Background

Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) refers to a training philosophy and set of training techniques first developed by John Grindler and Richard Bandler in the mid-1970s as an alternative form of therapy. Grindler (a psychologist) and Bandler (a student of linguistics) were interested in how people influence each other and in how the behaviors of very effective people could be duplicated. They were essentially interested in discovering how successful communicators achieved their success. They studied successful therapists and concluded that they “followed similar patterns in relating to their clients and in the language they used, and that they all held similar beliefs about themselves and what they were doing” (Revell and Norman 1997: 14). Grindler and Bandler developed NLP as a system of techniques therapists could use in building rapport with clients, gathering information about their internal and external views of the world, and helping them achieve goals and bring about personal change. They sought to fill what they perceived to be a gap in psychological thinking and practice of the early 1970s by developing a series of step-by-step procedures that would enable people to improve themselves: