Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) was first constructed as a “meta-discipline” to provide ways to observe, code and thus be able to replicate, the excellent patterns of communication and behaviour of outstanding human beings.

It grew out of the post-structuralist developments of the 1970s that identified language as both a coding or representation system, and a force with a life of its own, that could influence people’s perceptions of reality, even create new realities in the experience of human beings. The creators of NLP, John Grinder, Richard Bandler,Judith DeLozier and Robert Dilts, met on the Santa Cruz campus of UCLA. This was a rich and creative environment for new approaches to studying the social sciences, supported by a visionary education and research policy to integrate different areas of study such as linguistics, physics, biology and anthropology. The academic zeitgeist issued forth many new ways of thinking about and researching the relationship between individual and system and Grinder, Bandler, DeLozier and Dilts, managed to encapsulate many of these new ideas into practical applications for bringing about better results in communication, creativity, problem-solving and personal healing.

Their main tools for exploration were the use of questions that revealed the inner sensing of a person in their process of constructing their reality, exploring the “how” of their subjective experience in making evaluations and decisions. Like Gestalt Therapy, this brought the focus on the internal processes that generate behaviours rather than on the “why” of constructs about behaviour.In exploring the patterns of great communicators, the NLP developers designed their questions by observing and modelling the Gestalt Psychotherapist, Fritz Perls and the popular Family Systems Therapist, Virginia Satir. They called their system of questions the “Meta Model” in an attempt to describe its potential to decode other models of thinking and communicating. At the suggestion of the great anthropologist Gregory Bateson, the Meta Model was joined with practices of “perceptual positioning” to further model the work of the now legendary psychiatrist and psychotherapist, Milton H.Erickson. As NLP caught on, more contributors joined in developing the field, including Leslie Cameron, David Gordon and Todd Epstein to name but a few. Some others saw its potential for commercial enterprise and in order to pass on NLP in marketable training units, NLP began to be packaged as sets of procedures and techniques, contrasting its original intent as a fluid attitude and methodology that was infinitely flexible to individual and context. While these brief trainings remain popular to this day, especially in the business sector and arenas such as stage hypnotism, they represent something other than the essence and ethics of the psychotherapists that were originally modelled through NLP.

These events prompted Grinder and DeLozier to create “NLP New Coding” which reclaimed the importance of “mastery” of mental and somatic relationship into management of attention and neurological state. In support of this movement, Robert Dilts added prolific development to establish the further distinction of Systemic NLP. These evolutions are often referred to as 2nd Generation and 3rd Generation NLP and they incorporate the further developments of Ericksonian Psychotherapists such as Stephen Gilligan who has added Self Relations to the stable of approaches that influence Neuro Linguistic Psychotherapy. Like the models of   psychotherapy that inspired NLP, the presupposition central to “New Code” and Systemic NLP is that resources and expertise are within the client, rather than within a therapist’s theory or techniques, and that change is an inevitable process of ecological shifts in perception and experience brought about through a co-created field of communication.