As NLP is one of the systems we teach, I’m often asked about the origins of this robust basket of tools for change that have been shared around the globe for over 35 years.

For me the story starts before NLP, when I first met Virginia Satir. She and I were both hired for the same project in Reston, though she was quite senior. Similarly, I also knew Fritz Perls prior to NLP, staying at his house at Esalen on weekends. Both later became models for NLP tools.

How did these tools get launched?
 

It was a mix of good timing, a great location, an adventurous group of people, good luck, and a very useful question:

“What really works to create change?”

This question was on everyone’s mind and the focus of dynamic activity in the triangle around San Francisco. What eventually came to be known as NLP added a second powerful question:

“Exactly HOW do effective change agents get their remarkable results?”

To answer that question, take a glance at the map. Imagine the scene in the late 1960s and early 70s.

Location: San Francisco
 
There was a flourishing counter culture with flower children, psychedelic music and art in the city, social and political upheaval, led a new-left wave of protests against the Vietnam War. The Civil rights movement argued for social justice to broaden democracy, and across the bay in Berkeley, student political activists and their professors pressed for self-directed “democratic” education.
 
The first man landed on the moon in 1969: everything was possible. Stuart Brand slapped the first photo of the earth from space on the front of his Whole Earth Catalogue. The catalogue subtitle “Access to Tools” sounded the anthem: access to tools -- for all.

Tools for all included wider access to psychology tools in the form of brief therapies and new techniques. Rapid change movements were brewing in business -– with encounter and T-groups from NTL (National Training Laboratories). A new profession of “organizational development” (OD) consultants emerged to teach business how to speed up change.

Dynamic new technologies grew in nearby Silicon Valley. Computers and the first mouse were products of a frontier culture of innovation that stressed pilot projects and immediate use. Computer simulations and the power of modeling stimulated speculation that the human thinking process itself could be analyzed and captured.

There was a surge of interest in Eastern religions -- Zen and other Asian mediation centers proliferated. East-West views about the soul, heaven (and how to get there) met. Buddhist temples and Christian churches shared the same zip code.

The big question “what really works to create change?” was addressed simultaneously in music, politics, voting rights and justice movements, religion, business and personal growth -- everywhere on this map.

Location: MRI and Esalen Institute

Two organizations launched at the start of the sixties were key to the growth of new ideas and tools in psychology and communications: MRI (Mental Research Institute) and Esalen.

Both institutions were motivated by the desire to improve access to new and better models for growth. MRI, however, concentrated on professionals. By contrast, Esalen Institute opened its doors (and its tempting hot tubs overlooking the sunset) to public workshops.

MRI pioneered brief therapy approaches and drew leading thinkers such as Gregory Bateson, Virginia Satir, R.D. Laing, Irvin Yalom, and Paul Watzlawick. Jay Haley, for example, spent 20 years studying and working with Dr. Milton Erickson, who later became a model for NLP tools. 

A dynamic and influential center, MRI attracted innovators who thought hard about the future of psychology, communication theory, cybernetics and systems theory. Wedged between Silicon Valley and Stanford University, MRI trained professionals in brief therapies.

Esalen, further south on the beautiful Big Sur coast, focused on tools for self- directed growth. Esalen was/ is an international crossroads for ideas and experiments in human potential. The creators, Dick Price and Michael Murphy, had a wide cultural agenda; both had  studied comparative religion at Stanford and were interested in Eastern thought.

Esalen hosted a diverse mix of Eastern and Western philosophies and systems. Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Abraham Maslow, Virginia Satir, and Gregory Bateson were early supporters and participants. Later Fritz Perls lived on the grounds for several years.

If MRI focused on mental models, Esalen emphasized mind-body links, with many programs oriented towards touch and physical awareness. Esalen offered massage, meditation, Feldenkrais, Tai Chi, and dance along with the latest encounter group techniques.

But the staff of the two institutions overlapped, with Virginia Satir (who directed programs at Esalen) and Gregory Bateson, for example, advising both.

Location: University of California, Santa Cruz

Between MRI and Esalen, in the middle of the lively triangle, was a new, experimental campus, U.C. Santa Cruz. Perched on rolling hills with ancient redwood groves, you could see the ocean in the distance. With a fresh approach to education that mixed living and teaching, students were encouraged to initiate courses.

At Santa Cruz was a young professor of linguistics, John Grinder, and one of his students, Richard Bandler. Richard lived up in the hills above campus with an unusual landlord, Dr. Robert Spitzer.

Spitzer was at MRI and close to the key thinkers and pioneers in brief therapy. A publisher of psychology books and a psychotherapist, he had a perspective on the question: “what is effective therapy?”

 
NLP History: the Spitzer family land

Spitzer and his family created a community in the redwood hills above the sea. Spitzer’s wife Becky hired a skinny 17 year old teenager to teach drums to his son. The hired guy was bright and helped his son learn. In return, the Spitzers’ semi-adopted him, and he later built a cabin on their land where he lived for a long time. The hired guy was Richard Bandler.
 
Spitzer gave Richard work in his publishing company, Science and Behavior Books. Spitzer was Virginia Satir’s close friend, and technical “boss” at MRI, where she created the first Conjoint Family Therapy program. He was also Fritz Perl’s publisher, and later Richard and John’s.

Eventually Spitzer introduced Richard and John to his colleague Gregory Bateson. Spitzer and Bateson (who was also his tenant on the land) later introduced them to Dr. Milton Erickson’s work.

If I think of an intellectual mentor for Richard and John, it is Spitzer who fully understood the links and relevance of the different approaches in psychology.
 
Through Spitzer, Richard was hired to transcribe tapes of Virginia Satir's family sessions and much later, he transcribed tapes of Fritz Perls.
 
Richard never actually connected with Fritz Perls, who left California when Richard was about 18 years old (and died a year later). Nor was he trained by Satir; he did observe a session which took place at the Spitzer’s land, and he recorded some of her sessions elsewhere. But Richard was never a subject.
 
As Richard transcribed the tapes with his ability to mimic and an excellent musical ear, he memorized the cadence and voices. Through this, he got up enough confidence to start offering his own version of “Gestalt” sessions in Santa Cruz. He arranged to offer a student initiated class on the subject, with John Grinder as his faculty sponsor.

John and Richard sparked each other’s creativity. They began to collaborate, experimenting first with a bright group of adventurous collaborators. The Santa Cruz co-investigators included Psychology MA student Leslie Cameron (who later became Mrs. Bandler for awhile) and Judith DeLozier (contributing anthropology and comparative religion perspectives) who was linked with John Grinder.

Who else was around? David Gordon, seriously exploring therapeutic metaphor and modeling, Terrance McClendon, etc. They were joined by Robert Dilts, who went on to carefully document and develop substantial contributions to NLP along with Judith DeLozier and Todd Epstein. Stephen Gilligan, who studied directly with Milton Erickson, also influenced the group.

Steve Andreas was across the San Francisco Bay, a psychology instructor at a local college. Steve led Gestalt groups for 10 years and later become an editor/ writer for Richard and John, helping them to publish "Frogs into Princess" (1979). This was the first NLP book to name the nascent field, and reach a wide audience.
 
Timing: Psychology moves away from the “medical” model towards self- directed growth
 
It was a great time for new ideas in psychology.

Abraham Maslow, an early contributor to Esalen, asked a crucial question: “what do healthy people look like?” 

His question and research helped switch the focus from illness to health, and gave birth to the human potential movement.

Maslow, like Carl Jung, felt that the job of a healthy person was to individuate. Maslow called the process self-actualization and believed in self- directed growth. From its start in 1962, Esalen, described itself as a “growth center”. (Hundreds of other groups followed its wake.)

Historically, clinical psychology had been dominated by a medical model, the doctor/ patient model, and rigidly framed psychoanalysis. People went to doctors to be “treated” for illnesses. It was expensive. Treatments lasted a long long time, and the doctor decided when someone could be declared "well".

In the sixties, the culture switched from a "medical" to a “growth” model. Patients became “clients”,  started to set their own goals, and demanded results.

Influential psychologists, such as Carl Rogers, offered “client centered” therapy. Eric Berne, for example, although trained in classical psychoanalysis, argued bluntly that psychologists should deliver specific results. Berne, who developed Transactional Analysis, wrote the breakthrough book ("Games People Play") that made psychology more accessible to a wide audience. He also pioneered the therapeutic contract, between psychologist and client.

NLP History: Luck, location and timing

Did Richard Bandler plan to be a therapist and help people when he grew up? Nope. He was good at math, took computer classes, loved music. If you’d asked him then, he might have owned up to wanting to be a rock star.
 
And in many ways, he achieved that. He likes to entertain, can be funny, and commands an audience. I recall one night many years later when Richard had enough money to hire the Moody Blues as “his” back up band, and make them play some of his music. He was elated.
 
Did John Grinder plan to be a therapist?  Nope. A brilliant young linguist with a sharp military background and a gift for decoding patterns, he was on track to be a full professor of linguistics at Santa Cruz. Then he got interested in new kinds of language patterns about how people change.
 
Was there a wide and systematic search for new tools by Richard and John? Nope. They worked from a collage of what they had. Luckily, what they had came from the best minds at MRI who had been studying brief therapy for two decades. Pioneers like Jay Haley published the results of his twenty years of work with Erickson in 1973 (Uncommon Therapy). Haley broke new ground using extended quotes, not notes. He published two years before Richard and John’s “Structure of Magic I” and was cited by them.

There was luck, good timing, a unique context, and an extended community of souls who were willing to try almost anything. This gave the group freedom to test their discoveries immediately. Again, the bootstrapping culture of Silicon Valley came into play.

There was luck in being introduced by Spitzer to people with seminal minds, and pioneering ideas, such as Satir, Bateson, Erickson, and Haley.
 
There was fertile ground for new ideas, and for experimentation with new tools.

And also, for Richard and John, fertile ground for a new business.
 

Luck: NLP finds a business model

There was a lot of luck in the launch of NLP as a business. This included the location, timing, and a willing market. There was an eager community interested in fresh ideas, and NTL, Esalen, and others were already offering group workshops for non-professionals.

A new business model (EST) had begun in San Francisco. The psychology "business" now offered personal growth techniques to very large groups -- earning significant fees. This caught the attention of the Santa Cruz group.
 
Almost as soon as Richard and John began to explore the so-called Gestalt group format, they went off campus to teach on a paid basis, and developed a following in the Santa Cruz area.
 
These early groups and workshops morphed into an intense period of experimentation from 1972 to 1974 for the lively community of collaborators. They were constantly testing what works.

Language modeling becomes the focus

Richard and John  weren’t, from their viewpoint, "burdened" by a heavy background in academic or clinical psychology. Nor did they have any formal training in the therapeutic process or counseling.

The academic discipline they did have at their disposal was John’s, in linguistics, transformational grammar. John knew how to model language patterns.
 
And so language analysis of the people they modeled became the focal point. They put a lot of weight on text and transcript. Their books were mostly edited transcripts, as Richard had done for Spitzer. (As Haley had pioneered with Erickson.)
 
They borrowed freely from every technique that was available at the time, like psychodrama, Fritz’s “hot seat” and all the vast array of encounter group techniques. They also discovered genuinely new approaches to how people represent their worlds and new ways to change perceptions, feelings, and behavior.
 
They wanted to know what produced results, especially, what worked quickly. Magically. The impatience and constant experimenting yielded a sturdy list of brief interventions -- what NLP calls the “trail of techniques”.

As Virginia Satir put it, they learned how to distill the “how” of what she and others were doing.

They published some results of their language analysis in 1975, again with the help of Spitzer, as “The Structure of Magic, Vol. I”. While this book does not offer conventional academic footnotes, it does reference members of the MRI group (Jackson, Haley, Watzlawick, Bateson, Satir, etc) in the bibliography.

The rush to publish meant the book was hard to read, and they bypassed academic research techniques, which created many challenges in later years. In their search for originality and the ownership of ideas, Richard and John hampered the advancement of the field by neglecting to directly acknowledge the sources of their ideas.

Going off campus (and off the academic "reservation")

Meanwhile, the income from off-campus workshops grew enough for them to quit their day jobs.

Once it was clear that there was a large "market", quite distinct value systems emerged, along with issues of who "owned" the ideas and tools that later became known in 1979 as NLP.

During this period in the 70's there was a confusion in NLP between the two fields of studies that MRI had kept separate: communications theory, and brief therapy. While MRI had investigated both tracks, they differentiated between knowing how to communicate effectively, and knowing what to communicate. The "what" to communicate was based on decades of clinical practice.

Because they were modeling therapists, early NLP practitioners confused the communications modeling with the therapeutic skills -- and this led, for some, to excessive claims.  

Over time, spin off businesses emerged as different members of the community founded their own institutes and developed their own labels and approaches.

Some of the original group went for the power in the instant "magic techniques" (and the large audiences); branding became an issue. (We'll leave the discussion of the multi-million dollar lawsuits over "ownership" for another chapter in the history of NLP.)

Others sought degrees in clinical psychology and started individual practices. They developed their individual therapeutic skills, and joined mainstream institutions. Some retained the compassion and intellectual discipline of Satir, Erickson and Bateson.

Leslie Cameron, David Gordon and Robert Dilts developed the initial curriculum A national organization formed to establish quality standards for trainings and the core training stabilized. A testing process evolved to certify students who demonstrated knowledge of the core tools and approaches in the new field called NLP.

Myths versus Memes

There is a healthy dynamic tension between keeping a consensus about core elements, and adding in new research findings as they emerge. The “history” gets rewritten as NLP tools pass from generation to generation, and country to country; the origins become layered with myths. 

Myths. There are many stories about the naming of NLP, some humorous, some apocryphal, and some with a grain of truth.

The term "neuro-linguistics" was first used and taught by Alfred Korzybski in the 1930s. He was the founder of General Semantics and originated the phrase "the map is not the territory". John Grinder, who learned about general semantics as part of his linguistics training, cites Korzybski, as a key source of ideas. (See the annotated bibliography in The Structure of Magic I.)

Another myth is that there were only two "creators" of the range of tools labled NLP.  There were many sources for the thinking behind the modeling techniques from George Miller who made "suggestions for a representational system for reference structures" to Gregory Bateson, who introduced (and had modeled) the work of Milton Erickson. 

No one school is the “pure” NLP -- to claim that would not only risk atrophy, but obscure the roots and origins of the diverse models and the original sources of the main ideas. 

Memes. One advantage of the constant experimenting with lay audiences is that the stronger and more practical principles emerge. The best of the tools become memes, and merge with the culture.

Much has been added.

What we know for sure is that there has been enormous value in testing the techniques for 35 years within a business framework. The most robust tools and attitudes have been widely shared and applied, taken up by educators and adopted by business to get practical results.

While the context for the launch of NLP was a mix of good timing, luck, a great location, and an adventurous group of collaborators, what has given it a consistent focus is the useful question that followed Maslow's question "What makes a healthy person?"

They asked, "what makes an effective (healthy) therapist?"

“HOW do effective change agents achieve those remarkable results?”

The answer to that question is in the robust mix of internationally tested tools, and the key attitudes, values and practices drawn from the original models.

The attitude Virginia Satir embodied when you were with her was a respectful and compassionate presence. About six feet tall, she was fully present and radiated support and interest in all. There was never a question that she cared. She reached out to touch people, often taking their hands.

While she initially supported the project to model her techniques, Satir did not stop innovating, and resisted having her work narrowed. According to Spitzer, Richard and John did not see her for the last 10 years of her life, when she was in a period of strong spiritual growth.

These tools work best when they are infused with that empathic attitude, a high quality of attention and presence. They open up your capacity to step into another person’s view of the world, and to meet them there.

While the techniques and language patterns offered in NLP are useful blueprints, what makes them come alive is the quality of empathy I admired in Virginia: she would look at each human being and not only feel their potential, but invite them to feel it too.

What keeps this basket of communication tools so vital and valuable? It is the strength of the original models (Satir, Erickson), the significance of the focus question -- the HOW do they do it, and the continual pragmatic testing in multiple cultures.

Are there more tools? Yes absolutely.

Yet the core principles offer a solid base for excellent communications. Satir and Erickson (with or without his trance work) are universally recognized as leading 20th Century therapists.

The future history of NLP

What I like best about NLP is the original question --"how do effective change agents achieve those remarkable results?"

I appreciate the vital international community that continues to ask that question, and empirically test the answers.

What I least admire is that there is sometimes a loss of the true sources, and a neglect of other mainstream research findings. 

Does the exploding field of neuroscience add to the tools? Yes, and so we need to add in current research findings about brain plasticity, mirror neurons, etc.

Does the new research in linguistics and metaphor, which goes beyond Erickson, need to be included? 

Yes, absolutely, and so we add current knowledge about metaphor and the brain from leading figures like George Lakoff, with whom I studied.

Do values and attitudes such as compassion and respect for spiritual development matter? Absolutely, it was that compassionate core that made Virginia so effective.

Our policy at PSI communications:

In our NLP certifications we go back to the originals, so you know you are directly connected to primary sources

-- modeling skills are essential, therefore we base our training on the fundamentals of how to model and change perception

-- science matters, therefore we offer current neuroscience research on how the brain works

-- we update what is known about metaphor (beyond Erickson)

-- we emphasize body language (bodies convey most of the meaning in communication), practice face to face cues and develop a rich vocabulary for body signals (we draw upon the work of Paul Ekman, with whom I studied)

-- we add a lot of humor, not only because we love it, but because our brains learn best when they light up with a smile!

It’s a pleasure for me to teach people to listen to themselves, appreciate their own capacities, make the changes they desire, and grow in competence and confidence.

We looked at the history... now let’s create the future.

As the new brain science results give us dynamic tools for managing our brains, we are on the threshold of managing our evolution through new choices.

Join us in extending the joy of empathic communication as your story, our story, continues.

 
Kristin Shannon, Paris 2011

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