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    An Introduction to NLP: Exploring What Works
    An Introduction to NLP: Exploring What Works
    An Introduction to NLP: Exploring What Works
    Ebook164 pages2 hours

    An Introduction to NLP: Exploring What Works

    By Damian Hamill and David Kerr

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    About this ebook

    In this eBook, Certified NLP Trainers David Kerr and Damian Hamill take the reader through a fascinating and thoughtful introduction to the field of Neuro-linguistic Programming.

    Rather than merely focusing on techniques and superficial content, David and Damian empower the reader to harvest the full fruits of NLP by exploring the fundamental structure and underpinning concepts that make it the flexible and effective approach to life and work that it is.

    They help the reader build understanding step-by-step, embroidering the learning with enlightening examples and intriguing exercises to really integrate and bring to life the material being taught.

    Despite their particular focus on the use of NLP in work and business, the authors show how NLP can offer relevant and rewarding skills to every area of your life.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublishereBookIt.com
    Release dateApr 26, 2016
    ISBN9781456612894
    An Introduction to NLP: Exploring What Works

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      Book preview

      An Introduction to NLP - Damian Hamill

      NLP’.

      Introduction

      Hello, and welcome to this eBook, An Introduction to NLP: Exploring What Works. During the course of this eBook we will be helping you develop an understanding of some of the basic concepts and approaches from the field of NLP, or Neuro-linguistic Programming to give it it's full title. We want you to be able to take away from this exploration new perspectives and ways of thinking about the world and how you interact with it. We believe that by making use of these new approaches you will develop greater flexibility in navigating the challenges and opportunities of life and achieve better results and more satisfaction as a result.

      As much of the business of Watt Works is in the area of business consultancy, we will be taking a particular look at the application of NLP within the workplace and business world, however it is important to appreciate that NLP gives us a wide range of transferable skills that can be applied to almost any area of life - business, health, therapy, parenting and sport to name a few.

      This is because NLP at its purest is a way of thinking - one that is often more empowering than the ways in which many of us typically greet the world. As such, you can use its precepts to influence the way you perceive, think and respond in a wide range of situations, regardless of the context.

      From time to time as we progress we may suggest that you take part in a practical personal exploration of an NLP concept and you will be given the opportunity to do that. If you wish to read all the way through on the first occasion without pausing, that is fine. On future occasions, however, you may wish to use the exercises to enhance your understanding of the material we are looking at.

      However you chose to learn and make use of what we offer you in this eBook we are confident that your life and experience will be enriched by an appreciation of NLP.

      Section 1 – An Overview

      In the first part of this eBook we will be attempting to offer some definitions of NLP - a challenging task in itself. We will be looking briefly at the history of NLP and identifying some of the most important influences upon the field. We will also be exploring the fundamental mind-set and philosophy of NLP – the attitude and assumptions that make it so effective and flexible.

      What is NLP?

      So, first of all let's look at the question - what is NLP? Despite the fact that we are Certified NLP Trainers, this can be a difficult question to answer. NLP is a very broad field that has absorbed ideas and concepts from a wide range of sources. Trying to define it in a way that people can immediately understand is like trying to give a quick and simple description of sport, or art, or nature, to someone who doesn't understand these things already. People tend to come to understand NLP as they progress through learning and using it, however we realise that you probably feel entitled to some sort of definition to begin with, even if we evolve it as we move forward.

      Let's start with the name - Neuro-linguistic programming. It's a bit of a tongue twister. By way of analogy we are reminded of, many years ago, seeing a light-hearted magazine advert for a bourbon whiskey called Wild Turkey. The text said something along the lines of:

      Advertising experts will tell you that to have a successful product you need to have a cool and sexy product name. Where did we go right?

      We could take the same line of thinking with NLP. To have survived being christening with such a grim name it must have something pretty powerful to offer, and we believe it has.

      The name is comprised of three elements:

      Neuro - this refers to our nervous system and reflects the fact that all the information we become aware of relating to our internal and external worlds is processed through our nervous system. Since our nervous system, no matter how remarkable it may be, has certain constraints, our perspectives and worldview are necessarily limited by our neurology. For example, the human eye can only perceive a certain portion of the light spectrum. There is a vast amount of visual information out there that we simply never become aware of, yet which is readily accessible to other creatures that can detect other parts of the light spectrum. An owl will see a night scene vastly differently from a human being and a snake's visual perception will be heavily based upon the infra-red spectrum.

      The same is the case for sound, as the very concept of a dog whistle implicitly acknowledges. Dogs can hear them - humans can't. And if we consider elephants we find that they communicate using infrasonic sounds, which are too deep for humans to hear.

      In terms of touch we also experience limitations on perception due to the fact that some parts of our body are much more densely populated with nerve endings than others, meaning we have greater sensitivity there. For example, the minimum distance between two points on the upper arm that a subject can perceive as being different when subjected to touch stimulus is 30 times greater than on the little finger. In other words, what would be perceived as two separate locations on the little finger would be perceived as the same location on the upper arm, unless the distance between touches on the upper arm was increased very substantially.

      Our other senses are also limited in a way that ensures we only obtain a portion of the available information about the world. Our senses of smell and taste are remarkably impoverished in comparison with a great many other species and we have virtually no ability to detect electro-magnetic activity, unlike animals such as pigeons or sharks.

      In short, our awareness of the external world is both made possible, but also limited, by our neurology. We never really get the full picture, sound, feel, taste or smell. Since we use the same neurology to construct our inner worlds - that is, to think about stuff - our thoughts have the same limitations.

      Linguistic – this refers to the fact that in order to think and communicate with ourselves and others, we tend to edit and package up all of the sensory information into these things called 'words'. This is convenient, as it enables us to compress a vast amount of sensory experience into a brief visual representation or sound. Think of ‘zipping’ a file to easily send a huge amount of data and you will get the rough idea. Words are labels that represent something and they work pretty well when the label is accurately applied and when everyone understands the same thing from the label. We can run into problems, however, when we mislabel something and respond to it as if it is something it isn't. We can encounter further problems when a particular label (word) means one thing to us and something completely different to another person. NLP recognises the immense power that language has to shape our reality and gives us practical skills to use language effectively, whilst also cautioning about the implicit potential risks of filtering our experience through language.

      Programming - NLP appreciates that a great many of our seemingly autonomous behaviours are actually constructed using a series of sequential stages that produce an end result. Often these stages run together so swiftly and spontaneously that we perceive a single event but, by breaking the experience down into its individual steps, we can see that there is actually a process, rather than a single event. Let us give you an analogy. Damian comes originally from Belfast and one of Northern Ireland's little known secrets is that it is home to a famous aircraft ejector seat manufacturer. If you watch a pilot being ejected from his aircraft it looks like an instant, completely seamless action. The fact is that in fractions of seconds a whole range of different actions have happened that lead to the successful ejection of the pilot - and they all have to happen in the correct order for a successful ejection to occur. I am sure you can imagine the unfortunate consequences that would result if the pilot was ejected from the cockpit before the explosive bolts had detonated to remove the cockpit canopy, rather than afterwards.

      By recognising that many of the things we experience result from programmed sequences of thought and behaviour, NLP gives us the knowledge and tools to explore the structure of these programmes. If the results of the programmes are negative, we can disrupt or alter the sequencing in order to produce more useful outcomes. If the existing structure produces something useful, we have an identified structure that we can use to enable other people to acquire the same skill.

      So, there you are, we have looked at the elements of Neurology, Linguistics and Programming in terms of how they combine to give shape to this body of knowledge called Neuro-linguistic programming.

      Sounds a bit dry, we hear you say? Very wordy and abstract? You may have a point. So let's throw in a little bit of human colour at this stage to give it a little bit of texture and juice by looking briefly at the history of NLP.

      A Brief History of NLP

      NLP as a recognisable field has been around since the early 1970s, yet even in such a short time it has managed to attract a mythology, folklore and it's fair share of controversy and schism. Consequently, the brief history we will give you will be, at best, a rough guide to the development of the field. I am sure that if you showed the version of history we are about to give to many of the ‘wagon-train pioneers’ of NLP over the last few decades, there would be some raised eyebrows and a good smattering of But that's not what happened and I don't remember it like that, but in many ways such disagreement would be entirely in keeping with the spirit of NLP which emphasises the subjectivity of experience and the elusiveness of a consensual reality.

      William Maxwell stated:

      What we refer to confidently as memory is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling.

      Since NLP developed in a fairly maverick and organic manner and there was no official historian chronicling events, it is to be expected that recollections differ. Add to the mix the fact that a number of the most important co-creators ended up in court some years ago disputing amongst each other who 'owns' NLP and we might have good reason to be cautious about taking as gospel any particular version of history. Broadly speaking, however, what happened was this…

      In the early 1970s the campus of the University of California at Santa Cruz was a real hot-bed of radical thinking and innovation. A major approach at the University was that all students were required to study diverse subjects in addition to their main discipline. This was to encourage a broader perspective of thinking and cross-fertilisation between areas of study that might otherwise have existed in a silo-like isolation. There were many pioneering minds around the Santa Cruz campus at that time, both established geniuses such as the anthropologist and cybernetician, Gregory Bateson, and a range of freethinking, radical academics and brilliant students. Amongst their number were John Grinder, a former Special Forces soldier and skilled linguist, who was a member of the University teaching faculty; and Richard Bandler, a student studying mathematics, computing and psychology. Bandler was also fascinated by the form of psychotherapy called Gestalt Therapy, whose leading developer was the German former psychoanalyst, Fritz Perls. Bandler had made extensive recordings of Perls and, by absorbing himself in the mind-set and behaviours of Perls (it has been said that he dressed similarly to Perls, learnt to chain-smoke and speak in a German accent) he managed to acquire a degree of intuitive skill in the practice of Gestalt Therapy. Bandler sought Grinder’s

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