What Is Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP)?

In this track, Jacci describes what NLP is, why she learned NLP, and how she shares that knowledge. This is an addition to her track called A Short History Of NLP, and it describes how NLP is useful in helping people to overcome emotional challenges.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to this quick talk about what is NLP?

I've been asked so many times what is NLP?

Neuro Linguistic Programming,

Which is why we shorten it to NLP because it's a bit of a mouthful and I do already have a track about the history of NLP,

How it was started and who was involved back in the 1970s.

So I want to supplement that by really talking about what NLP is all about and give you a bit of an insight into why I got into it in the first place.

Now NLP is actually described as the study of the structure of subjective experience,

Which is a few short words encapsulating a very large concept.

Breaking that down it just means it's a study of how we all experience the world,

How our environment and everything around us is the same,

But how we experience it,

How we take it in through our five senses,

How we then encode it and put it into our memories,

How we then take it into our world and our unconscious mind is all completely unique and individual,

But it does follow some structure and there is a structure of that experience and we can actually learn what that structure is all about and how our senses take in information and how that's processed through our unconscious mind and how it's revealed in the way that we behave and our language,

How we describe things,

How we remember things and how that's also very much coloured by our own values and our own belief system.

So it focuses on how individuals interpret their experiences through their neurology and it involves understanding the mind,

Our language and the behavioural programming that actually achieves specific outcomes.

We know that we all have,

We're all programmed in some way to respond automatically to things and how we all respond differently because we all have our own individual programs that have been built during our life experience because of our subjective experience and how that actually works.

When you learn NLP,

You learn all of those individual things and it gives you an extra toolkit.

It means that in my case,

I used to be a manager of a sales force.

I managed a sales team and I used to coach people and the usual coaching things that we would be taught how to use really didn't satisfy me.

They didn't give me the flexibility to manage to coach people on a very individual basis.

When I learned NLP,

I was able then to understand people's subjective experience.

I was able to decode how they were thinking by listening to their language and then actually tailor my coaching approach to them completely individually to them.

It made me so much more compassionate and aware and it means that I get a deep understanding of what's going on for people just by listening to them.

NLP is also full of techniques for change.

There are various change techniques in NLP.

What the presuppositions are in NLP is that we're all open to change,

That actually our programming,

The way that we respond automatically doesn't have to stay hardwired.

Actually,

It can be changed and we can learn to behave differently and it can happen quickly.

It doesn't have to take a long time.

So we can help individuals release negative states,

We can change limiting beliefs with it and we have techniques such as timeline processes where we can take somebody into their past and change their memory and how they respond to things that may have been traumatic to them in the past.

So we really can help people to overcome emotional challenges and the other thing about NLP is it models excellence.

That's how it started.

So the importance of modelling successful behaviours from others means that in the world of NLP they've been broken down into their constituent parts and can then be taught and you can take them on board yourself,

Which means that individuals can adopt different strategies,

We can have more effective strategies and attitudes and we can learn that.

The whole thing really,

This whole approach of NLP fosters personal growth and it means that you can also pass on those techniques,

Those understandings,

Those ways of being that I share in all of the talks that I have here on Insight Timer.

For me NLP is just,

I describe it as this huge yummy chocolate bar that's,

If you break off little pieces of it and just taste it,

That little bit is enough to really make a difference in your life.

You don't have to learn the entire canon of NLP,

Although I have as I've gone through the process of learning it from being a practitioner to a master practitioner and now I'm qualified to teach it.

You don't have to go through all of that,

You can learn a little bit of NLP and it can make a big difference in your life because it helps you to understand how your unconscious mind works,

What's going on for you when you have certain behaviours and it gives you the tools and techniques to make changes to yourself so that you can live your best life,

So that you can live a really good life,

So that you can really overcome your challenges and have a life that gives you everything that you could possibly want.

So that's basically what NLP is.

I'm a big advocate of it obviously and it's changed my life completely and I've been in that world of NLP for the last 23 years.

So thank you for listening to this short track,

I hope it's answered your question about what is NLP and if you want to know more about it,

Explore it.

There's loads of books,

There's loads of courses and of course I'm always dropping in little chocolate chunks of NLP here at Insight Timer so that you can pick it up as you want,

Make those little changes to your life that can be so powerful.

So thank you for listening and as always,

Much love.