Financial Times

Series on the mind
The art and science of achieving personal excellence throughout life
By Jayamini Samarathunge
Life is a journey – a journey without an end, even after death. During our lifetime we have many expectations from life. It can be both material and immaterial. Money, fame, wealth, love, happiness, relationships, children, health and many more become the priorities when living. Every minute of everyday, knowingly and unknowingly, we chase after some form of fulfilment in life. Sometimes, some people spend their whole lives wondering what to do with theirs without understanding what exactly they want from it. Those who do understand what they want may try to comprehend the dynamics of their own mind and use them in order to succeed.

This created interest in research to understand why some people become successful while others don’t, and researchers found a unique mental attribute and behaviour patterns for successful subjects.

In the early 1970s, John Grinder, an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of California in Santa Cruz, and Richard Bandler, a student of psychology, identified patterns used by successful therapists. They packaged them in a way that could be passed on to others through a model now known as Neuro-Linguistic Programming, or NLP.

NLP embraces three simple concepts. First, the neuro part of NLP recognises the fundamental idea that all human behaviour originates from neurological processes, which include seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling. In essence, people experience the world through their senses. Second, they communicate their experiences verbally, through language; therefore, the linguistic part of NLP refers to this use of language to communicate thoughts. Finally, the programming aspect of NLP recognises that individuals choose to organise their ideas and actions to produce results.

Each person also decides how to organise these ideas in a specific manner. The NLP founders theorize that people think differently and that these differences correspond to individual programming or processing systems. People use their senses outwardly to perceive the world and inwardly to “re-present” this experience to them. In NLP, representational systems denote ways people take in, store, and code information in their minds.

These systems pertain to the principal human senses — seeing (visual), hearing (auditory) and feeling (kinesthetic). To a lesser degree, they involve tasting (gustatory) and smelling (olfactory). People constantly see, hear, and feel whatever transpires around them. When individuals relate these experiences to others, they mentally access the sights, sounds or feelings associated with these experiences and communicate them through their predominant representational system.

It’s an art, because everyone brings their unique personality and style to what they do; and this can never be captured in words or techniques. It’s a science, because there is a method and process for discovering the patterns used by outstanding individuals in many fields to achieve outstanding results.
The purpose of NLP is to help increase choice and to enhance the quality of life. It helps to create more choices and happiness in one’s personal and professional life, and in the lives of others.

NLP is practical. It is a set of models, skills and techniques for thinking and acting effectively in the world. It is also a model of how individuals structure their unique experiences of life. It is only one way to think about and organise the fantastic and beautiful capacity of human thought and communication.

NLP shows how to understand and mould your own successes, so that you can have many more of those successful events in life. It is a way of discovering and unfolding your personal genius; a way of bringing out the best in yourself and others. In essence, it is a study of what makes the difference between the excellent and the average.

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