The Temptation That Led Me to NLP

It was 1986, and the occasion was an evening concert given by two brothers in a local church. I don’t remember why I went; I just remember the conversation that changed my life. It happened during the intermission. There, I happened to meet one of the brothers at the refreshment stand. If my memory serves me right, he was in his mid-thirties. I asked him what he did for a living when he wasn’t traveling and giving concerts. He said he “used to be a therapist.”

“Used to be?” I asked, surprised. That was a bit of a shock for me. I’d never heard someone in their mid-thirties talk about their job in the past tense before. That surprised me. “Used to be? What do you mean by that? Aren’t you a therapist anymore?”

Then the musician said, “Well, after I could cure phobias in ten minutes, I lost interest.” In my head, a little voice said, “Yeah, right! You can cure phobias in ten minutes! Do you also have some land in Florida to sell that’s underwater?” Then, out loud, I tried not to let my doubt show too much and said: "Okay, you got me. As a cognitive-behavioral therapist, I can cure phobias in six months, and if the person is really ready, I can even do it in three months. But ten minutes? That’s gotta be a joke, right?"

"No, it’s not a joke," he said. "You haven’t read Frogs into Princes, have you?" And of course, I hadn’t. I didn’t even know what that was. I asked him what it was and who wrote it. Then he told me about the discoveries made by the founders of NLP, which led to the creation of NLP.

"Okay, give me a hint. How on earth would you cure a phobia in ten minutes? How is that supposed to work? I’d make a fear hierarchy, get the person relaxed, and over weeks slowly expose them to the fear triggers to desensitize them. But how would you do all that in just a few minutes?" At that point, other people were already waiting to talk to him, so he just repeated his first sentence: "You haven’t read Frogs into Princes, have you?" He smiled at me and left it at that. And it was exactly that little tease that tempted me to dive into exploring this thing called Neuro-Linguistic Programming. It was his refusal to explain the process that pulled me into this field. Within a few days, I got the book and read it in a couple of sittings. That was enough. I wanted more. So I immediately started reading everything that had been printed about NLP (which wasn’t much at the time, maybe 12 to 15 books), and then I went to see Richard Bandler in San Diego, where I did my first trainings.

But before that, something else happened. Two weeks later, I had an appointment with a client who came to me because of a phobia. As usual, I started by making a list of his fears and then asking about their hierarchy. I explained the process to him—slowly exposing him to his fears while he was relaxed, until we could finally tackle the phobia directly. He said he hadn’t expected it to take three to six months, and asked if there wasn’t some faster process.

"Well... maybe. I just came across a pattern that’s supposed to work for phobias, but I’ve never tried it and I don’t know if it actually works."

When I explained to him that I’d never used this method before, that I had no training in it, and that I had no experience with it, he asked if I’d try it out with him. Excited and a bit hesitant, I grabbed the book and started reading him the instructions. His phobia was a textbook example and fit the pattern perfectly: just thinking about the triggering event put him in a state of intense fear that took over his whole body.

I didn’t do any anchoring—no touch, no change in voice. Nothing. Back then, I didn’t even know what an anchor was. I just read the text. After we’d rewound his inner movie a few times, I read the last line of the pattern to test it.

"Okay, now try to bring the phobia back—really try to bring it all up again." He couldn’t do it. I read the sentence again. He still couldn’t bring the phobia back. I don’t even know if he was surprised by it himself; all I know is that I was! And that settled it—I definitely had to learn NLP. I had to understand the magic of those words and how they managed to change the inner structures of his mind in just a few minutes so that this unconscious reaction disappeared. And that’s how my journey into NLP began.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D., has been an NLP thinker, trainer, and developer since the late 1980s. He founded Neuro-Semantics as a model and as a community. He also created Meta-Coaching, several diplomas (Self-Actualization, Leadership), and has written over 73 books.

How NLP has changed

Stephan Landsiedel asked two questions that I want to address in this article. The first question is: "How has your view of NLP changed or evolved over the years?" And: "If you were to reinvent NLP today, what would you do differently?"

NLP change and perspective shift

While NLP has changed over the years, my own view and understanding of NLP has shifted even more. The change in NLP was that it went from NLP for therapy and therapists to NLP for communication, NLP for business (sales, persuasion, leadership, etc.), and finally to NLP for coaching. The early models were totally focused on psychology and psychological healing. Therapists were the first to get interested in NLP as a model and its abilities for dealing with all kinds of trauma. That’s why I looked into NLP too—to pick up more skills as a psychotherapist. In my early trainings, the vast majority of participants were also therapists, about 80 percent.

After that, NLP shifted its focus to general communication, and during that time NLP became known worldwide as a communication model. In the 1980s and 1990s, the focus was on assertive communication, negotiation, persuasion, hypnosis, and so on. After the turn of the millennium, with coaching developing as its own field, NLP’s focus shifted again, this time to companies and organizations. First, NLP modeled therapists, then other communicators, then leaders, entrepreneurs, and so on.

My personal view of NLP started with seeing it as a communication model. The key models offered different ways to understand how to handle communication and how communication works—like the Meta-Model, Meta-Programs, Submodalities, and the Milton Model. I used NLP as a therapist and as a trainer for assertive communication. My first integration of NLP into my writing was the book Speak Up, Speak Clear, Speak Kind (1987). But each of these models also offered something deeper than just communication—thinking, even though I wasn’t aware of that at the time. That realization only hit me around 2010, when I started exploring the field of critical thinking, which eventually led to a series of books about thinking, including Executive Thinking (2018) and Thinking for Humans (2024).

Today, I define NLP as a model of thinking. I see it as a model that gets to the core of things—how a person "thinks." It starts with representational thinking, then comes "editorial thinking" (submodalities), and finally meta-thinking (in the form of beliefs, values, identity, decisions, metaphors, etc.). NLP deals with the higher psychological levels—our thinking styles (that is, meta-programs). Of course, thinking then leads to everything human—communication, relationships, creativity, business, modeling, ethics, self-actualization, and so on. It’s the quality of thinking that determines the quality of communication, leadership, management, parenting, and so on. The quality of thinking also determines a person’s physical health and mental well-being.

If I were to reinvent NLP

I would reinvent NLP by putting the focus on thinking instead of communication. Deeper than the way we talk to each other is the way we think. How we think is described in the model of meta-programs. And the specific ways we think can be shown like this:

• We think representationally by running a movie in our head (VAK).
• We think about this movie by editing it (submodalities).
• Then we think from the mental-emotional state that these representations create.
• After that, we take a step back and draw conclusions or develop beliefs about things (first meta-level or logical levels).
• From there, each further logical or meta-level offers additional thinking formats: values, identity, memory, imagination, anticipation, decision, understanding, metaphor, intention, and so on, all of which are described in detail in the Meta-States model.

By emphasizing thinking, NLP could easily be recognized as a model for critical thinking, creative thinking, and executive thinking. What we call the "Meta-Model of Language" is actually more accurately a model of thinking—linguistic thinking—and how our language naturally generalizes, deletes, and distorts. What we express in words and how we think in words can be updated and improved through Meta-Model questions.

It’s the same with what we call hypnotic communication: it’s actually hypnotic thinking. It’s a way of thinking that uses imagination to send deeper kinesthetic messages to the body—for healing, renewal, pain relief, well-being, and so on.

If I were to redesign NLP, I’d add everything that’s already been discovered about thinking—especially about how thinking can go wrong. The three lists of thinking—cognitive distortions (from developmental and cognitive psychology), cognitive biases (from neuroscience), and cognitive fallacies (from the philosophy of argumentation)—already offer great checklists for our thinking. That would prevent anyone from misusing the thinking model of NLP the way some people have misused the communication model.

Actually, this isn’t so much a hypothetical exploration of how I’d reinvent NLP, but more a description of what we’ve been doing in Neuro-Semantics for the last ten years. So, in addition to the NLP books about thinking—like Figuring Out People, Communication Magic, and so on—I’ve written eleven more books about thinking: Executive Thinking, Strategic Thinking, Thinking for Humans, and so on.