Neuro-linguistic Programming

Neuro-linguistic programming was developed in the 1970s at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Its primary founders are John Grinder, a linguist, and Richard Bandler, an information scientist and mathematician. Judith DeLozier and Leslie Cameron-Bandler also contributed significantly to the field, as did David Gordon and Robert Dilts.

Grinder and Bandler’s first book on NLP, Structure of Magic: A Book about Language of Therapy, was released in 1975. In this publication, they attempted to highlight certain patterns of communication that set communicators considered to be excellent apart from others. Much of the book was based on the work of Virginia Satir, Fritz Perls, and Milton Erickson. It also integrated techniques and theories from other renowned mental health professionals and researchers such as Noam Chomsky, Gregory Bateson, Carlos Castaneda, and Alfred Korzybski. The result of Grinder and Bandler’s work was the development of the NLP meta model, a technique they believed could identify language patterns that reflected basic cognitive processes.