I just read with some angst that yet another journalist has lumped NLP into the field of psychotherapy again. This is incorrect. NLP has its roots in linguistic modeling. It just so happened that Bandler and Grinder were formalizing NLP methods by looking at some linguistic models who happened to be psychotherapists because it seemed like they were doing something extraordinary.
If they were modeling chefs, you can’t say that NLP is about cooking. NLP is a science of modeling, but it happened to be modeling processes of things that have already been working. Psychiatrists have said that NLP is not scientifically valid, but that’s silly. NLP is not about scientific validation – it’s about modeling.