20 MINUTES TO MASTER ... NLP

The inaugural meeting was held at the London Business School on 8 May 1985 and around 60 people participated. The first executive committee consisted of: Chair: Eileen Whicker, Vice Chair: Peter Rust, Treasurer: Roy Johnson, Secretary: Regan Masters, Membership Secretary: Paul Clarke. Eric Robbie helped to prepare the Association’s first newsletter and Frank Kevlin, later to become Chair, helped set up and print the first issue of Rapport, which became a quarterly magazine of international reputation.

From these beginnings, ANLP expanded to around 1,000 members in the late 1990s, worldwide, in all walks of life. After Eileen, Chairs of the Association were Frank Kevlin (who died very tragically at a young age), Sue Burke, Peter Child, Carol Harris and Derek Jackson. In 1996, the Psychotherapy and Counselling Section (PCS), which had existed for several years, became a wholly owned subsidiary company of ANLP, catering for those involved in therapeutic applications and leaving the main body of ANLP covering those in business, personal development work and a myriad of other activities, with its main activities being public information, recognition of training organizations, conference organization and magazine production.

Later, PCS separated from ANLP and it became an information and networking organization rather than a professional body.

PEOPLE

Let us now turn to some other people who were involved in NLP’s development, contributed ideas which were seminal to its progress, or helped popularize and promote it as a field of activity.

RICHARD BANDLER AND JOHN GRINDER

As mentioned above, these two men are recognized as NLP’s major co-founders. Although they are generally credited with ‘creating NLP’, many of its ideas and principles had come from earlier thinkers, or been based on their ideas and writings.

FRANK PUCELIK

Frank is an international business trainer and author, living in Ukraine. He has been a professor at Oklahoma City University, spent time in Vietnam and worked with disaffected and drug-addicted youngsters. He studied at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he and Bandler started a Gestalt group.

ALFRED KORZYBSKI

Recognized as the founding father of general semantics, Count Korzybski had a major effect on the development of NLP and, in particular, the ‘Meta-Model’ (seeChapter 3 (#litres_trial_promo)).

Born in Warsaw in 1879, Korzybski trained as an engineer. He served in the First World War, attached to the General Staff Intelligence Department of the Second Russian Army, and later served in the US and Canadian military services, remaining in the USA from 1921. He developed his theory of time-binding around 1921 and published his first book, Manhood of Humanity, in 1921 and his most famous work, Science and Sanity, in 1933.

Korzybski was founder and Director of the Institute of General Semantics, which was established in 1938 as a centre for training in his work. One of its aims was ‘neuro-linguistic’ research and education. Korzybski was the first person to use the term ‘neuro-linguistic’ and it appeared in Science and Sanity; he continued to write and lecture until his death in 1950.

NOAM CHOMSKY

Chomsky was a professor of linguistics whose work, based on Korzybski’s earlier ideas, was key to much of the development of NLP. Now a revolutionary figure prominent in US politics, he became very anti-establishment at the time of the Vietnam War. Chomsky’s work on general semantics first appeared in a range of published papers and culminated in the 1957 publication Syntactic Structures (now out of print). This work established the transformational model of language, with its concepts of deep structure and surface structure, elements which feature heavily in NLP’s approach to precision in language. Chomsky’s 1965 book Aspects of Theory and Syntax, published by MIT Press, is an easier publication for the general reader.

GREGORY BATESON

Bateson was a British anthropologist and author who influenced several of NLP’s leading proponents. His father, a geneticist who coined the word ‘genetics’, named him after the famous Russian geneticist Gregor Mendel.

Bateson wrote on a range of topics including communications, systems theory/cybernetics, psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, biological evolution and genetics. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his first attempts to synthesize cybernetic ideas with anthropological data. He was ‘ethnologist’ at the Veterans Administration Hospital at Palo Alto from 1949 until1962. At the time he was married to Margaret Mead, another famous anthropologist, who also worked with him on many projects.

Later, Bateson’s communication studies were extended to the animal kingdom and, together with his then wife, Lois, he kept about a dozen octopuses in their living-room! He went on to become director of a dolphin laboratory in the Virgin Islands, where he continued his studies on communications in animals for about a year. In 1963 he went to the Oceanic Institute in Hawaii to work on problems of animal and human communication and it was there that he wrote most of his book Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972).

Bateson also led the Palo Alto Group (#ulink_7edc8bee-4efa-5af2-b0a7-6a7278c44597) and lectured at the University of Santa Cruz at the time that Bandler and Grinder were developing NLP. He was a neighbour of Bandler’s and it was he who suggested that Bandler and Grinder visit Milton Erickson (seeErickson (#litres_trial_promo)).

Bateson considered that ideas were not abstract concepts, but the basis for the way people live their lives. He said that people should think and act systemically, by allowing both conscious and unconscious processes to shape their decisions, and by developing congruity in diverse parts of the mind. In the preface to Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Mark Engel says:

The central idea in this book is that we create the world that we perceive, not because there is no reality outside our heads … but because we select and edit the reality we see to conform to our beliefs about what sort of world we live in … For a man to change his basic, perception-determining beliefs … he must first become aware that reality is not necessarily as he believes it to be.

CARLOS CASTANEDA

An anthropologist and writer whose works greatly influenced Bandler and Grinder and their associates, Castaneda made great use of metaphor, often in conversational dialogues, and some of his ideas were to form the basis for therapeutic interventions. His thoughts on ‘stopping the world’ – a concept where the mind is stilled to allow expansion of consciousness – was one of the underpinning elements of New Code NLP (seeChapter 3 (#litres_trial_promo)).

ROSS ASHBY, STAFFORD BEER AND PETER CHECKLAND

These systems thinkers and writers have strongly influenced NLP. Ashby originated the Law of Requisite Variety in 1956, emphasizing that it is important to keep exploring variations when working towards results. The principle behind his theory is that, in any system, the part that has the most flexibility will predominate, and as a system becomes more complex, more flexibility is required. Beer provided models which can be used with both individuals and organizations, and Checkland was the developer of ‘soft systems’ thinking.

ALBERT ELLIS

A psychotherapist, writer and lecturer whose work was a major influence on several people working in NLP, especially Robert Dilts and Judith DeLozier, Ellis felt that traditional therapy sessions were too long and tried a more active approach based on work by early philosophers. His technique – Rational-Emotive Therapy, or RET – was a synthesis of psychology and philosophy. It has been described as ‘perhaps the most widely practised form of the cognitive-behavioural therapies’ (Yankura and Dryden, Doing RET: Albert Ellis in Action, Springer Publishing Company, 1990). Ellis concentrated on an individual’s beliefs and identified both rational and irrational beliefs during therapy; his work also incorporated shifts in time in a similar way to that employed by NLP (seeChapter 3 (#litres_trial_promo)).

ROBERTO ASSAGIOLI

Assagioli is known as the founder of psychosynthesis, on which he published the seminal book in 1965. Later, his work was rediscovered and Michael Hall, an American therapist and NLP trainer, has written of it in the American NLP publication Anchorpoint. Hall outlines several of Assagioli’s ideas and exercises and shows that his work predated NLP by around ten years. Some areas of similarity include what NLP knows as ‘Well-Formed Outcomes’ (objective setting), sub-modalities (elements of sensory perception), ‘anchoring’, ‘swish techniques’, ‘personality parts’ and spiritual development. Genie Laborde names Assagioli as one of the possible sources for NLP in her book Influencing with Integrity.

MAXWELL MALTZ

Maltz was a plastic surgeon writing in the 1960s, again before NLP was ‘created’. His book Psycho-Cybernetics contained ideas, references and guidance using numerous techniques which we now regard as NLP.

PAUL WATZLAWICK

Austrian by birth, Watzlawick was a research assistant at the Mental Research Institute (MRI) in Palo Alto from 1960 and Clinical Associate Professor at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences at Stanford University Medical Center. He was later Professor of Psychotherapy at the University of El Salvador in central America. One of his books, Change, sets out many of his ideas, which were invaluable to the development of NLP.

VIRGINIA SATIR

As mentioned earlier, Satir was one of the earliest, and best-known, people whose ways of working acted as models for the analysis and development of many NLP principles and processes. She was a social worker who was particularly interested in family systems. She developed an approach to family therapy which she called ‘conjoint family therapy’ and taught the subject at the Mental Research Institute (MRI) in Palo Alto, in the first training programme in the country on family therapy.

One of Satir’s ways of working was with what she termed ‘parts parties’, where people would act out the characteristics of different facets of personality. A model which is associated with her is her analysis of five different personality elements, which have become known as ‘Satir categories’. She gave these categories the names of ‘Blamer’, ‘Placator’, ‘Distractor’, ‘Computer’ and ‘Leveller’. Each can be recognized through typical postures and modes of communication. These patterns are discussed in her book Peoplemaking, published in 1972.

Satir was very innovative and used games, exercises, audio, video, one-way mirrors and demonstrations in her work, approaches which have since become commonplace but were at that time novel techniques. She was the first Director of Training at the famous Esalen Institute, which was at the forefront of the Growth Potential movement. It is said that she was deaf until the age of ten, so, like Erickson (#litres_trial_promo), with some sensory impairment, she developed her observation skills to an extraordinarily high degree. Fritz Perls described her as ‘the most nurturing person known’. Satir died in 1988.

FRITZ PERLS

Like Satir, Perls was another of the best-known models for NLP’s development. He is often credited as the founder of Gestalt Therapy, although three other people, including his wife, co-authored with him the first book on the subject. Gestalt psychology dated back to 1912, but Perls turned it into a therapeutic tool. The word ‘Gestalt’ refers to a pattern of parts which make up a whole and Gestalt psychology indicates that a study of parts alone is not sufficient to lead to understanding – the whole must be taken into account.

Born in Berlin in 1893, Perls gained an MD in psychiatry. Originally influenced by Freud, he rejected the psychoanalytic movement, believing that the present is more important than the past. Often blunt and ignoring conventional pleasantries, Perls encouraged his subjects to explore their emotional responses through processes including the use of ‘hot seats’ through which a person could exchange roles by moving to a different seat where they could act out a different part.