NLP is a methodology for replicating ‘natural’ talent.

Everyone is talented in one way or another, although our attitude towards a particular talent can vary according to what we believe.  While one talent might be perceived as a useful aptitude or 'flair' for something, another might be perceived as a 'problem' or an undesirable quality - and yet another still might be perceived as an extraordinary 'gift'.

And whichever is the case, a talent is something that someone does extraordinarily well, that allows them to achieve some result that other people are either unable to achieve - or are unable to achieve as easily, quickly and/or thoroughly.  Maybe someone has a talent for selling life insurance, or getting small children to eat vegetables, or playing poker, or drawing caricatures, or coping with grief, or remembering names, or resolving conflicts between particularly stubborn people.

Can you think of a talent - a 'gift' or an ability - that you'd really like to have?  Something that a few fortunate or extraordinary people seem able to do?  Well ... learning NLP will allow you to develop that ability.

In most cases, people with extraordinary talent are not conscious of the key differences in their thinking and behaviour that allow them to have that talent.  Those key differences are usually patterns of thinking and behaviour that can be described as instinctive, intuitive or automatic - patterns that are outside of their conscious awareness.

NLP is a methodology for extracting and reproducing those key patterns - so that an ability that was once thought of as an innate talent becomes a transferable skill.  The process of extracting and reproducing those patterns is called modelling.

If someone has a valuable talent, then we can model that person and reproduce that talent in ourselves or others - either in the interests of personal development, or to improve the performance of an individudal, team or organisation so as to get better results in some context. 

Hang on!  Isn't NLP really all about ____________ [insert concept here] ?

Let's clear up some confusion.

When you look outside on a windy day and there are trees swaying in a particular direction, you don't actually see the wind - you see trees moving.  In other words, what you see are the effects of the wind - the results that are visible in the world.

This is also the case with NLP.  What people see are the results of the process of modelling, not the modelling itself.  So in the early 1970s, when the originators of NLP modelled a bunch of geniuses in the field of psychotherapy, the results were a set of models and techniques for creating profound therapeutic change.  So when people looked at NLP, what they saw was a bunch of great therapeutic processes.

More recently, there's been a lot of modelling done in the areas of persuasion, motivation, and leadership - and people subsequently saw the results of that modelling.  So now a lot of people these days think that NLP is about persuasion, motivation and/or leadership.

And a lot of other people think that NLP is about personal power, or accelerated learning, or improving sports performance, or communication skills, or lateral thinking.

And NLP has indeed made tremendous contributions in all of these areas - but these are all by-products of the process of modelling.  They are the visible results that people see, like the trees swaying in the wind.

What people typically don't see is the wind itself, the invisible force that causes those trees to sway, the source of those results in the world.  But when you look outside and see those trees swaying, you know it's the wind that's making them sway, even if we only see it by its effects in the world.