USING HISTORY TO ESTABLISH CREDIBILITY

Recently in a public forum when I presented a bit of the history of NLP, a young man asked, “So, why did you write the book NLP Secrets: Untold Stories? Was it just as a historical record?” Now before he could finish his question, I was already shaking my head back and forth to signal “no,” that’s not the reason. And so before I said a word, he continued. “No? So why? What did you hope to accomplish?”

“Credibility,” was my one word answer. I wanted to establish credibility for NLP — for the NLP Communication model and for the development of NLP over the decades. As a child of the Human Potential Movement and as a child of the Cognitive Psychology Movement, NLP appeared at a time when moving beyond psychology’s focus on pathology to generative development. Arising at a time when computers were beginning to model “intelligence,” information processing, and computing capacities and when a strength-based or resource-based approach was part of the spirit of the times— it arose as a significantly new approach. I wanted to demonstrate how it was (and is) a valid approach.

Sure, some of the characters involved in the history of that development were not paragons of virtue— by any stretch of he imagination. But NLP did not grow up as about anyone— not the founders nor even the first exemplars (Perls, Satir, and Erickson). It grew up as about an idea. The idea was that there is structure to experience and when you discover it, the structure gives you access to the power and magic of that experience.

That’s why I wrote the book— in part to set the history straight, to address many of the myths that have grown up around NLP, and to position the role of those who mis-use the model.

That people can and do mis-use a model, or a technology, an idea is part of the history of any and every movement. So it has been with NLP. There have been people who took the powerful communication tools and used them manipulatively. There were others who solely focused on how to use it to make money. Yet mis-use itself is not an argument against something. Mis-use simply warns us that there is a proper and ethical use of that thing.

The credibility of NLP goes back to the scholars that were quoted and relied upon to build the foundations of Neuro-Linguistic Programming. I’m talking about scholars like Gregory Bateson, Alfred Korzybski, Abraham Maslow along with Carl Rogers, George Miller with his associates Karl Pribrim and Eugene Gallanter, and Noam Chomsky. The credibility goes to these

individuals and to the disciplines that they represent— General Semantics, Cognitive Psychology, Transformational Grammar. And there’s more— Gestalt Psychology and Gestalt Therapy, Family Systems, and Ericksonian Medical Hypnosis.

Now true enough, credibility lagged for awhile after the beginning. In those “Wild Days of NLP” (as Terry McClendon titled his book), the focus was entirely on a discovery stage and then a practical “what can we do with this stuff?” stage. Further, given some of the iconoclastic individuals who were involved at the beginning— they downplayed (and even argued against) traditional quantitative and statistical research methodology. That created a vacuum of research at the beginning. And it would be a few years before new qualitative research methodologies would become available for researchers.

It wasn’t until mid-1990s that a new generation of NLP trainers, thinkers, researchers arose. That led to many people finally conducting research on various aspects of the NLP model, as well as a NLP Research Conference, a Research Journal, and many chapters and books looking at NLP in terms of evidence-based methodologies. Yet many people in NLP are not aware of this and most people outside of the various NLP communities do not know this.

I wrote about the wild and wonderful and strange people in the history of NLP to tell the story about how it all came about and who was involved. By expressing the myths and telling the untold stories, it not only reveals “family secrets,” it lifts NLP up above the fallible human beings who were involved. It moves things up to the model and the processes by which we an make our individual and collective lives much, much better. And when that happens, the world can change for the better. Ah yes, that’s why I wrote it— because NLP has the power to change the world, one person and one group at a time — I wrote to enable NLP to change the world.