What is NLP?

When it comes to NLP (which stands for Neuro-Linguistic-Programming) people generally tend to fall into one of two camps: those who think it’s this amazing tool that can totally change your life and get you everything you want, and those who think it’s a cult full of weird idiots along the lines of Sceintology; neither is completely true.
From what I can gather it’s a few money grabbing con artists who have given the practice a bad name (and some dubious attempts to connect the principles to wider pseudo-scientific theories);
and this is a shame as there is actually a fare bit of useful information to be gained from it. Many of the ideas revolve around the use of communication, language and gestures to understand cognitive processes and build a ‘rapport’ with another individual. In particular it is useful for sales people as a means to help persuade a potential customer to buy a product.

NLP was co-created by Richard Bandler and linguist John Grinder in the 1970s and contains several key areas:

Modelling
Modelling is the broad term for the systems used by a ‘modeller’ to adopt their client’s gestures, patterns, beliefs and more to make themselves more agreeable and persuasive.

The Meta Model
The Meta Model focuses on errors and assumptions in a client’s language to gain insight into the speaker’s thought processes and looks to respond to the construction or a sentence rather than its meaning and content.
For example if you were to say ‘everyone loves me’ the NLP expert might respond ‘everyone?’, or ‘what would you say love is?’. In other words – annoying.

The Milton Model
The Milton Model has the NLP practitioner using language that is purposefully vague or ambiguous to allow the listener to project their own meaning onto what’s being said and so almost certainly agreeing.

Representational systems
This is the idea that we use visual, auditory and kinesthetic methods to understand ideas and that different people prefer to use different ones. Our language is supposed to give away which we are using – for example people who say ‘I see’ or ‘see what I mean?’ might be visual types, while people who say ‘you hear what I’m saying?’ might be auditory.
By adapting our behaviour and language to suite the representational system of the intended
recipient it is thought that we can build a better rapport more quickly.
Personally I believe that they have left out an important fourth option that being lexical – where ‘know what I mean?’ might be an indicator. I’m fairly certain that I’m that type.

Accessing cues
Accessing cues refer to the way our eyes give away our thought processes where basically we look up and left or right when visualising, level and left or right when processing sound, or down and right for kinaesthetic.

Mirroring
Mirroring is a technique by which you subtly mimic the posture and body language of whoever you’re talking to thereby building rapport. This is also taught in crappy self-help dating books as a technique for pulling.
Apparently it can be very powerful but subtlety is really the key here – make it obvious and you will find it has the reverse effect with people just ending up pissed off at you.
NLP also has various techniques that use these principles to therapeutic effect. These include ‘Anchoring’ by which you associate a word or movement with a positive memory as a way to instantly recall a good mood or feeling; and ‘Framing’ where you try to change the way you view or remember a painful event or anxiety inducing thought. For example you may re-frame the image of a phobia with a comedy soundtrack and all in pink so that when you visualise it it causes humour rather than stress.
This is only really a taster but it gives you a basic understanding of NLP’s key principals. A lot of it from there is common sense.
Bare in mind that the methods have little scientific verification, but the rapport building stuff at least is widely used in business and generally accepted as effective.