Neuro Linguistic Programming in a Glance — Behavior Magic For Beginner

NLP therapist work people to understand their thinking and behavior magic patterns, emotional state, and aspirations. I first heard and learned about Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) when a fellow JCI member talked about hypnosis and demonstrated how to know if an individual is lying. I was very fascinated about it especially when he explained the idea behind eye moments and a person’s thought process.

Learning about NLP will be very valuable for people in the behavioral and social sciences field. It’s basically a secret code that has been right in front of us all along!

Humans’ basic neurological system transmits information that you receive from your environment through your senses and then to your brain. The environment, in this context, is everything that is external to you, this also includes your sensory organs, such as your eyes, ears, skin, stomach, and lungs.

Your brain processes the information and then communicates the messages back to your organs. A prime example of this is how your eyes, automatically close when it feels tired. The information processed can also create emotions, and thus you may feel joy, cry, or laugh.

In short every processed information from your environment (and everything external) results in a certain behavior!.

NLP basically helps us understand what drives human behavior, straight from how our mind process things. The ability to do anything in life – be it swimming in a pool, having the ability to cook a meal, or even as simple as reading – depends on how your body responds to the stimuli on your nervous system. Therefore, NLP can be used in discovering how to think and communicate more effectively within yourself and with others.

Introduction to Neuro Linguistics Programming (NLP)
Example of NLP in Action

This topic is particularly fascinating because this is as close as it gets to actual mind control. We’ll discuss more of these in the next articles about NLP. Just so you have an idea here is an excerpt about the Milton model that’s gives an overview of the hocus pocus that happens through NLP.

“The user of the Milton Model attempts to lead someone to a conclusion they may not want to make by use of mirroring techniques like eye contact, pacing, overloading the conscious mind with nonverbal communication (touching your hand or leg), and vague suggestions that play into your subconscious. By keeping the conversation nebulous, the listener digests the information in a way they feel most comfortable.

This kind of mind control technique turns up all the time in advertising. By being purposefully vague, advertisers bombard you with a ton of useless information and let you attempt to sort it out. Advertisers love using non-specific language to guide customers towards making a purchase they wouldn’t normally make. How many times have you found yourself suckered into an ad because of the copy? Probably more times than you’re willing to admit.”

Introduction to Neuro Linguistics Programming (NLP)

Before we go into the pillars of the discipline, let us first look at the breakdown of NLP to understand its roots: Neuro – refers to your neurological system. NLP is rooted in the idea that thought processes (both conscious and unconscious) are translated from sensory information (how you experience the world through your senses) Linguistic – refers to how you use language to communicate how you conceptualize and capture experience, and make sense of the world. NLP, is rooted in linguistics which is the study of how both the words you speak and body language influences your experience. Programming – inspired from learning theory and addresses how you mentally denote (also termed as code) your experiences. Personal programming includes your internal processes and strategies (thinking patterns) that you are using to make decisions, evaluate, solve problems, learn, and get results. NLP teaches you how to recode your experiences and reorganise your internal programming so that you can get the outcomes you want.

It was in 1970s that Richard Bandler of University of Santa Cruz and John Grinder worked and studied with some of the renowned psychiatrists and therapists (Milton Erickson, Virginia Satir, and Fritz Perls). It has its roots in a therapeutic setting with the help of the mentioned psychoterapists. In their work, Bandler and Grinder also sought help of the linguistic skills of Alfred Korzybski and Noam Chomsky; psychotherapist Paul Watzlawick and social anthropologist Gregory Bateson. From the early days of NLP encompassed different disciplines in many countries around the world. The discipline has certainly journeyed a long way from Santa Cruz in the 1970s, and since there has been no sign of the discipline’s decline. Other pioneers have picked up the concept and pushed it forward – using it help transform the lives of real people and finding practical uses. Today you can find NLP applications for salespeople, coaches, accountants,doctors and nurses, taxi drivers, , teachers, animal trainers, workers, retired people, parents, and teenagers alike.

Example of NLP In Action:

The formal definition of NLP is that it’s: ‘the study of the structure of our subjective experience’. The following is just a demonstration for you to see this process in action you can try the following: Pay attention on how you think of things/ Imagine a hot summer’s day. As you stand your kitchen holding a lemon you’ve taken from the fridge.Try to focus on it. Look at the outside of it, the yellow waxy skin, maybe even with green marks at the ends. Feel how cold it is inside your hand. Raise it to your nose then smell it. Press it gently and notice its weight in your palm. Take a knife and go cut it in half. Pay attention as you hear the juices start run and focus on how strong the smell is. Bite into the lemon and allow the juice to swirl around in your mouth. Now let’s go back… Did you almost taste the lemon even if the scenario was just in your head? This demonstration shows how simple words can have the power to trigger your saliva glands. Even just hearing the word ‘lemon’ and your brain kicks an almost ghostly sensory response. The words that you are reading told your brain that you have an actual lemon in your hand. This shows the power of words.. you may be thinking that you are only using words to help you create meanings, but the truth is, they have been creating your reality!

There is so much more to Neuro-Linguistic Programming and this behavior magic and I hope that you stay tuned for the other articles soon!