The Major Inuences on NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP)

NLP training has become one of the leading ways to improve your communication skills and change your behaviour and those of people around you. However, like every eld, NLP was inuenced by other people and models. Here are a few of the key people:

Fritz Perls
Fritz Perls developed Gestalt therapy, a process that enhances awareness of sensation, perception, bodily feelings, emotion and behaviour, in the present moment, to enable the client to become more fully and creatively alive and to become free from the blocks and unnished business that may diminish satisfaction, fullment, and growth, and to experiment with new ways of being.

Virginia Satir
Known as the Mother of Family Therapy Virginia Satir was an author and psychotherapist, known especially for her unique and innovative approach to family therapy and her work with Systemic Constellations. Virginias was one of the rst therapists to recognise that the "presenting issue" or surface problem was seldom the real problem.

Milton Erickson
Milton Erickson was a psychotherapist who specialised in medical hypnosis. He was known for his unconventional approach to hypnotherapy. Where classical hypnosis was authoritative and direct, Erickson's approach is permissive, accommodating and indirect. He developed an extensive use of therapeutic metaphor and story and coined the term brief therapy for his ability to create therapeutic changes in relatively few sessions.

Gregory Bateson
Gregory Bateson was an anthropologist, social scientist, linguist and cyberneticist. He extended systems and cybernetic theory to the social and behavioural sciences. His cybernetic epistemology and, in particular, his learning levels work were large inuences on the eld of NLP.

Alfred Korzybski
Alfred Korzybski developed General Semantics to help undo the either/or thinking of Aristotelian logic. He argued that human knowledge of the world is limited both by the human nervous system and by the structure of language. He recognised that the words we use to describe our reality often became our reality. He was the person who coined the term The Map is Not the Territory.

Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky is a linguistic and social commentator. Described as the "father of modern linguistics", he is most well know for his revolutionary approach to the eld of linguistics. His model of Transformational Grammar was used as the original blueprint for the Meta Model.

Frank Farrelly
A big inuence on Dr Richard Bandlers approach to client work, Frank Farrelly developed the Provocative Therapy methods during his time working on an inpatient ward. He was dissatised with his effectiveness as a therapist and began to explore new procedures for promoting signicant, resilient change in patients which involved deliberately bating the client and poking fun at their problems.

Others
Other major inuences on NLP include: The brief therapy methods of Paul Watzlawick and others Cybernetics (systems theory), including W Ross Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety Bertrand Russell and Alfred N Whitehead's Theory of Logical Types The TOTE (Test Operate Test Exit) model developed by George Miller, E Galanter and Karl Pribram George Miller's theory, "The Magic Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two". The Discordian Movement Robert Anton Wilson Maxwell Meltz Psycho-cybernetics You may not be told specically or directly about some of these people, theories and elds on your NLP training, you may not, but they must be credited for helping to shape and create the eld as it is today.