NLP was created in the 1970’s by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. They were two students who met at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Richard Bandler was a Computer Programmer with an interest in Gestalt Therapy and John Grinder was an Associate Professor of Linguistics.
Richard Bandler began to study the communication patterns of the famous Psychoanalyst and founder of Gestalt Therapy, Fritz Perls. He noticed that there were certain patterns of language that were more effective than others when Perls related to his patients. John Grinder also became enrolled in studying these distinctions discovered by Bandler.
The two men decided to test out their theories by expanding their observations to include recordings and tapings of the work of two other unique therapists, Virginia Satir and Milton Erickson. Virginia Satir was considered to have done extraordinary work in the field of Family Therapy. She was often successful in achieving results with clients who were referred by other therapists because they had already given up on their cases. She succeeded where others had failed. Bandler and Grinder sought to study her work to find out the reasons behind her success.
They also chose to study the unique work of Milton Erickson, a world famous hypnotherapist. Although Bandler and Grinder noted that all the therapists was very different, in their approaches, personalities and characters, they recognized that they all had many similarities in terms of how they related to their patients. Bandler and Grinder considered this ability to relate to people to be a science. This is considered to be the science of human rapport.
They continued to expand and revise their experiments with the intention of building a model for communication to be taught to therapists in order to increase their rapport skills and maximize their success rate with patients. The team wrote a series of books sharing their findings and observations. Their discoveries were set down in four books that were published between 1975 and 1977: The Structure of Magic 1 and 2 highlighting the work of Satir and Perls and Patterns 1 and 2 which focused on Erickson’s work. Since that time, NLP has continued to develop and grow with every new contribution making it richer and more diverse with a host of new resources to share and something for everyone.