NLP Neuro Linguistic Programming

Neuro Linguistic Programming The Incredible Tool Set For Working With The Unconscious Mind That Empowers Seriously Successful Individuals

NLP is short for Neuro Linguistic Programming.

NLP was developed by Richard Bandler and John Grinder in Santa Cruz in the 1970s, much of their work drew from developments in hypnotherapy by Milton H. Erickson, and work by Virginia Satir and Fritz Perls. The applied research forming neuro linguistic programming.

Since the 1970s NLP has steadily grown in usage, with various organizations seeing its value. From a coaching perspective the linguistic patterns, especially from the NLP Master Practitioner level have been credited by many for their rapid changes. With 93% of coaching clients finding that significant issues such as grief, unworthiness and victimhood (acceptance of abuse) disappear within 4 hours of coaching.

NLP pairs well with other modalities including Time-Lime Therapy and hypnosis, helping to bring about rapid lasting change in those involved. These combinations have helped clients overcome serious issues with post traumatic stress disorder, nervous breakdown, and other issues which would usually just be medicated due to the challenges many people believe exist in releasing them.

Neuro linguistic programming has proven effective in enabling good mental health outcomes with multiple modalities from coaching and neurolinguistic psychotherapy, as well as helping those seeking to become successful individuals with optimizing their mindset so success can be achieved more easily.

What Is NLP?

Neuro Linguistic Programming Definition

What is neuro linguistic programming? In literal form neuro linguistic programming NLP is working with the unconscious level of the mind through use of specific language patterns in order to change the programming which runs a person’s life.

Neuro Linguistic Programming Explained

There are various layers within the mind, most people being aware they have a conscious mind within which their thinking occurs, such as what they wish to do, where they are going, or how they will do something. The unconscious runs the body and does its best to automate many tasks, breathing, beating your heart and so on.

Within your unconscious there are further layers, going through thoughts, experiences, belief structures into values at the deepest level.

NLP works through the various levels using special language patterns, right down into your core values for the most powerful and wide reaching effects.

What Is NLP Good For?

NLP has been widely demonstrated as being good for virtually everything since formulation in Santa Cruz in the 1970s.

NLP interventions help people achieve improvements in life and business through use as a mindset change tool. Releasing old limiting beliefs holding people back. NLP practitioners then helping their coaching clients install fresh empowering beliefs, which help them achieve the results they desire with a degree of ease.

NLP has also been helpful in helping people improve their physical health, again through bringing about changes within the mindset in terms of what is possible with healing.

Core to all these things is the level of skill of those using NLP, and the various language patterns used as tools to create desired outcomes.

Level of skill in terms of certification is a good clue as to how skilled a coach or therapist is with NLP, though not all NLP Practitioners or Master Practitioners are equal, some are far better than others.

As with footballers, pilots, musicians, and other highly skilled professionals, some practitioners have a higher aptitude for what they do. Some, through practice, have higher ability too. While some who are new and fresh to neuro linguistic programming, perform faster and more effectively than others with many years experience.

When working with a good coach, NLP therapist, or practitioner of neurolinguistic psychotherapy, almost any issue can be addressed, and the desired outcome brought about.

There are a great many more though.

Many people seeking a more successful professional life will gain the help from an NLP life coach or an NLP business coach, depending on the focus they have, and the issues presenting and holding them back. Often there are a set of intermeshed issues, with relationship challenges, chemical dependencies, lack of creativity, low self esteem and others, conspiring together to cause the surface level issue. Many successful professionals also use neuro linguistic programming to help with team building and improving enterprise performance, with various NLP language patterns helping them become more effective. Equally, neurolinguistic programming helps a lot of parents, couples and single people live their daily life in more effective ways.

How An NLP Therapist Or Coach Will Work Through Issues

As problems due to limiting decisions and unreleased negative emotions come up, they’re dealt with according to the circumstances involved. Time is also a constraint, when using Time-Line Therapy to release negative emotions, anger, sadness, fear, hurt and guilt, around one hour is required depending on how easily the client can let go. So longer sessions, including a full breakthrough session, are often scheduled for such things.

At the end of the session, after the negatives and limiting decisions have been dealt with, time running through certain visualization techniques is often taken, along with time to build other empowering resources that help the client.

If you can think of a result you wish to achieve, or a problem you wish to get rid of from your life or business, NLP can likely be very helpful.

Neuro Linguistic Programming Evidence For Enhanced Mental Health And Physical Health outcomes

While there’s little empirical evidence, and almost no clinical studies, on the clinical effectiveness of neuro linguistic programming NLP and NLP interventions, skilled NLP practitioners have been producing highly effective results with clients since the 1970’s when NLP first came into practice.

Some mental health professionals have compiled a systematic review which was published on the NIH website. It compiled views from various science and behavior books and a handful of studies. The British Journal of General Practice also released a publication titled “Neurolinguistic programming: a systematic review of the effects on health outcomes” along with the Polish Psychological Bulletin with their piece “Thirty-Five Years of Research on Neuro-Linguistic Programming. NLP Research Data Base. State of the Art or Pseudoscientific Decoration?” which both echo the conclusions of the article on NIH.

Both NIH and British Journal of General Practice studies draw on little evidence though. Ignoring subjective experience regardless of how well witnessed.

The core finding of most mental health professionals, is that there is too little empirical evidence to draw any conclusions on the efficacy of neuro linguistic programming, or NLP. Other people refer to neuro linguistic programming as “cargo cult psychology” often having had zero relevant experience of it’s use, or not seeing its effects for themselves first hand.

The Issue With Neuro Linguistic Programming And Gaining Empirical Evidence

The majority of practitioners using neuro linguistic programming NLP are coaches, with some counsellors, and few doctors of clinical psychology.

Therein is the issue.

For clinical studies, certain conditions have to be met. Including use of a control group, defined methodologies for treatment of particular issues, then quantitative methods to measure results.

In short, every case must follow the exact same method, and be measured in a prescribed manner.

What highly skilled practitioners of neuro linguistic programming will tell you is that everyone is different, and as such the treatment protocol for each person will be different. Even if they have the same presenting problem.

Traditional psychology holds that a certain issue has a certain cause.

Neuro linguistic programming holds that the causes of an issue can be diverse, and only discovered through exploration with the client.

You can easily have two clients, with identical issues, yet their different backgrounds have caused that issue to form in different ways. So different tools from the NLP array of skills must be used at different times, with other tools can being inappropriate for each.

Presenting issues all result in behavioral patterns, and all behavioral patterns are formed by a diverse set of inputs.

Inputs That Form Behavioral Patterns According to NLP Models:

• Experiences
• Learning from parents, teachers, friends, mentors, etc.
• Thoughts
• Decisions
• Beliefs
• Values

Around 2,000,000 bits of information per second are processed by your various senses, and routed to your mind for interpretation and use.

Your conscious mind can only handle around 134 bits of information per second.

This means that people never have a true impression of what is going on. The sheer volume of data is too much.

So all that information goes through a process of deletion, distortion and generalization.

In everyday life this has little impact on things. where issues occur is generally when events which are outside of the normal occur. Walking to the shops you rarely have need to be consciously aware of the feel of the socks on your feet, or the weight of your watch on your wrist. Your mind removes certain things as you have little need to know.

Which causes various issues.

Police Studies On Incidents And Memory

Numerous studies exist on how people recall information following incidents.

Police have run studies in various countries, all showing the same conclusions. What most people remember of events is vastly different from what actually happened. This includes memory of what color clothing people were wearing, sounds heard during the incident, and what various people did.

How The Mind Can Fail To Serve People At Times

Commonly when dealing with relationships one partner will state that their partner does not value them, or never tells them that they love them.

Usually, their partner has shown love, told them they love them. They just never observed, never heard.

What This Means For Neuro Linguistic Programming And Therapy

Because of how the mind works with information, and the fact that most never makes it to the conscious mind, we are left in a relatively unempowered state, when most people believe they are in full control of all the facts.

So people draw conclusions without all the information, though believe that they do know everything.

In a scientific study, unless you take into account all the data, then you lack efficacy. In short, without all the data being rationalized, your study and any conclusions drawn are flawed.

For centuries many people believed the world to be flat, finally sufficient evidence was put to them in such an irrefutable way they had to accept it was spherical.

Therapy and coaching done using neuro linguistic programming NLP flows in much the same way. Practitioners going through everything leading up to events, finding contributing causes, limiting beliefs and root level limiting decisions that caused those events to happen. All of this coming from the perspective that the person was at cause for those events. Because unless they can put themselves at cause, the issue can never be resolved as it would always be external. By being at cause, the issue is internal, and can be resolved.

How This Impacts On Empirical Evidence And Research Findings About NLP

When working through therapy or coaching sessions with a client, NLP practitioners are working in a highly adaptive way. Listening for minute cues for what’s going on in the unconscious, with various representational systems. Working out the individual’s map of reality. Then instantaneously pulling the right technique from their neuro linguistic programming tool kit to clear the issue.

With high quality NLP training, students of neuro linguistic programming must gain 100% scores on every exercise, every technique, to pass. As a result, it comes to the point where everything is happening on an unconscious level in order to deal with complex presenting problems that clients come to them with.

In essence, your NLP practitioner or NLP therapist has to go through a significant amount of personal development in order to be able to pass their neuro linguistic programming certification, and work with people effectively.

When working with clients, NLP therapists and NLP practitioners including Master Practitioners, are working so quickly they lack time to write down everything they’re doing. As such, are unable to record everything needed to demonstrate efficacy in scientific studies.

The only way it could be recorded would be with multiple video cameras, allowing all physiological and tonal cues, or non-verbal communication cues, along with vocal cues and wording to be captured. The challenge being is that no client wants their coaching or therapy session recorded.

Ergo, gaining effective empirical evidence becomes exceptionally challenging.

Add to this that fact that very few practitioners of neuro linguistic programming are medical doctors, or mental health professionals with PhDs, and the chances of getting a clinical study that reflects accurately what skilled practitioners of NLP can do, becomes very slim.

Hence why there are currently very few accurate clinical studies about neuro linguistic programming and it’s efficacy.

Talk with a good, well trained and experienced NLP therapist or NLP practitioner, and you will discover how effective NLP is.

There is a growing NLP research database, it is taking time for NLP therapists and practitioners to accrue quality studies though due to the various constraints shared above.

The Work Of Dr. Ryke Geerd Hamer Over 10,000 Clinical Case Studies

One medical doctor who did compile over 10,000 clinical case studies regarding mental health causes for various terminal physical health issues, including cancer, healed through pioneering therapy known as German New Medicine, was hounded so badly by the medical community in Europe that he went into exile and stopped practicing.

Some who received training in his approach still work with select clients though.

In essence, Dr. Hamer mapped out root causes of various health issues, tracing them back to certain types of events. Characterized as Significant Emotional Events. With this knowledge practitioners could then help clear the presenting issue on a mental health level, clients then experienced healing within their body. The final health outcomes documented by Dr. Hamer, 10,000 terminal patients doing what medical professionals classify as spontaneous healing, being incredible.

German New Medicine is not neuro linguistic programming NLP, it does draw on elements from NLP in order to produce effects though. Though Dr. Hamer’s work was never formally published, partly as no-one would peer review it. Therein being a further issue with clinical studies and published papers, the need for peer review when their are either no peers to review, or peers straight out refuse to.

NLP Techniques

The various techniques of NLP vary from being incredibly simple, to very complex.

All techniques within the umbrella of neuro linguistic programming NLP require one common factor when being used, precision.

As with all techniques it is largely the precision of their use which influences results gained. In tandem is the mindset of the practitioner using NLP across the various situations that they employ it.

Neuro linguistic programming “not not” language patterns and double negatives can be very simple to employ. They shake up belief structures, causing clients to re-evaluate their model of the world. Then empowering belief structures can be installed.

Neurolinguistic programming Meta Model language patterns are based on the work of Virginia Satir, and work on shifting perceptions from impossibility to possibility. For example, when a client has a belief that an event will never happen for them, their coach or NLP therapist shuffles their thinking around via graded levels of possibility in directed questioning, until they believe that it will happen, or vice versa depending on the presenting problem.

NLP cartesian coordinates require far higher precision though, with only those who are highly skilled in NLP can do it on the fly with clients. Speed of employment of techniques in NLP is vital, higher skill levels make a real difference. Especially with higher levels such as the Master Practitioner level.

There is a wide gulf between how Practitioner level and Master Practitioner level NLP techniques work.

NLP practitioner level techniques can be lengthy, with various steps to them, often requiring a degree of setup and time. SWISH patterns often taking up to 15 minutes for various practitioners to use when helping their clients.

At NLP Master Practitioner level many NLP skills are condensed to single sentence linguistic techniques, thus transitioning NLP to the level of conversational change. Something Milton H. Erikson was famed for.

That ability to condense techniques from the Practitioner level into single short sentences in numerous cases is what gives the Master Practitioner level NLP skill set such incredible power. They can be woven seamlessly into conversation, often without the client being aware of what is happening, yet still receiving great benefit.

While at times this can yield big life changes which are consciously noticeable for coaching clients, often those receiving transition so smoothly that they are rarely aware of their own internal changes.

Neurolinguistic Programming And How Conversational Change Quantum Leaps Possiblities

Conversational change is a great tool and means that those life changing techniques from NLP can slip past most filters which people have protecting their mindset, which is good. It facilitates more effective mindset change. People often drop their defenses when listening to music, or watching TV, unfortunately allowing various negative, or disempowering messages to be assimilated by their mindset. Then when in conversation, their defences are usually up, minimizing opportunity for change.

When creating life change, adapting a mindset for success, ability to bypass defences so someone can be empowered on the deepest level, is something which brings that person huge benefit.

The Importance Of Milton Erickson For Key Elements Of NLP

Conversational change was perhaps the biggest breakthrough Richard Bandler and John Grinder brought through their work developing NLP. Much of conversational change has its roots in the clinical hypnosis work of Milton Erickson, who constructed metaphors and ran conversations with clients that led to health conditions healing on an almost instantaneous level. Milton Erickson was a master wordsmith, who also knew the intricacies of his patient’s minds. The meta analysis done with patients during sessions enabled him to clear any issue that clients presented. The book “My Voice Will Go With You” by Sidney Rosen shares a very comprehensive account of the work done by Milton Erikson, and is well worth reading.

Worth noting is that Milton Erickson resisted talking with Richard Bandler multiple times when he was approached by the duo developing neuro linguistic programming. Eventually he agreed to talk with them, and many are very thankful that he did. His work provided the foundation for conversational change, along with various other aspects and techniques of neurolinguistic programming.

Neuro Linguistic Programming Training

NLP training is available in many countries, certainly in most major cities.

As with all things, including coaching, it has to be noted that not all NLP training is equal. There are some incredibly good NLP Master Trainers who lead classes that truly excel. While other trainers leave their students with limiting beliefs which affect both themselves and those they work with.

If you are planning on getting NLP training, studying with the best is advisable.

Online Coaching Coach recommends The Performance Partnership in London. David Shephard is an incredible NLP Master Trainer who induces magical results with his neurolinguistic programming students. Many experiencing their own life changes in incredible ways as a result of attending his NLP training courses. As an important note, David Shephard’s NLP training courses include training in Time-Line Therapy and Hypnosis, enabling additional options in shifting a client’s energy level and mindset.

NLP Practitioner Training Or Master Practitioner Training?

As mentioned above there are some key differences between NLP Practitioners and NLP Master Practitioners, knowing your purpose for studying neuro linguistic programming prior to booking your training course is wise. For many the Practitioner level of NLP is good enough, giving grounding which helps with communication, negotiation and dealing with various situations. The Master Practitioner level of NLP is good when you are planning on using neuro linguistic programming within therapy or coaching sessions that you facilitate. Master Practitioner NLP skills can also be very useful for high level negotiators, largely due to the way it empowers their communication techniques.

Usually, Practitioner level NLP courses are around 7 days in length, with Master Practitioner level NLP training being around 14 days often with a day off in the middle.

That is just the live training though. There is pre-study to be done too.

Doing both Practitioner and Master Practitioner levels of neuro linguistic programming can require as much study as is required in various higher education institutions for some Bachelors Degrees. While the in class part of courses may seem short, they are very intense. Pre-study for courses is essential.

NLP Certification

There are four levels of Neuro Linguistic Programming Certification:

1. Practitioner
2. Master Practitioner
3. Trainer
4. Master Trainer

Each level brings different degrees of skill and depth of understanding. Though the core NLP techniques only vary from Practitioner to Master Practitioner, beyond which becomes about how skilled the person being certified is in teaching others to use those skills effectively.

NLP certification varies between training organizations and membership bodies.

If you’re planning on doing an NLP certification ensure that your trainer operates a requirement of 100% correct answers for all tests in order to pass and certify. If students are unable to use various neuro linguistic programming techniques correctly they can be limited in their ability to help people achieve results. At worst they could even cause greater issues.

Neuro linguistic programming causes changes within mindset, these then affect personality, relationships, thus all of life.

So for anyone using any NLP technique, ensure you can use it properly, thus can generate properly empowering results in those seeking change.

NLP Practitioner Near Me?

There are many skilled NLP practitioners around the world. You may be fortunate enough to have one near you. Most highly skilled NLP Master Practitioners, coaches and therapists choose to work in major population centers. So finding an NLP practitioner near you can be challenging.

Thanks to Skype, Zoom and other such applications, along with mobile technology, having your NLP practitioner near you is unnecessary now.

Organizations such as Online Coaching Coach connect people worldwide with highly skilled NLP practitioners for coaching sessions.

Focusing on finding an NLP practitioner could limit your results. Find the best NLP practitioner that you can, and see if they do online sessions so that you can receive the benefit of high level neuro linguistic programming wherever you are.