There have been some very interesting debates about NLP on the forum and I am left with the perception that there are some people who have an extreme liking for it and others who have an extreme disliking for it and wish it would just go away. To this ongoing debate I contribute my own journey with NLP which is a part of what I do and how I work rather than how I represent myself.
I use many solutions and techniques which are widely accepted. Such as:
MBTI - Myers Briggs / Carl Jung.
SDI - Elias Porter
Learning styles - Kolb, Honey and Mumford, Solomon and Felder et al.
In addition to specific learning “products” I have also maintained a programme of ongoing action based research since 1998 via a Masters Degree and Doctoral studies into many aspects of learning such as:
Experiential learning
Baby sign language
Visual learning
Academic teaching (which I did for a year as part of my research)
Trainer development and evaluation
The Montessori teaching approach
My first introduction to NLP was in 2000 when I had the privilege of learning with an excellent teacher, Nick Owen. This was followed in 2002 when I became a master practitioner with Kathy Strong, a wonderful coach. I completed my NLP trainer training in 2007 with John Seymour, the best trainer I have ever seen and had the pleasure of working with since. John has the highest level of ethical practice, honesty, generosity and integrity.
From these three and others I have been given a very wide range of sources which they would refer to as the foundations or roots of NLP. These contributors are, or were, well established academic experts in their field of research.
For anyone interested here are a few of them:
Sigmund Freud was a Jewish-Austrian neurologist who founded the psychoanalytic school of psychology. Freud is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind and the defense mechanism of repression and for creating the clinical practice of psychoanalysis for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst.
Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist, an influential thinker and the founder of analytical psychology (also known as Jungian psychology).
Burrhus Frederic Skinner was an American psychologist, author, inventor, advocate for social reform, and poet. He was the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until his retirement in 1974. He came up with the operant conditioning chamber, innovated his own philosophy of science called Radical Behaviorism, and founded his own school of experimental research psychology—the experimental analysis of behavior. His analysis of human behavior culminated in his work Verbal Behavior, which has recently seen enormous increase in interest experimentally and in applied settings. He discovered and advanced the rate of response as a dependent variable in psychological research. He invented the cumulative recorder to measure rate of responding as part of his highly influential work on schedules of reinforcement. In a recent survey, Skinner was listed as the most influential psychologist of the 20th century
Bernard Weiner is a cognitive psychologist who is known for developing a form of attribution theory that explains the emotional and motivational entailments of academic success and failure. He has published 15 books and many articles on the psychology of motivation and emotion, and has been a Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles for many years. His contributions including linking attribution theory, the psychology of motivation, and emotion.
Anthony Stafford Beer was a British theorist, consultant and professor at the Manchester Business School. He is best known for his work in the fields of operational research and management cybernetics.
Carl Rogers was an influential American psychologist and among the founders of the humanistic approach to psychology. Rogers is widely considered to be one of the founding fathers of psychotherapy research and was honored for his pioneering research with the Award for Distinguished Scientific
Jean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist and philosopher, well known for his pedagogical studies. His theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "Genetic Epistemology."
Friedrich Salomon better known as Fritz Perls, was a noted German-born psychiatrist and psychotherapist of Jewish descent.
Perls coined the term 'Gestalt Therapy' to identify the form of psychotherapy that he developed with his wife Laura Perls in the 1940s and 1950s. Perls became associated with the Esalen Institute in 1964, and he lived there until 1969. His approach to psychotherapy is related but not identical to Gestalt psychology, and it is different from Gestalt Theoretical Psychotherapy.
George Armitage Miller is the author of one of the most highly cited papers in psychology, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two"[1] published in 1956 in Psychological Review. This paper suggests that seven (plus or minus two) is the magic number that characterizes people's memory performance on random lists of letters, words, numbers, or almost any kind of meaningful familiar item.
Paul Watzlawick was an Austrian-American psychologist and philosopher. A theoretician in communication theory and radical constructivism, he has commented in the fields of family therapy and general psychotherapy
Stephen G. Gilligan, Ph.D., (born 1954) is an American author, registered psychologist and psychotherapist. Gilligan was selected as one of the first students and developers of the work of Milton H. Erickson, considered the founder of modern hypnotherapy. Gilligan is most well-known for his work in the area of hypnosis and psychotherapy. He is also known as one of the contributors in the early development of Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). Gilligan has had a private practice in psychotherapy and has taught his approach to hypnosis and psychotherapy for the past 20 years.
Virginia Satir was a noted American author and psychotherapist, known especially for her approach to family therapy and her work with Systemic Constellations. Her most well-known books are Conjoint Family Therapy, 1964, Peoplemaking, 1972, and The New Peoplemaking, 1988.
Gregory Bateson was a British anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. Some of his most noted writings are to be found in his books, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) and Mind and Nature (1979).
Milton Hyland Erickson, was an American psychiatrist specializing in medical hypnosis and family therapy. He was founding president of the American Society for Clinical Hypnosis and a fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Psychopathological Association. He is noted for his approach to the unconscious mind as creative and solution-generating. He is also noted for influencing brief therapy, strategic family therapy, family systems therapy, solution focused brief therapy, and neuro-linguistic programming.[1]
Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski was a Polish-American philosopher and scientist. He is most remembered for developing the theory of general semantics.
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, political activist, author, and lecturer. He is an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky is well known in the academic and scientific community as one of the fathers of modern linguistics. Since the 1960s, he has become known more widely as a political dissident, an anarchist, and a libertarian socialist intellectual. Chomsky is often viewed as a notable figure in contemporary philosophy.
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, a Russian, and later Soviet, physiologist, psychologist, and physician. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1904 for research pertaining to the digestive system. Pavlov is widely known for first describing the phenomenon of classical conditioning.
David Kolb published his learning styles model in 1984. The model gave rise to related terms such as Kolb's experiential learning theory (ELT), and Kolb's learning styles inventory (LSI). Publications - notably his 1984 book 'Experiential Learning.
I have learned a lot and continue to learn from my ongoing journey through the works of these people, past and present. I have been able to apply much of this learning successfully for myself and those I work with.
I see NLP as another set of options for me to use as a trainer and coach and the more options I have the more choices I have and the greater my ability to serve my clients well.
Cheers.
Nick
