Nlp and Excellence

1 NLP. A focus on excellence.

I feel writing an article on NLP and coaching for readers who are professional psychologists is a bit like walking into a Lion’s den. However for some reason, despite a rigorous chartership journey, I still find myself using NLP as my central model for coaching. In this article I would like to tell you a bit about NLP and why, for me, it has proved so effective in coaching clients. Coaching is about assisting clients in an exploratoratory and non-directive way understand their reality, the reality that both enables them and hinders them. NLP contends, following Korzybski, (1933) in order to explore one needs a map, or indeed in exploring one creates a map. Here a crucial distinction is highlighted by both Korzybski and people who use NLP; the map is not, and can never be the territory it sets out to explore, and the utility of the map is directly related to the extent it isomorphically maps the territory it seeks to represent. NLP claims to have a map which isomorphically represents the way individuals construct their realities. To have a conscious understanding of such a map is to be able to control one’s inner experiences within an infinite array of environmental contexts and therefore to determine the quality of one’s own life. To have this competency, it has been said, is to be as close to happiness as a human can get. About NLP. NLP, (Neuro-Linguistic programming), started during a Spring evening in the early ‘70s, when Richard Bandler, a 4th year undergraduate from University of California, (Santa Cruz), knocked on the door of John Grinder, Assistant Professor of linguistics at the same university. Richard had been conducting a gestalt therapy group with Frank Pucelik, and said to John he and Frank were excellent Gestalt therapists, but were struggling to teach their group what they did. He asked John to observe, and build a description of what they were doing, from which they would be able to design a training program....