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 [...]]]> photo credit: Ranoush.

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.

In fact, the process of anchoring comes from psychology, known as conditioning. If conditioning works, anchoring works. There’s tons of literature on behavioral conditioning.

There’s plenty of literature on the fast phobia cure, which is based on the psychological treatment in desensitization therapy. If desensitization therapy works, then the fast phobia cure works because it’s been modeled.

NLP was never meant to be simply a model for psychotherapy. It is a linguistic approach to understand what’s going on in the mind. So, newbies, please don’t lump NLP together with psychological testing. If you want to see the effects of NLP, then show me a target, and I’ll model it for you. This is what good master practitioners of NLP do. We will model results and figure out strategies to reach outcomes appropriate to the model.

However, psychotherapists who learn NLP find out that they are able to deepen their understanding of psychotherapy. Marketers who learn NLP are able to deepen their understanding of marketing. NLP puts into the hands of the average person, a way to model the blueprints of excellence. You use NLP methods for modeling and achieving similar results as others.

One clear example is in the area of Public speaking. For the longest time, I just could not understand why I didn’t win speech competitions. Then after I applied my modeling strategies, I discovered that there were certain things I had to do in order to jump through the hoops. From 1997 to 2002, I cracked the competitive speaking code and emerged champion for Evaluation Speeches. Using the same models, I taught others to win other international speech competitions.

NLP is about linguistics – understanding the representations in your mind. It spans many possible theories, which are highly accepted in the professional field of linguistics. Some of them come from the now defunct Transformational Grammar. Newer linguistic models (Gricean Pragmatics, Speech-Act Theory, Systemic Functional Grammar and other models in Pragmatics) will point the way to the achievement of more effective representations of the way the mind works.

To find out more about this, join my mailing list and I’ll update you when I’m running a real NLP certification training.