What Is NLP and How Can It Help You Change Your Life

NLP — Neuro-Linguistic Programming — is one of those terms that sounds complicated but describes something surprisingly intuitive once you understand what it actually means. It is a set of techniques for understanding and changing the way your mind processes experience, and it has been used effectively for decades to help people overcome phobias, break unhelpful patterns, improve communication and create lasting behavioural change.

What NLP Actually Means

Neuro refers to your nervous system — the brain and how it processes information. Linguistic refers to the language you use, both internally (the way you talk to yourself) and externally (the way you communicate with others). Programming refers to the patterns of thought and behaviour you have learned and run automatically — your mental software, so to speak.

NLP is based on the premise that the way you represent experiences in your mind — the images, sounds, feelings and language you use to process them — directly shapes how you feel about those experiences and how you respond to them. Change the representation and you change the response.

What NLP Can Help With

NLP is particularly effective for phobias — specific fears that are out of proportion to the actual threat. It is also widely used for anxiety management, confidence building, improving communication in relationships and professional settings, overcoming limiting beliefs and creating motivation for change that has felt impossible through willpower alone.

Some of the most powerful NLP techniques work remarkably quickly. The fast phobia cure, for example, can significantly reduce a phobia's intensity in a single session by changing the way the experience is represented in the mind.

How NLP Works in Practice

In an NLP-informed session you might be guided to revisit a memory with different sensory qualities — changing the size, brightness or distance of the mental image. You might explore the submodalities of how you represent a feared experience and experiment with shifting them. You might work with timeline techniques to process past experiences or create compelling visions of a desired future.

NLP works especially powerfully when combined with hypnotherapy — the relaxed, receptive state of hypnosis creates ideal conditions for NLP techniques to take effect at a deep level.

If you are curious about how NLP could help you with a specific pattern or challenge, book a free 15 minute consultation — online sessions available Australia-wide.