And then there’s the ordinary guy in the street, John Doe, Joe Public or - here in Ireland - Sean Citizen.  I love you and hate you - all Johns, Joes and Seans.  I love you because you come right out and ask “What the hell is that when it’s at home?”.  I hate you for that very same reason.  How on earth do I explain NLP?

 

First of all it stands for Neuro-Linguistic Programming.  When I heard that first I thought “Ya wha’ Gay?” and I have to say it still causes me to stop and rack my brains.  Richard Bandler, one of the co-creators (with John Grinder) of NLP, defines it in a recent book as:

 

“NLP is an attitude, methodology and technology that teaches people how to improve the quality of their lives.  It is an educational tool that teaches people how to communicate more effectively with themselves and others.  It is designed to help people have personal freedom in the way they think, feel and behave.”

 

For me the most informative part of that explanation of NLP is “teaches people how to communicate more effectively with themselves” because that’s how change comes about in our own lives.  Someone else telling you to give up smoking, get over your fears, pull yourself together and make the changes - is NEVER going to work.  But if we can get inside our own thinking and find out how to communicate with ourselves how much we WANT to give up smoking, or how there has been a perfectly good reason for having fear in the past but now we want a new way of believing and thinking - imagine how much we could improve our lives every day!

 

That’s what I love about NLP.  It’s about story telling.  It’s about the stories we tell others about ourselves, and more importantly, it’s about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.

 

I think it’s telling that Bandler and Grinder called it Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) because their own background was in technology and linguistics.  But as a term, it doesn’t explain itself to the ordinary punter very well.

 

As I said earlier, for me NLP is about stories.  We hear, create and learn stories and patterns of behaviour from the moment we’re born.  We hear that we are “the cutest baby”, “just like your Daddy” etc. all harmless enough.  When we’re older we learn “if you don’t eat up all your dinner you won’t grow up big and strong” which in our own mind can translate into food being a contentious issue.  We learn “don’t talk to strangers” which can translate into a lack of trust in people and a difficulty in making new friendships.

 

I’m not trying to sound like everything we hear is bad, but we hear a “story” then we tell ourselves a “story” and pretty soon we have formed a pattern around it, and forget the original story.  Our personality development is filled with patterns we adopt based on the stories we’re believing.

 

I used to have a fear of dogs.  Now that may have stemmed from an incident with a dog when I was tiny, or it might have been an imagined drama that I created in my own mind.  I don’t remember.  But for the rest of my life I was left with a fear of dogs, that - at its worst - meant that I wouldn’t go outside the door on my own and couldn’t even enjoy a walk.

 

I went to a therapist to help that.  Turns out it’s not stemming from a fear of dogs, but a fear of being alone.  But that’s another story!

 

The great thing is we can decide or choose - at any time - to believe a different story!  This is the genuine magic of Neuro Linguistic Programming.  When an NLP practitioner listens to us telling our stories, they can see what language we use to tell ourselves stories.  They can then speak our language back to us and help us to choose a more useful story for our lives.

 

In one line - what’s the best thing about NLP?  NLP is about finding and choosing the most useful beliefs, stories and patterns to live the life we want for ourselves.  Apologies to Richard Bandler, John Grinder and my tutors Owen Fitzpatrick and Brian Colbert if I’ve just negated all your years of training me!

 

To get NLP straight from the horse’s mouth, check out www.nlp.ie and www.richardbandler.com .