What is NLP?

NLP stands for Neuro-Linguistic Programming and explores the relationship between how we think (neuro), how we communicate verbally and non-verbally (linguistic) and how these are programmed to create emotions and behaviour.
By understanding how our mind is programmed to certain situations, we can use techniques to make changes. For example, irrational fears can come about due to many reasons such as having a traumatic event when we were young (e.g., a dog biting us creating a fear of dogs), learnt behaviour (e.g. seeing our mother being scared of rats teaches us to fear them) or behaviour instilled in us from society and further reinforcement of that (e.g. we see many people being scared of spiders and this can be positively reinforced when we get the positive attention from someone rescuing us). The behaviours that are created from the stimulus (seeing a spider/rat etc) are resultant of how we have programmed this in our mind. If we can alter this programme, we can alter the unwanted behaviour.

Taking the example of a fear of spiders, the person will often picture the spider being particularly large and very close to them where someone who is not concerned about spiders will have a representation of a small creature that doesn’t do anyone any harm and is insignificant to them (far away and small). In NLP we would ask the question “if someone can not be concerned about spiders to the extent they are not significant then why can’t the other person be the same?” So we would use a technique with the phobic person so that when they think of a spider they represent it to themselves in a similar way to the person who is not concerned about the little creatures i.e. at a reasonable distance and a proportionate size. Thus we have modelled the phobic person’s behaviour on the person who is not concerned about spiders.

NLP therefore, can remove self imposed limits as it gives individuals choice; choice to choose their behaviours, emotional states and physical states of well-being by understanding how the mind works.