Neuro-Linguistic Programming is an approach to psychotherapy and personal development that aims to help people make changes in their behavior, beliefs, and thoughts. It has never been scientifically proven to be effective, but many people have found success by utilizing its principles. Due to its lack of professional organization and regulation the standards of training and therapy can be vastly different.
However, if the lack of proven scientific efficacy does not deter you from investigating this potentially powerful methodology, please continue reading. The rest of this article will detail some of the improvements you can possibly expect. Its important to remember that your results may be very different from somebody else even if you do the same thing. NLP puts a lot of emphasis on the individuality of each person and that if something isn’t working for you, even if it “should,” you should try something else.
Possible Applications of Neuro-Linguistic Programming
Mastering your mind and life: NLP’s greatest successes have come from helping people overcome stress, fears, phobias, etc. Most of us believe that it’s impossible to control how we feel. However, once you know your mind works you will be more likely to be able to control your feelings. NLP has some very powerful techniques for releasing us from events in our past as well as equipping you to increase motivation, handle fears, and decide what you want in life.
Peak performance: Much of NLP is based on modeling the behaviors and programs of very successful people. If you can duplicate what very successful people do and think, you should be able to experience success for yourself. Even on a more individual level, if you know how your mind operates when you are at your best you can more easily duplicate that situation. Increasing motivation, improving performance at work or sports, and setting/achieving goals all fall under the focus of NLP.
Communications and influence: Being able to communicate effectively is a huge part of human life. NLP offers some very effective communication skills such as building rapport with people quickly, how people respond differently to certain words, handling different people and how to become a better public speaker. There is no one-size fits all answer to improving your communication, but NLP can offer many different ways to improve the way you communicate.
Learning how to learn: At its core, NLP is about learning how to learn. It provides a set of techniques for accelerating your learning and helping you reach your potential. Every other category that NLP helps with comes back to the fact that it teaches you how to learn more effectively.
Business Benefits
NLP is very popular among every size of business. Multi-national corporations, entrepreneurs, and small business all use the principles of NLP. Being able to do perform at your best, tapping your true potential, and improving communication are all areas of interest that businesses have. NLP provides many simple techniques and procedures for improving all of these areas. Business application of NLP focuses very much on already successful businesses and business people in order to help other people model their success.
Although NLP does not have a rich scientific history to back up its claims, it does have a rich anecdotal library of people who have improved their lives dramatically from learning about NLP. NLP is essentially a very simple discipline that is based on the idea of learning about how your mind works and why you think the way you do. Once you’ve unlocked that aspect of your life, it becomes much easier to make positive changes. NLP can be a very powerful agent of change indeed.
