| WHAT IS NEURO-LINGUISTIC PROGRAMMING ( NLP)? |
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By Steve Andreas The question “What is NLP?” is a bit like asking, “What is Physics?” because there are so many possible ways to answer it. One answer is that NLP is able to accomplish what the beginnings of psychology promised a hundred years ago, and never quite delivered—a practical way of understanding our thinking and our behavior that can be used to make rapid and useful changes in our lives. Another answer is that it is the study of the structure of subjective experience, the inner workings of our minds, and how to use that knowledge to enrich our choices. Much of this structure is typically unconscious, or preconscious. However much of this structure can become conscious, altered, and then allowed to become unconscious and automatic again. Someone once described NLP as “Cognitive Behavioral Therapy on steroids” because although it is fundamentally similar in orientation, NLP makes much finer distinctions and has many specific processes, principles, and presuppositions that make change much faster. Yet another description is that it is a collection of methods for achieving specific personal outcomes, along with a common understanding of how they all work, which can be used to develop new methods. NLP is sometimes described as a pragmatic methodology for modeling human excellence that can be applied to any context that includes at least one human being. Once modeled, anyone can learn the model in order to learn the skill, an example of a much-overused term, “accelerated learning.” Someone once pointed out that “The human brain is the only self-maintaining, general purpose computer that can be manufactured by unskilled labor.” It is also the only computer that is only partially programmed at the factory, and doesn’t come with an operating manual. A child’s brain doesn’t have the kinds of programs that we have as adults, and there are no instructions about the operating system, or how to program it well. Although there is still some disagreement about exactly what kind of computer the brain is, it is clear that we input information through our five senses, process it in a variety of ways, using our ability to remember, forecast, connect different experiences, and generalize about them, and then output behavior and responses. Our output of behavior and responses then become additional inputs to be processed, in a never-ending cybernetic process. Since we have no operating manual—and no keyboard—each of us essentially had to program ourselves, with some help from our parents and others. Despite the best efforts of our parents, much of our programming was somewhat random, and was often the result of accidental events, some supportive and some traumatic. Much of our programming operates reasonably well, while other parts usually don’t work well at all. So another definition of NLP is that it is an operating manual for the human brain, providing “software for wetware,” that can be used to reprogram ourselves when we are less than fully satisfied with our responses. From the e-book, "Help with Negative Self-Talk" by Steve Andreas. http://helpfornegativeselftalk.com Steve Andreas is one of the leading developers and teachers of NLP. He is one of my Great Mentors, and I highly recommend his trainings, books, audios and videos. Please go to http://www.steveandreas.com
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