What is NLP?

In this mental health topic we discuss what NLP is including the basic principles and benefits.

Mental Health Topic – What is NLP?

Have you heard about Neuro Linguistic Programming, or NLP? It’s an incredibly useful behavioral science that can help you change your life and is used by life coaches in Australia and throughout the world.

Created in the 1970s by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, NLP combines techniques from neurology, computer science, and linguistics to help people achieve their potential. The creators of NLP found that a connection between neurological processes (neuro), language (linguistic) and behavioral patterns learned through life’s experience (programming), which can be changed to achieve specific goals in life.

Many life coaches and mindset coaches use NLP in their life coaching services to help their clients as it promotes self-reflection, confidence, and communication. Here’s what it is and how it works.

NLP has been described as the science of excellence in humans and involvesmodeling the language structure and behavior of success people.

This means if you want to be a happy, successful person, you can’t go wrong by thinking, talking, and behaving the way happy, successful people do. And if you utilize NLP in your speech, you will be able to persuade and convince others with greater success, too!

Basic NLP Principles

There are many variants of NLP, so there is debate between some practitioners including amongst life coaches that others are doing it wrong. Even with these hot debates, though, the basic principles are the same, and all agree that it works to make your life more fulfilling.

The two biggest principles of NLP are that the map is not the territory, and that both life and mind are systemic processes. What do those principles mean? Let’s take a look at them and find out.

The map is not the territory. This means that, as people, we understand our perceptions of reality, and those perceptions may be flawed. Essentially what this means is that our subjective perception of reality is filtered by our brain and is why two people can experience the same event differently, hence why our map (view or perception) of the territory (event) can be different, even though the territory itself was the same.

The reason for this is we use our senses to create a map of what we believe is there based on our perceptions, beliefs or world-view. These maps will therefore determine our behavior, not the event (reality) itself. So if your map is skewed, you’ll behave in ways that are skewed, too.

Life and mind are systemic processes. This means that the things going on inside your mind (which includes your beliefs, perceptions, attitudes, as well as the events of the past that have impacted you), your body and your environment can’t be isolated from one another because they are all interconnected. It is only by changing our mind do we create the opportunity to change both our inner world and our external world as well.

There is a saying that ‘you cannot solve a problem with the same level of mind that created it’ and that changes to our mind will create changes to all parts of our life which is the underlying premise of this principle.

Every NLP technique you encounter is based on these principles. These NLP techniques can help us understand how our brains work, how we store information, and how to change our behaviors to ones that are more desirable.

The Presuppositions of NLP

The presuppositions of NLP are the principles and guides which form the foundation of NLP practice. Below are a few of the presuppositions that NLP models are built upon:

Our map is not the territory, it is a symbolic representation of the territory.
Respect each person’s model of the world.
The meaning of your communication is the response you get.
There is no ‘failure’ only feedback.
Everyone is doing the best they can.
Mind and body are both part of the one system (the neuro-linguistic system) and influence each other.
People have all the resources they need; they just need to access, strengthen, and sequence them.
We can model excellence if we break the tasks and skills into small enough chunks.
NLP looks to add or create more choice for people.
People tend to make the best decision from the choices available.
The most important information we have about a person is their behaviour.
Behind every behaviour is a positive intention.

NLP Benefits

Here are some specific ways that NLP can help you:

Career. NLP can help you be more effective in your career.It can build your skills in teamwork, personal development, coaching, leadership, sales, and productivity. No matter what it is, if there’s a potential for growth and human interaction is present, NLP can help.

Goal Achievement. You can use NLP to help you set and achieve goals,as long as those goals are intelligent, measurable, meaningful and achievable.

NLP can change the way you think and speak, and motivate yourself to take appropriate actions to achieve your goals.

Mental Health. NLP can help you overcome some mental and emotional disorders and phobias.

NLP can bring you a happier and more fulfilling life.

If you’re interested in learning how to make a change in your life, NLP could be the tool you’ve been looking for.

Quite simply, NLP involves studying successful people and the steps they take to achieve such success. This success can come from any part of your life.

Overcoming phobias, learning how to speak with confidence in front of large groups, and learning how to have a loving personal relationship are all issues that can be helped with NLP techniques. Investigate your options with NLP; you’ll be surprised by the difference it can make in your life!

In Conclusion…

As a mental health life coach, I use many methods of coaching including NLP when helping clients. If you would like some personal coaching please reach out. I can be contacted at https://adammedaglia.com/contact/

Adam Medaglia

Mental Health Life Coach.

Author of WARRIOR: How I Defeated PTSD.

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