Basic idea of NLP

Many people learn NLP because of the powerful psychological ideas, tools and techniques that it offers. I'd certainly agree that NLP has some very powerful tools, and after having practiced NLP with many clients for a number of years, one of the things I have really found worth appreciating is the therapist towards client attitude that it encourages....

Allow me to expand on this a little...

One could say there are generally two types of people helpers, the 'diagnosers' and the 'fixers'.
The diagnoser is the type of person who is constantly seeking to evaluate within each interaction with a client in order to categorize the person with whom he is interacting i.e. are they confident, depressed, impulsive, etc. And also, to understand what are their real ‘issues’? Where did these issues come from? Etc...

The danger:
Such a person may get lost in the focus of their clients problem(s) and may not be able to leave much room to actually see the potential in the client, seeing beyond the problem.


The fixer on the other hand says, there is no such thing as "problems", only challenges. The fixer would love to let everyone know that there problems can and will be solved today.

And since the fixer has numerous powerful tools that they have mastered and have read so many ‘great positive psychology / self-help books’, it would be a very good idea not to get too close to them unless you are 100% committed to change (or not committed at all, since then you can simply pretend to go along with the fixers words and that will make the fixer happy enough).

The fixer does not have time to wait around for you until you get ‘want’ to change, in fact he cannot stand the fact that you have a problem (although he may never admit that).

The outcome of this is that many people with problems prefer the 'diagnosers' and end up not really getting solutions.

Working through the use of NLP methodologies can be useful.

NLP’s basic idea is to understand that people’s problems are their unhealthy patterned strategies. And usually a strategy has a structure. That strategy may involve the person’s thought, triggers of their emotional state (which they may not be aware of), as well as the sequencing of their behavior(s) etc...

Therefore, with practicing NLP it is rarely useful to think of the client as the problem.

Principally, it may be somewhat like a heart Doctor who is operating on a patient, at the moment when the problem needs fixing, the Doctor does not need to know how much physical exercising he’d been doing or what kind of emotional issues the patient has had with his parents etc… (Although later on, after the treatment the doctor may recommend that he change certain life style habits.)

Another useful analogy to describe NLP in practice, would be, if I baked a cake and it came out tasting awful to me, I do not need to bite in to it and taste it a number of times in order to change the cake, all I need to do is go back to the ingredients and work out what’s missing or what needs adding and then correct it. Naturally, that is if I ‘want’ to learn how to bake that cake again. Alternatively, I may just choose to bake a different cake altogether.


NLP believes in changing the ‘how’ people do problems, instead of the ‘why’. Naturally, when clients come to me and I am not judging them with their problems, rather, I am interested in what is keeping the problem from being resolved, the entire interaction can be different. I am facing a great potential of a person who for some reason has some unhealthy structured patterns in some area of their life which they may wish to decide to change, or not.

This blog is taken from http://www.menachemschloss.com/2012/04/22/basic-idea-of-nlp-therapy/ Menachem Schloss
NLP Therapist
& Educational Consultant
Menachemschloss1@gmail.com