From: friday@well.sf.ca.us (Carol Anne Ogdin)
Subject: Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP)
Summary: A Brief explanation of NLP
Keywords: Behavior, NLP, Communication
Organization: Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1992 15:46:18 GMT

Neuro-Linguistic Programming grew out of the chance meeting of Richard Bandler
(then editor of a number of psych/behavior books) and John Grinder (then a
psycholinguist at UC Santa Cruz).  They video taped Milton M. Erickson, M.D.,
the worlds' foremost medical hypnotist, and began to notice subtle patterns
of interaction between Erickson and his subjects, and began to translate
those into teachable skills.  Later they added a lot of stuff from Bateson
and others.  Richard Bandler is a wantonly creative guy, absolutely unfet-
terred by established practice, so he has continued to expand his searches
into progressively more sophisticated areas; Grinder has an academic bent,
and was good at fitting what Bandler did into a larger model.  They founded
the NLP Society in the early 70's in Santa Cruz, and it fell apart in the
80's.  Along the way they trained lots of people who are now Practitioners,
Master Practitioners and a few Trainers.

NLP's predicates are few:  All experience is stored in the senses (pictures,
sounds, feelings, tastes, smells), and can be accessed, manipulated and
reported; Correllary:  Manipulating those sensory experiences means we can
manipulate the effect they have on the way we recall those experiences.
Another:  True communication between people must be reduced sensory grounded
terms to be complete.  Another predicate:  All experiences are connected,
some more strongly than others; particular stimuli will cause people to
assume an internal state in response, and that will manifest as subtle shifts
in external behavior.  If you become sufficiently trained to notice those
subtle shifts, you can engage in interactions that--to the uninitiated--would
appear to be highly intuitive or even "mind-reading."

One important aspect of NLP comes from psycholinguistics:  How our internal
experience shapes our choice of words, and how words can shape our experience.
For example, appending ", yet" to a phrase like, "I can't do that" changes
the internal experience from an absolute to the potential for change  (try
saying it aloud each of the two ways and notice how your experience subtly
shifts).

There are a few more, but those are the main points.  Unfortunately, I have
not seen a book from which one could learn NLP; it is an experiential skill,
and can only be learned by practice.  Most people will read about NLP from
a book, skip all the exercises, conclude they "know" NLP, and then go about
giving a NLP a bad name by practicing something else altogether.  It's sort
of like learning calculus from a text without ever having done an exercise
or solved a single real problem (funny, people wouldn't then call themselves
mathematicians...but they will claim behavioral skills!).

The following books are recommended:
John Grinder & Richard Bandler:  THE STRUCTURE OF MAGIC (& Part II), two
volumes, Science & Behavior Books, 1975
Jerry Richardson:  THE MAGIC OF RAPPORT, Meta Publications, 1987
Michael McMaster & John Grinder:  PRECISION - A NEW APPROACH TO COMMUNIC-
TION, Precision Models (Beverly Hills, CA), 1980

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    Friday                        "When a miracle happens in your vicinity
    (aka Carol Anne Ogdin)                         ...take credit for it!"