The Beginnings of NLP
23 July 09
Annie Burns
At the heart of NLP, is the idea of 'modelling' excellence of human
behavior and that is where the story of NLP begins, founded by the
collaboration in early 1970's of Richard Bandler and John Grinder.
Richard Bandler was a student of mathematics and had a particular
interest in computer science, who got involved in the transcription of
some audio and video seminar tapes by Fritz Perls, the father of
Gestalt Therapy and also Virginia Satir, the founder of Family Therapy.
Bandler realised, that by copying certain aspects of their behavior and
language he could also achieve similar results. And so he began to run
a Gestalt Therapy group on the university campus.
John Grinder, an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the university
was intrigued by Bandler's abilities and asked him to show him what he
was doing and they began to swap learnings. It wasn't long before
Grinder too, could get the same kind of therapeutic results as Bandler
and Perls , simply by copying what Bandler did and said. Then, by a
process of subtraction - that is, by simply leaving out various
elements and testing them - Grinder was able to determine what was
essential and what was idiosyncratic.
Bandler and Grinder joined and wrote the first NLP book called "The
Structure of Magic" and published it in 1975. Already the essence of
NLP had been defined. By studying carefully and analysing thoroughly-
that is- by modelling behavioural excellence, those who were excellent
in their field, it is possible for anyone to copy the crucial elements
and achieve the same results. For example, if you want to be an
excellent public speaker then you need to model someone who is
excellent at that.
The most crucial discovery, was that our subjective experience of the
world has a structure and that how we think about something affects how
we experience it. Referring to the work of Alfred Korzybsky, NLP makes
a clear distinction between the 'territory' - the world itself - and
the 'map' which is the internal interpretation of reality. Hence the
expression "the map is not the territory". The linguist Noam Chomsky
who developed transformational grammer, in which Grinder was the
expert, had shown that our map will always be an incomplete and
inaccurate version of whats out in the world because of the process of
distortion, deletion and generalisation.