What is NLP?

NLP makes available a body of knowledge about how human beings make sense of their experiences and interaction with others.

NLP is the acronym for Neuro-Linguistic Programming, a purely descriptive term. Neuro refers to our nervous system, the mental pathways of our 5 senses by which we see, hear, feel, taste and smell. Linguistic refers to our ability to use language and how specific words and phrases mirror our mental worlds and to our silent language of postures, gestures, and habits that reveal our thinking styles, beliefs and more. Programming is borrowed from computer science, to suggest that our thoughts, feelings and actions are simply habitual programs that can be changed by upgrading our "mental software".

Above all NLP is concerned with how people do things, not why they do them. If someone is having difficulty learning to use a computer the, NLP approach is "what are they doing, specifically, to make it difficult to learn?" rather than "why aren't they learning?" The result of this is to define the structure of their behaviour (perhaps they are becoming physically tense whilst learning and thus reducing their ability to concentrate) which allows them to change the structure and get a better result (they could then deliberately relax and concentrate better.)

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