Finding Useful NLP Books

For any student or curious seeker of nlp, or neuro-linguistic programming, it’s important to have access to helpful literature and reference material to keep your head in the head game, so to speak.  Some great NLP books are listed below and you’re sure to find plenty more at the library, your local bookstore, or online at places like Amazon, Ebay, or similar merchants.  

If you are just now delving in to this exciting new field on the cutting edge of psychology and brain neuro-science, you’re in for a treat. NLP has been brewing throughout much of the 20^th century but really took shape in the 1970s when the term was coined by psychologist Richard Bandler and linguist John Grinder, who combined behavioral psycho-analysis with forms of hypnosis, language patterns, and natural psychological therapy. The result is a system that, despite its out-of-hand rejection from mainstream psychiatry, has grown by leaps and bounds as new brain studies and noetic sciences have evolved to support it.

NLP is basically a system of reprogramming behavioral patterns by connecting them with the subjective experiences and thought patterns that underlie them in the mind. Practiced NLP practitioners learn to identify the unique individual sensory language that each person uses to interpret or interact mentally with his/her reality. Some people operate in a visual method in which the mind constantly relies on visual patterns and description to relay information about one’s surroundings, while others rely more on auditory methods or even kinesthetic and emotional patterns.

When you understand your own sensory modality, you have a more clear access point to the part of the brain that develops unconscious and particularly detrimental behavioral patterns. Accessing these “software programs” of the mind are the main method for clearing away damaging patterns of thought and behavior by “rewriting the code” so to speak, to use a modern analogy. A good deal of this is available in the many NLP books on the market that offer simple explanations as well as neuro linguistic programming for dummies and similar simplified texts.

While a large portion of the craft and study of neuro-linguistic programming relies heavily on understanding body language and speech patterns and therefore necessitates in-person, hands-on learning and study, one can still mine a wealth of information from the multitude of texts already on the market to explain the overall process and methods involved.  Understanding the relationship between language and behavior is a massive topic and unique to each individual, demographic, and culture.  Our entire reality is mediated by language.

Many NLP books will tell you, the complex inner monologue that happens in your head about everything you experience is a product of how you’ve learned to interact with and associate the things and happenings around you.

Hey there’s a coffee… I like coffee… Wakes me up… caffeine… caffeine is bad… I should cut out caffeine… Ooh that smells fresh… love hot coffee…

This kind of continuous accounting of things in the mind is a product of language and its relationship between You and the World around you.  This is what separates human beings from the animal kingdom.  Language causes us to step away from reality a bit and interpret it for meaning, something animals don’t seem to do.  They have a much more direct relationship with reality, what we would call instinctual.  It isn’t just unconscious programming on their part, they have sentience.  It’s more that they don’t analyze and interpret everything for advanced meaning the way a human being does.  To a dog, things are what they are.  There is no concept of past or future.  Just Now.

NLP allows us to analyze the unconscious processes of linguistic mediation that take place between the Self and the World so that we can better interact with it by choice and will, rather than by default.

When you flip through nlp books, try to retain as much theory as possible so that you can creatively adapt it to unique situations in your life and in those of your patients or peers.  Everyone has a unique lense that they peer through but each lense is assembled with the same basic components.  Learn those components, either from classes, experience, or nlp books, and you’ll have a broader understanding of the complex workings of human behavior and success.