NLP is a study of how humans think and experience the world. As we are all  unique, we all perceive the world differently. Even identical twins may have natures which lead them to be shy or assertive for example, and this affects their vision of the world; their ideas about people and things.

You cannot create precise, statistical formulae with something so subjective as how we perceive the world, but you can produce models of how things work. From these models, NLP techniques have been developed, which can quickly and effectively change thoughts, behaviors and beliefs that limit you. 

Language is a limited way of expressing the richness of our inner life but it’s the only tool we have. We draw different meanings from the same words, sometimes because of intonation or facial expression; Sometimes because our own feelings/beliefs/programs give us our own unique interpretation. In the same way when we express ourselves, we miss out part of what we need to say, make generalisations or distortions, for example. Our internal representation of the world is built through our senses; sight, hearing, smell and touch. In NLP we call these modalities. Most people code their experience through sight, hearing or feeling making them visual, auditory or kinaesthetic. We can break down these modalities into submodalities eg. for hearing; pitch, tone, and volume. All this information taken in at a deep neurological level cannot be conveyed simply by words.

John Grinder and Richard Bandler developed an NLP system to uncover the deep neurological level, the real meaning from language and they called this the Meta” model. It relies on understanding the limited nature of the words spoken and asking the right questions to recover the hidden meaning.

When you understand that a collection of submodalities creates our inner experience and that this experience affects our beliefs and behaviour, this leads you to the idea that if you can change the submodalities within an experience, then beliefs and behaviour will also change. This is the basis for the many NLP techniques.

NLP can be used as a technique on its own or be used with Hypnotherapy in very powerful ways.