NLP has spread all over the world and now it enjoys the reputation of being “the most comprehensive synthesis of psychological knowledge. It is widely used in business, management, sales, education, law, sports and coaching. NLP is a profound set of tools for personal development.

At the heart of NLP is the ‘modelling’ of human excellence – and that is where the story of NLP begins in the early 1970s (1972), from the collaborative efforts of Richard Bandler and John Grinder at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Bandler, a graduate student of mathematics and psychology with a particular interest in computer science and psychotherapy, got involved in transcribing some audio and video seminar tapes of Fritz Perls (1893-1970), the innovative psychotherapist and originator of the school of therapy known as “Gestalt Therapy” and Virginia Satir (1916-88), the founder of Family Counseling. Bandler discovered that Virginia Satir was consistently able to resolve difficult family relationships that many other therapists found intractable. Bandler found that by copying certain aspects of their (Perls&Satir) behaviour and language he could achieve similar results, and began running a Gestalt Therapy group on the campus.

John Grinder, an associate professor of linguistics at the University, was intrigued by Bandler’s abilities, and reputedly said to him: ‘If you teach me how to do what you do, I’ll tell you what you do.’

It wasn’t long before Grinder too, could get the same kind of therapeutic results as Bandler and Perls, simply by copying what Bandler did and said. Then, by a process of subtraction – by systematically leaving various elements out – Grinder was able to determine what was essential and what was irrelevant.

Realising they were on to something, Bandler and Grinder joined forces and went on to write the first NLP book, The Structure of Magic,Volume-I, which was published in 1975. Subtitled A Book about Language and Therapy, it introduced the first NLP model, the Meta Model – 12 language patterns distilled from modeling Perls and Satir.

Bandler and Grinder were living very close to Gregory Bateson, the British anthropologist and writer on communication systems theory. Bateson was, in fact, their mentor. Bateson himself had written on many different topics – biology, cybernetics, anthropology and psychotherapy. He is best known for developing the double bind theory of schizophrenia. His contribution to NLP was profound. Perhaps only now it is becoming clear exactly how influential he was.

Following their modeling of Perls and Satir, Bandler and Grinder went on to model Milton H. Erickson (1901-80) the world’s foremost medical hypnotist and he was the father of “conversational hypnosis”. Ericksonian Hypnosis , thus, became part of NLP. It was Gregory Bateson who introduced them to Erickson.

By the late 1970s, the human potential movement had developed into generating methodologies for developing human sytems. At the center of this growth was the Esalen Institute at Big Sur, California. Perls had led numerous Gestalt therapy seminars at Esalen. Satir was an early leader and Bateson was a guest teacher. Bandler and Grinder claimed that in addition to being a therapeutic method, NLP was also a study of communication and began applying it as a business tool.