Finding Yourself Again

Your words and thoughts are powerful.  Very powerful.  This isn’t speculation; it is a reality. 

The basic premise of NLP is focused on the “language” of our thoughts and how that language is stored in the brain. The specific language we use reveals our inner, subconscious perceptions or beliefs around our problems and the world at large. If our language and our perceptions are inaccurate, as long as we continue to talk and to think in that same way, the underlying problems will persist. In other words, our attitudes are, in a sense, a self-fulfilling prophecy and a way of remaining stuck.  Our words and thoughts create our own version of reality.

“The phrase “Neuro-Linguistic Programming” describes the process of how personality creates and expresses itself. Put simply, we are all made up of a neurology that conveys information about our environment to our central nervous systems and brains. Since we are also meaning creating creatures, we translate these perceptions in our brains into meanings, beliefs and expectations. As we continue to grow from a rather infant brain into a more complex adult human, we tend to filter, distort and magnify the input we get from our environment such that it matches the elaborate program we evolve to explain our life experience.”  -Wikipedia

In the early 70’s a man named Richard Bandler, decided for his thesis project that he wanted to develop models of human behavior to understand why certain people seemed to be excellent at what they did, while others found the same tasks challenging or nearly impossible to do.  Along with his then professor, John Grinder, and using inspiration by pioneers in the fields of therapy and personal growth, they began to develop systematic procedures and theories that formed the basis of NLP. They studied three top therapists: Virginia Satir, the extraordinary family therapist, who consistently was able to resolve difficult family relationships that many other therapists found intractable, the innovative psychotherapist Fritz Perls, who originated the school of therapy known as Gestalt, and Milton Erickson, the world-famous hypnotherapist.

“Their goal was to develop models of how it was that these people got the results they did. They sought to identify and model the patterns that produced these results and then to teach these models to others. These three gifted therapists were quite different personalities, yet Grinder and Bandler discovered some underlying patterns that were quite similar. These patterns became the underlying structure of NLP, with names such as meta-model, sub-modalities, reframing, language patterns, well-formed conditions and eye accessing clues.”

NLP allows you to change the language and beliefs that you are holding, thereby allowing you to create new, healthier, productive patterns.