Pegasus NLP Blog

Today is Remembrance Sunday which commemorates the official ending of World War I - when, on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month Germany signed the armistice with the Allies. It’s the day when we remember those who died in all wars.

Out in the New Forest today we were on the final day of the NLP Core Skills programme and we agreed to take a break at about 10:55 a.m. to allow people to recognize the moment in whichever way they considered was appropriate for them.

I spent a few minutes walking almost ankle-deep in autumn leaves among the trees and listening to the birds. Somewhere in the distance was the sound of a volley of gunfire to mark 11 a.m. and, curiously, just at that moment a huge hawk swooped down almost to ground level about 50 yards in front of where I was standing… Right at that moment a dove might have been more appropriate, perhaps, but it was a wonderful moment.

We have a saying in NLP that “if you always do what you’ve always done you always get what you’ve always got.” (It’s not exclusive to NLP, I know, but it’s one of the ways in which we encourage ourselves to become more adventurous and more flexible in how we deal with situations.)

And, as I walked back to the training room, I tried to imagine how the world would be if political leaders had to prove their worth rather than their wealth and cunning before they were allowed to have power. And if, as part of proving their worth, they had to study the 15,000+ major wars in the last 5000 years of world history to recognize the futility of war - especially ones which are designed to change people’s beliefs.

Yes, I agree, it was just a fantasy… but it might make a difference - there’s a saying: ‘those who aren’t prepared to learn from history are destined to repeat it.’

I’m amazed at the number of individuals, websites and blogs which describe NLP or Neuro-Linguistic Programming as a set of techniques or, even worse and from a recent Daily Express headline, ‘a technique’!

Over 30 years ago, back in the early to mid 70’s, Bandler and Grinder began NLP as a sort of meta-therapy. A therapy that would have the key ingredients of successful therapies. In doing this they ‘modelled’ what worked in the world of therapy; notably Fritz Perls’ Gestalt Therapy, Virginia Satir’s family-oriented therapy and Milton Erickson’s unique approach to hypnoptherapy.

(This was, of course, just the beginning and pretty soon they and their co-explorers realised that NLP had potential in many more fields than just therapy).

To do this modelling they didn’t use ‘techniques’. They used an attitude and a methodology. The attitude was one of wanting to know how things worked. Specifically, in this case, they were curious and fascinated to discover how, despite being radically different from one another, the approaches of Perls, Satir and Eriksson all worked and produced very effective results.

They were also very, very systematic in how they went about studying, or “modelling” these approaches. And that’s where the methodology comes in. By looking at the processes (what was actually going on at the level of structure and patterns) rather than the content (the superficial level of what these experts did and said) they were able to identify the key ingredients which accounted for their successful results.

Out of this Attitude and the application of this Methodology came a whole series of techniques including the Meta Model, Reframing, and the Milton Model.

These techniques, and the dozens of techniques which have since been developed, are the result of the modelling process which is NLP.

Saying that NLP is a technique isn’t just inaccurate - it’s missing the point.

NLP is an approach to life, a way of looking at things, a way of understanding things, a way of thinking, and so on and on… it’s much, much richer than a paltry set of techniques.