The History of NLP

Content

As you know from Activity 1, NLP was developed in the early 1970’s in California. It developed in a historical context that is a huge influence on the way that it was used and seen in the early days. By 1975, when the first work on NLP was published, President Kennedy and his brother along with Martin Luther-King had been shot, the first Star Wars movie was in production and the Summer of Love of 1968 was just a distant, blissful memory.
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Richard Bandler was a post-grad student in Psychology, and he started running Gestalt Therapy workshops for groups of fellow students. John Grinder a tutor in Linguistics who attended Bandler’s workshops and saw that Bandler was getting great success with his work. Grinder realised that the reason for the success was the way that Bandler used language, and the 2 of them started to work together.
At this time there was a huge growth in “Talking Therapy” and the different schools of therapy that were developing. Most training, and therefore most therapy, was not great quality, but some therapists were outstanding. Bandler and Grinder chose 3 of these and spent many months analysing what they did, asking themselves this question “What is the difference that is making the difference in their work?”
Taking all this research on the 3 other outstanding therapists and analysing their work Bandler & Grinder discovered that the secret of their success lay in how they used language. They broke this down further and simply copied the best bits of their work, gave it a twist and called it NLP. This process of “Modelling Excellence”, in other words, copying what others do well and re-using it, is a key part of NLP.

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NLP developed in a specific historical context in the early 1970s in California. To understand NLP fully we need to know about this historical context so that we can adapt it for our own Mental Health Promotion youth work in the early 21st Century.
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This badge needs to be completed before the training starts so that you arrive with an understanding of NLP that we will build on during the training.

Tasks

Task no.1

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1. Please think of and list 8 other social, political, historical or cultural movements that were gaining influence in the USA at that time.
2. Find out who were the 3 Super-Therapists that Bandler and Grinder chose to model. What sort of therapy did these 3 offer?
3. In no more than 1 paragraph, please say what a Gestalt cycle is. This might help: 
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4. See what you can find out about Richard Bandler’s murder trial!

Skills

ESCO

#promote mental health

Personal development

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Organisers

Network of Cities and Regions of Learning

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MENTAL HEALTH PROMOTION

Network of Cities and Regions of Learning

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