Think of something that you have always wanted to have or experience in your life, yet never really seem to be able to make it work. This might be more success in your career or a feeling of confidence when you are speaking on stage. Maybe you have struggled with feeling calm or content even in seemingly positive situations.

What is NLP?

NLP stands for Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Like the concept of computer programming, our mind has language or programs that tell us how to react to the different situations that we encounter.

It can be incredibly useful to have an automatic program that tells us how to drive when we get behind the wheel of our car or one that tells us how to calculate exact change when buying a coffee at Starbucks. Yet, these patterns can sometimes become unhelpful when we can’t get on an elevator because we are afraid of being closed in or miss important deadlines at work because of severe procrastination.

You likely created these presently undesirable programs when you were very young and for very good reason. Yet this “software” became outdated as you grew older.

If you were punished by being locked in a closet as a kid, a program may have been created to avoid tight spaces at all costs. Or maybe it was something subtler, where never really making good grades in school created a program that told you not to even try so you can’t fail.

How does NLP work?

There is a part of our brain that oversees one thing and one thing only – that is to make sure that we survive for as long as humanely possible. It doesn’t care about whether we are happy; only that we live to breathe one more day.

Unfortunately, this part of our brain, let’s call it the critter brain, has a lot more control over what happens in our lives than we might like. It works hard to repeat the experiences that resulted in survival, even if they ended up feeling bad.

For example, maybe you survived an abusive childhood and now find yourself in abusive relationships over and over. This part of your brain does not know that it is safe to be genuinely loved and cared for, because it hasn’t survived this experience yet.

NLP uses a set of questions and guided practices to contact this part of your brain so that we can uncover how and for what purpose the programs that are keeping you stuck were created. Together, we can then revise them so that they produce better results in your life.

Your experiences create your beliefs, and your beliefs create your reality. NLP is a process of looking at the experiences that created your beliefs that wrote the programs that are now impacting your reality so that they can be changed.

Wayne Dyer once said, “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” I would take that one step further to state that when you change the way you experience things, the things you experience change.