The NLP Fairy Tale

NLP is sort of the homeopathy of psychology — great marketing, sounds nice, looks great, but there’s a catch…

NLP is very popular in today’s organizations, no doubt, but that shouldn’t blind us from what has actually been proven to be true. The origins of NLP are just as shady as its supposed great results are unproven.

The wildly popular Neuro-Linguistic Programming — commonly abbreviated as NLP, but not to be mistaken for Natural Language Processing, which deals with interactions between humans and computers — is a popular method of applying practices to read and influence people’s behavior — your own, and other’s. It was first introduced by American psychologist Richard Bandler (1950) and American linguist John Grinder (1940) in the 1970s as a new form of psychotherapy and nowadays its principles are widely used in various settings, mostly in business environments.

Grinder (left) and Bandler (right)

The basic idea is that Bandler and Grinder have, what they call “modeled” the best practices of some well-known psychologists and therapists of those days into a mixture of tools and techniques that can be used to steer oneself — or fellow human beings — to…