What NLP Really Is

This is obviously open to interpretation. There are many branches of the Neuro-Linguistic Programming tree, and perhaps even more offshoots... It seems every guru has their own definitions and opinions these days.

I've been studying NLP and hypnosis for around 4 years now. I've studied under many people here in NYC and I've tried to grab a little bit of everything that seems to work. I've also studied the original NLP works, such as Frogs into Princesses.

I've begun to realize something that I wanted to share with you guys. There's an overwhelming amount of information out there. I think many of us know this, at some level or another. If you go on YouTube, you can find thousands of videos on hypnosis, EFT, reframing, pacing, eye access cues, trance, inductions, and a host of other topics...

A lot of people don't even know the basic premise of NLP. And what happens? They get lost, overwhelmed, lose interest in practicing and learning, and become demotivated.

I've found that when you understand the basic premises of NLP and its foundation, the rest of it (the tools, technologies, patterns, etc.) come very naturally...

The very basic premise of NLP is simple. You may or may not have heard it before. I'm sure a number of you have. If you haven't, that's okay too. It's "The map is not the territory." Everything else that follows in NLP is supported by this understanding.

Allow me to explain.

NLP takes a radically different approach to therapy and working with the mind. It doesn't make an attempt to "fix" or understand the "why"... That's all very complicated and isn't all that important for change... It attempts to understand the "how" of our behaviors. What is it we to get ourselves so stuck? What do we think? What images come into our head? How do we feel?

Most schools of therapies here in the United States try to uncover the "why", thinking that there's a "standard" way to fix things for people. This just isn't the case.

This is because our map is not the territory. Our understanding of the world is not made up of what the world actually is. Our subconscious mind, the deeper level of our mind, works with symbols... Our sense of the world is built upon a series of representations. When we think of something, we don't think of what it actually is... We think of our own representation of it, and everything we feel, think, imagine, visualize, etc. is simply a symbol representation of that concept. Practitioners of therapy obviously don't have the same representations as us!

NLP is taking this premise and working with it. How can we work with ones representations of the world? How can we shift them around, play with them, explore them, make them work, destroy them, reorder them, turn them upside down, rightside up, etc.?

This concept of representations is essential to actually making NLP work for you.

Lastly, a lot of patterns in NLP take practice. They may not work the first, second, or third time around the way you want them to. This is because most of these patterns induce a certain trance, and a new trance is a new state of mind... And a new state of mind is unfamiliar to our mind. It takes practice because it's new! It can be scary at first for some. It can be "no!" until we practice it and become used to it. Then we begin to understand "ahh..." and we see how the resources all fit together, nicely, one after another, and the pattern begins to make sense. This is when we begin to see results.

Hope this helps in some way.