NLP or Neuro Linguistic Programming is a new cognitive science born in California USA in the 1970’s, the brainchild of Dr John Grinder and Dr Richard Bandler.

 It is often referred to as the study of subjective experience or the study of excellence. The science and art of NLP enables the practitioner to understand the way another thinks or in NLP terns how the other party constructs their model of the world, or how they make sense of what they see, hear, feel, smell and taste.

Many of the techniques of NLP help you to understand how another person reacts to various stimuli they receive from the outside world.

 It is often said that NLP is the closest you will ever get to “mind reading”. NLP does not just accept that a person does something; it wants to know how a person does something, what exactly is going on inside a person’s head that produces the specific result.

 NLP is governed by a set of presuppositions that are held to be true, or to put it another way, what has to be present in a person’s world to achieve consistent positive results. These presuppositions over time have proved to be a great way to respond to and live in the world. Here are a couple of examples:

“There is no failure only feedback”

With this idea locked into your mind all of life’s seemingly difficult problems become a source of understanding as to how to solve them. Look at the process not the apparent failed outcome and see the way to change to get the desired outcome or goal.

“Respect another’s model of the world”

This seemingly innocent statement has profound influences on the way we communicate with others. It is often said that whatever words come out of another person’s mouth must be absolutely true – for that person.

NLP is built on strong foundations and just accepting these foundations will improve the way an individual succeeds in his life. These foundations, or the 4 pillars of NLP are:

• Rapport
• Outcome
• Sensory Acuity
• Flexibility

These four pillars are fully explained in your NLP practitioner training programme - more later.

 For now let us look a little closer at just one of the many ways in which NLP can help you achieve consistent high sales.

 The Human has little conscious awareness in his daily interaction with his world. The vast majority of this contact with the world is unconscious. To simplify this contact the human develops strategies or automatic internal processes that enable him to make decisions.

 These strategies are run completely automatic and without the person’s conscious awareness. A person uses these strategies for everything he does unconsciously.

For example let us look at a very simple action a person engages in quite often. This is the action of simply standing up from a sitting position in a chair. If every time you had to stand up, you had to consciously control all the muscles and balance mechanisms of your body to achieve this, the everyday act of standing up would, in itself, become an arduous activity. Instead we run an automatic process, called in NLP terms, a strategy. This strategy is normally the same every time you need to use it (i.e. stand up).

Likewise, the human uses strategies for everything he does - including a strategy for buying anything. Along with this buying strategy is a convincer strategy, how do you know it is a good buy? After the purchase the human often runs a reassurance strategy, how do you know it was a good buy?

These strategies seldom ever change; therefore the human runs the same strategy every time he buys something. This is the basis behind the famous NLP saying:

“If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got, if you want something different – do something different”

NLP has techniques for eliciting another’s strategies and understanding how another person uses them.

If you knew another person’s strategy for buying something you could actually sell to that person, utilising that person’s own strategy. This would result in a person being happy with their purchase.

Do you think this would be useful for you?

NLP was developed out of studying how people with, apparent natural abilities, managed to achieve their goals on a regular basis. How do they do that?

It was quickly discovered that just copying a person was not enough. Copying alone did not help. There was a missing element:

“The difference that made the difference.”

NLP training concentrates on this difference.

NLP concentrates of the internal and external processes required to achieve excellence in all that we do.

This short article can in no way do justice to the science and art that is NLP. To understand NLP fully you will need to undertake a practitioner training. Originally this training took a minimum of 20 days of 8 hours each.

Over the years, with the help of accelerated learning techniques this has been gradually reduced to 5 days. The 5 day course requires a lot of home study and this is achieved by listening to 15 audio tapes and 2 video DVD’s. On enrolling on a practitioner programme you immediately receive the home study material so you can prepare for your epic adventure into NLP.

There are trainings available for specific business skills using NLP techniques. Some of these programs are NLP for sales professionals, Power Negotiation Techniques, Presentation Skills, Inspirational Leadership and Influential Manager.