace a particular metaphor in preference to another inhibits the process of human development. Presuppositions reinforced by a particular metaphor limit the range of personal and professional choices to which a person is exposed.

Whereas many therapies facilitate a degree of change in clients, this change tends to be limited to assisting the individual in coping with currently experienced difficulties. NLP aims to enable individuals to create systematically a reference structure, or set of experiences, that permits them to change their coping patterns in response to new difficulties as they emerge. This involves the systematic demystification of normally out-of-awareness aspects of communication that give the person a heightened sense of control over himself and his environment.

Human beings live in a real world. They do not however operate directly or immediately upon that world. Rather their relationships to it are mediated by neurological filters. Because sensory organs vary greatly between people, each perceives the world differently through different models or maps of reality. A series of such maps is used to guide behaviour. These maps, or representational systems, necessarily differ from the territory which they model. They have built-in errors. These are due to three processes characteristic of human modelling: generalization (the assumption of conformity to a general pattern), deletion (failure to attend to significant details), and distortion (alteration of perception of sensory input). The limitation that people experience are typically in their representation of the world, not in the world itself.

NLP focuses on the human language as the best understood of the representational system of maps and on transformational grammar as the best model of it. This provides a meta-model, a representation of the structure of human language, which is itself a representation of the world of experience. NLP has adapted this for therapeutic purposes. Using this appropriate grammar for therapy, people can be assisted in expanding the portions of their representations of the world which impoverish and limit them.

Originally created by behavioural modellers John Grinder and Richard Bandler, NLP intersects with the theoretical material of several fields including cybernetics, linguistics, psychotherapy and personality theory.