NLP stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming. It’s the study of excellence. It’s how to use the language of the mind to consistently achieve specific and desired outcomes.

• The Neuro part of NLP refers to our neurological system and the way we use our 5 senses to translate our experience into thought processes, both conscious and unconscious.
• Linguistic refers to how we both create and reveal to ourselves and others our unique model of the world, the way we think about it, and the way we experience it.
• Programming refers to the processes and strategies, the specific steps we go through to achieve our specific and desired out comes.

NLP was initially created by Richard Bandler and John Grinder in 1975, who began by developing models based on top communicators of the time. Their initial intention was to discover how certain individuals had become excellent communicators, and to create models of this behaviour, which would then enable them to teach others how to be as equally as effective.

Most people want better or different results in their lives. The questions is: What creates results in your life? It has to be behaviour, right? So, in order to change the results we’ve got, we need to change the behaviour. To change the behaviour, we need to find what is causing the behaviour. What is preceding every single behaviour?

As human beings we live in a five sensory world. We take in all information through our five senses. Now if we absorbed everything that comes to us at the rate of 2 million bits of information per second, we'd fry our circuits. So to deal with it - to make the pieces of information into small enough chunks to deal with - we filter the information.

Some of the filters are our perceptions of time and space, energy and matter, the language we use and our understanding of words and meanings; our memories; our decisions; the patterns we look for when selecting information; our values and beliefs and our overall attitude. And we delete, distort and generalize information according to our unique filters.

Once we have passed incoming information through all these filters, we take what has got through and we make an internal representation of it. This internal representation is in the form of a sensory perception: a picture with sounds, feelings, tastes and smells. The next thing that happens (instantaneously) is that we react to the internal representation and enter a corresponding state.

Being happy is a state; so is depression. Being "fired up" is a state, so is tiredness or lethargy. Many people are familiar with the expression "It's a state of mind" but what's really interesting about the state is that it leads us to choose a corresponding behaviour.

The "fight or flight" response is the best known example of this.
There's a caveman walking along the path and out jumps a saber-toothed tiger. The caveman's body immediately reacts: the arousal system kicks-in, there's a surge of adrenaline into the system, the breathing rate goes up and more oxygen enters the lungs, the heart pumps the blood stronger and faster through the system and simultaneously the blood drains away from the extremities, not only so that it can be used more effectively internally but so that if the caveman decides to fight, he won't bleed so much should he be cut. Now his body is ready for his behaviour, running or fighting.

In a nutshell, we have a process which starts with information and ends with behaviour and physical manifestation.

Studying NLP is like starting a journey - a journey into consciousness. It looks not for right or wrong choices, but for the reason (positive intention) for the choice. It looks for the patterns and draws into conversation the parts involved in creating our experience. It reveals that "the map is not the territory". Our every experience is something that we literally makeup inside our heads. We do not experience reality directly, since we are always deleting, distorting and generalizing. Essentially, what we do experience is our experience of the territory, and not the territory itself.

The NLP journey is about increasing awareness ... increasing awareness of the information that is available to us and the realization that we can choose how we deal with that information. We begin to see that different choices will get different results. As our awareness increases, so we become more resourceful. By realizing that we have more resources available to us than we thought, and by using more of our innate capability, we gain greater flexibility. And so we grow.