OUR ONCE-HIDDEN, BUT NOW OPEN MASTER IDEA

Every great company or organization operates from a master idea. That’s what Joey Reiman has asserted, and as someone who “thinks for a living,” he should know. Whatever that master idea is, it powerfully gives people in an organization a sense of purpose and direction; it inspires them, invigorates them, defines who they are and what they are about. For Neuro-Semantics and NLP, what is our master idea? What is our timeless and passionate idea that inspires our hearts?

Once upon a time, realizing that NLP is essentially a Communication Model, I thought that our master idea was something about communication, about becoming a professional communicator, about people connecting, and about self-communicating in such a way as to “run your own brain.” Now while those are great ideas, they do not exactly rock my world, inspire me to go to the ends of the earth, send goosebumps up and down my spine, or ignite fire in my belly. They may be great ideas, but they didn’t seem to be a master idea.

Then I discovered a secret about NLP that no one had told me about. I did search for it. But that secret was not in any of description of NLP, nor was it in any of the books about the history of NLP. Then I accidently came upon it. In 2005 while reading about the history of the Human Potential Movement (HPM) and the second generation leaders and how they created a “headquarters” at Esalen, I happened upon a strange fact. Namely, Perls, Satir, Bateson and other “Who’s Who” in NLP were the key leaders in the Human Potential Movement. Really! How could that be? That’s when the blinders fell from my eyes and suddenly many of the disjointed pieces of NLP history came together and made sense. NLP arose as a birthchild of the Human Potential Movement.

That informed me about lots of things. It informed me regarding where the NLP presuppositions came from—Maslow, Rogers, Bateson, etc. It explain why NLP began at Kresge College—a college that would have been named Carl Roger College except Kresge was the primary donor. It identified how the HPM itself was a reaction to the orientation in psychology that focused on “the dark side” and shifted to studying “the bright side” of human nature. All of the assumptions in NLP about human beings and human nature arose from the Self-Actualization Psychology of Abraham Maslow. And as Maslow had modeled fully-functioning or self-actualizing people beginning with Max Wertheimer and Ruth Benedict, so the founders of NLP did the same (well, except that they did not acknowledge the HPM or Maslow or Rogers).

In Neuro-Semantics with this rediscovery, we took this as a rediscovery of our roots, where we came from and what we are about. We used it to pinpoint our master idea as a timeless, transformative, and inspiring idea.

We are about unleashing the nearly limitless human potential that’s waiting to be tapped

in each and every person. We are about enabling the inner journey that releases each person’s vitality for living fully and becoming the best version of oneself. We are about changing the world one person at a time, via one conversation at a time, so that people can become “fully alive/ fully human.” We are about enabling the competence in people to become their most unique selves actualizing their best possibilities.

Eric Fromm in Human Ethics described this actualizing in these moving words: “There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by unfolding his powers, by living productively; and only constant vigilance, activity and effort can keep him from failure in the one task that matters— the full development of his powers.... He can make use of his powers only if he knows what they are, how to use them, and what to use them for...” (Quoted in The Conative Connection, 1990, Kathy Kolbe, p. 132)

Neuro-Semantics, as the 21st century Human Potential Movement, we carry on what was begun nearly a century ago with Maslow and Rogers. Unleashing potentials—our own and others, the potential of families, groups, businesses, and even nations. This is in our DNA. It’s what we do. And we are constantly learning how to do it better. It’s our master idea for changing the world and this adventure has only just begun!

Want to Know More — See the following books: Unleashed! (2007). Self-Actualization Psychology (2008). Unleashing Leadership: Self-Actualizing Leaders and Companies (2009).