What is NLP and what can you actually do with NLP

NLP was developed in the 1970s by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. They asked themselves why it was that people could change easily in hypnosis, but when hypnosis was not used, it was a lot harder. They wanted to develop something that would make the rapid changes possible even without hypnosis. Unfortunately, they did not succeed....

What is NLP

First, it is good to briefly explain what NLP is. NLP stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming and was devised by Bandler and Grinder to sneak in hypnosis. That's what it came down to in a nutshell.

When you look at the techniques in NLP, it is simply simply hypnosis. The schwisssh, the feeling reversal technique, the fast phobia cure, they are all hypnosis techniques.

The change personal history is a somewhat simple form of a regression and often works fine. They are all simplified forms of hypnosis and only work when NLP practitioners understand this idea, and that is exactly where the problem lies.

Most can't calibrate (sense perception) very well, so they don't know exactly if the client is in hypnosis. If the client is not, then the technique does not work.

The submodalities devised by Bandler is another good example. Genius thought to hypnotize people that way, only many NLP people also believe in it. That's fine, because it helps to come across convincingly, only you're also locking yourself into the model.

NLP and the hypnosis of NLP

The moment you start believing the hypnosis of Bandler and Grinder you are missing the essence of NLP. The essence of NLP is being curious, calibrating and experimenting. Most NLPers today don't really do that.

In addition, most are not very good at hypnosis either. They think they are and that's ok, but they also believe in Erickson's hypnosis and all his stories. They believe that's the way to do hypnosis, but that's often not at all convenient to employ. It can be done much faster and Bandler and Grinder I think realized that just fine, just most of their followers didn't.

Now there's no need to sneak in hypnosis, of course.

Indeed, we are moving toward a time when hypnosis and hypnotherapy are going to become more accepted so we don't necessarily need to use the NLP techniques anymore, simply because they often don't work either and are more tricks. In the hands of the skillful hypnotist, these techniques are very effective, but they are not addressed anywhere in NLP training.

I myself have been to NLP courses that purport to do hypnosis, but none of them come close to actual effective hypnosis.

And that's pretty interesting because Bandler can hypnotize quite well, but he's not the best hypnotist by a long shot. When you start studying the phenomenon of hypnosis you will find that out.

But the techniques that have evolved from the NLP model do apply well to the hypnotherapist. Hence, they are also exam components of the hypnosis 1.0 training.

Below is a video of one of those techniques. It's a very cool technique that works very quickly and effectively.

Below is the video of that technique

You'll see NLP University there in the intro because we also taught NLP courses years ago before it became clear that hypnosis just worked better.

I'd love to hear what you think :-)