History of ANLP

NLP was first developed by Richard Bandler (a mathematician) and John Grinder (an Associate Professor of Linguistics) working together at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in the early 1970s this was a time of rapid development in the human relationship fields.

They asked the important and now famous question:

“What is the difference that makes the difference between somebody who is merely competent and someone who excels at the same skill?”

Three people they chose to model were the outstanding therapists, Fritz Perls (Gestalt Therapy), Virginia Satir (Family Therapy) and Milton Erickson MD the world renowned psychiatrist who gave his name to a form of hypnosis and brief therapy.

Bandler and Grinder modelled these peoples language, physiology and mental processes and began to identified patterns which could be duplicated and explicitly taught. NLP also drew on many existing fields of study including the work of Chomsky in linguistics, of Korsybski in general semantics, Ashby in systems thinking and many, many others. In fact it has been said many times that there is nothing new in NLP other than the way it is all put together.