How does NLP work?

[The Fantomaya]

I'm not familiar with NLP and NLP techniques. I read all the posts here in this thread and I got some very vague ideas.

Can someone please tell me how this system uses the language of the mind? I'm lost here. I tried to research about the topic but I got more confused.

[Paddy Landau]

That's a big question. To explain NLP, you need two different answers.

First Answer

The first answer involves the core of NLP. At its root, NLP is a system to model and copy anything that someone else does, and to take such a process and refine and improve it.

That's the core.

Now, Richard Bandler and John Grinder, the developers of NLP, rather enjoyed copying success, and they had a taste for helping people with psychological problems.

So, Bandler and Grinder practised their new art by modelling the world's most successful people, mostly therapists including hypnotherapists; refining, improving and simplifying those processes; and then copying the results to themselves and to others who needed help.

In fact, Bandler used to go into psychiatric wards and persuade the psychiatrists to give over their worst cases, where the psychiatrists had given up, and he would proceed to cure the patients. Some of his stories are very funny.

This gave rise to the second answer...

Second Answer

Bandler and Grinder packaged their discoveries together and sold them, making lots of money. In the process, they created a new therapy (which we call NLP) and has helped to influence and revolutionise therapy, including hypnosis, EFT, and certain styles of psychology. It has influenced the direction of psychiatry, too.

In this second answer, NLP is a huge toolkit that continues to grow and develop. In fact, only last year, Bandler approved TFT (a predecessor to EFT) as part of NLP.

Naturally, NLP includes hypnosis as one of its most powerful tools.

[Fargo]

That is a quite odd technique if you look at Paddy's first answer. It seems like this method is kind of like plagiarizing but you would edit it and add your own things to make it better.

[lightseeker]