History of NLP
In the early 1970's a 20 year old psychology student at the University of California, Santa Cruz (Richard Bandler) met and befriended an associate professor of linguistics there (John Grinder).
Bandler had originally majored in mathematics and computer science but had switched when the field of behavioural sciences piqued his interest. Hence why NLP is usually said to have been created by a linguist and a computer programmer.
Bandler had become particularly interested in the work of therapists Virgina Satir and Fritz Perls and began to run various workshops and study groups around the subject of gestalt therapy.
Soon Bandler and Grinder began to work together to develop a behavioural syntax for gestalt therapy i.e what skills and techniques would help a person overcome a problem. Adopting an approach of "if it works, use it - if it doesn't work, try something else" they analysed writings and tape recordings to discover the roots of what allowed Satir and Perls to produce such remarkable results.
Ideas, insights, and techniques were tried out on friends (including Sleight of Mouth author Robert Dilts, Judith DeLozier, Leslie Cameron Bandler, and David Gordon) who soon joined them in developing and extending the work. The enthusiastic and highly creative group grew and this was how NLP developed.
Out of this search came many of the techniques and methods that are still part of good NLP Practitioner and NLP Master Practitioner trainings today, techniques such as anchoring, sensory acuity and calibration, reframing, representational systems and personal techniques such as Change Personal History.
It became evident that highly effective communicators seemed almost able to create theraputic magic by their adept use of language. The language patterns that emerged from this work became the Meta Model which was published in the first NLP book - The Structure of Magic, published in 1975.