From: L. Michael Hall 2025 Neurons #17 April 28, 2025 Updating NLP Series #5
There are lots and lots of pieces of NLP. When you speak about NLP, you could be speaking about one of two dozen things. Some years ago a young man told me, “I can’t do NLP on myself.” To that statement, you could go in one of dozens and dozens of directions. So I asked,, “What part of NLP can you not apply to yourself?” It turned out to be matching a client, but not merely any client, only those of a particular ethnic group.
Speak about NLP and you might be speaking about representation systems, language, sensory awareness, sensory acuity, matching, mirroring, pacing, anchoring, collapsing anchors, transderivational search, the Meta-Model, any one of the linguistic distinctions, sub-modalities in any one of the VAK systems, synesthesias, meta-programs, time-lines, modeling, strategies, and on and on and on.
The bottom line—there are a lot of pieces or components that go into what we call NLP. Now the question of the title, “What is NLP all about?” is asking for how do you tie all of them together? Yet over the years, there’s been numerous answers: Communication, linguistics, change, therapy, personal development, psychology, hypnosis, modeling, new age, learning, etc.
Amazingly, whatever a person concludes “What it is all about” that then becomes that person’s definition of NLP. It operates as his overall classification. Even the first NLP book’s subtitle contribute to the confusion, “A book about language and therapy.” And even today, you will find different trainers emphasizing these different aspects of NLP which leads to the controversy over What is it really?
True enough, NLP arose from the field of therapy. It emerged from studying the language patterns of the therapeutic communications of Perls and Satir. Yet NLP was never thought of or confused with, Gestalt Therapy or Family Systems Therapy. NLP also was built from many of the concepts in Cognitive Psychology (Transformation Grammar, the TOTE model) and from Korzybski’s General Semantics, yet it is not and has never been confused with either of these.
Now over the past 50 years, probably 90 percent of the field has come to think of NLP as primarily a Communication Model. This is the consistent theme that you will find in books, manuals, videos, podcasts, etc. Accordingly, all of the above components of NLP are positioned as an aspect of communication, and they are or at least they can legitimately be framed in that way.
NLP is a model of thinking, a model of the mind
In revising and updating the NLP practitioner course, I began seeing it in terms of something more fundamental, namely, as a model of thinking and of the mind. After all, what was the most unique discovery of the founders? It was that people think in five modes—they think visually as they make pictures, they think auditorially as they hear sounds, they think kinesthetically as they feel sensations, they also think in terms of smells and tastes, and then they think linguistically as by using words for thinking (the meta-representation system).
Now other psychologists had mentioned and used the sensory systems going all the way back to Tichner, but no one had ever proposed that thinking goes to how we represent the senses. That put the power of communicating, changing, therapy, creativity, etc. back to a much simpler mechanism, a mechanism every person has access to.
The result? For one thing it cut out thousands of years of trying to guess what mind, consciousness, and personality is comprised of. As Bateson noted in his Introduction: “Psychologists accepted all sorts of internal explanatory entities (ego, anxiety, aggression, instinct, conflict, etc.) in a way reminiscent of medieval psycho-theology. … Psychiatrists dabbled in all these methods of exlanation … they created statistical samples of morbidity. They wallowed in internal and mythical entities, ids and archetypes.” (The Structure of Magic, p. ix)
The phenomena of re-presenting to ourselves in our minds what we see, hear, feel, smell and taste on the outside and then code it in words as we classify things, allowed NLP to create a model of the mind which opened up the fields of change, communication, therapy, linguistics, etc. Yet what the founders failed to recognize, which was much more significant, was the model of the mind or of thinking which they had discovered.
Today we know a lot about the brain and simultaneous we still know very little about the mind. But we know this—the mind thinks. That’s what it does. It represents, it edits, it perceives, it attends, it languages, it draws conclusions, it values, it remembers, it imagines, it intends, and on and on. And in my opinion—that’s what NLP is truly all about. And when you know that— it opens up everything else which the mind creates in human experience—which is the whole world. Additionally and most importantly, the quality of your thinking is the quality of your life.