What is NLP?
Neuro
(The activity throughout your brain and your whole nervous system - why what you
think affects what your body does and vice versa.)
Linguistic
(Refers to words - and how we use them: how we are affected by the words we use,
how our perceptions are framed by the words we choose.)
Programming (Taken from the computing term, this basically means that as we go through life we collect all kinds of "programs" (similar to what are referred to in Transactional Analysis as "scripts."))
The key idea is that just as a computer will try to execute all of the
instructions in a program, regardless of whether they make sense, so human
beings tend to act in accordance with the ways in which their experiences have
"programmed" them, even when the program doesn't make sense (like people
speaking very slowly and loudly to foreigners as though that will somehow
improve the level of communication).
On the positive side, just as computer programs can be debugged, or even completely re-written, so we can examine the mental programs we live by and, if we don't like the results they generate, we can "re-write" them to get results we do want, or we can adopt completely new programs that have been shown to be effective for someone else. In other words, NLP is about our ability to change our lives in the way we want by changing our thinking and our behavior.