But What is N.L.P. Anyway ??   A More Basic Audio Introduction Available in Media Section Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) began as a model of how we communicate to ourselves and others which was developed by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. This model explains how we process the information that comes into us from the outside. The belief is that "The map is not the territory." And so the internal representations that we make about an outside event are not necessarily the event itself.

• Typically, what happens is that there is an external event and we run that event through our internal processing. We make an Internal Representation (I/R) of that event. That I/R of the event combines with a physiology and creates a state.

• State refers to the internal emotional state of the individual -- a happy state, a sad state, a motivated state, and so on. Our I/R includes our internal pictures, sounds and dialogue, and our feelings (for example, whether we feel motivated, challenged, pleased, excited, and so on).

• A given state is the result of the combination of an internal representation and a physiology. So an event comes in through our sensory input channels which are:

Visual

Including the sights we see or the way someone looks at us;

Auditory

Including sounds, the words we hear and the way that people say those words to us; 

Kinesthetic

Or external feelings which include the touch of someone or something, the pressure, and texture;

Olfactory

Which is smell

Gustatory

Which is taste.

Deletion:

Deletion occurs when we selectively pay attention to certain aspects of our experience and not others. We then overlook or omit others. Without deletion, we would be faced with much too much information to handle with our conscious mind.

Distortion:

Distortion occurs when we make shifts in our experience of sensory data by making misrepresentations of reality. In Eastern philosophy there is a well-known story of distortion in the rope versus snake analogy. A man walking along the road sees what he believes to be a snake and yells "SNAKE." However, upon arriving at that place he is relieved as he discovers that what he sees is really only a piece of rope.

Distortion also helps us in the process of motivating ourselves. The process of motivation occurs when we actually distort the material that has come into us that has been changed by one of our filtering systems.

Generalisation:

The third process is generalization, where we draw global conclusions based on one or two experiences. At its best, generalization is one of the ways that we learn, by taking the information we have and drawing broad conclusions about the meaning of the effect of those conclusions.

Go to Part 2