Felix Economakis

Therapy - NLP

NLP is essentially a collection of solution-focused mindsets, outlooks and therapeutic techniques developed by mathematician Richard Bandler and linguist John Grinder in the 1970s. NLP was derived from their study of three master therapists: psychiatrist and clinical hypnotist Milton H.Erickson; family and interpersonal therapist Virginia Satir, and the creator of Gestalt Therapy, Fritz Perls.

These are quite different therapies in themselves, so NLP can be thought of as a hot pot of different strands of therapy that work in their own way and in their own right. Over time, NLP trainers have added additional techniques to this melting pot, so that today NLP has become a vast and flexible tool kit, containing many techniques that proved themselves in the past, and yet always making room for new techniques or the evolution or updates of existing techniques.

The underlying principles of how the mind works, how it creates problems and solutions and how it creates motivation and learning has been applied to other fields such as sports and business. One more thing about Bandler and Grinder was their intention to strip away any unnecessary ritual or elements to making the techniques work, leaving behind the essence of the technique in its most streamlined form. NLP has been made famous by practitioners such as Anthony Robbins, Paul Mckenna and Derren Brown.