Welcome to Episode 76 of my podcast, The Executive Edge, with Carol Harris (www.carolharris.uk) who is a coach and author.

Carol and I talked about NLP, a subject I’ve known about in the past but felt the need to understand better. Essentially, NLP stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming. Many people know it as the science of personal effectiveness.

She trained with David Gordon and learnt a great deal about performance from him. The tools she discovered she has written about since in one of her many books. Performance breaks down in to what goes on in our heads, or our thoughts. Then it’s about the language we use. This means how we talk and what we say. It can be adjusted if we are helped to recognise whether it is helping, or hindering, us. Between what we think, and what we say, we can influence our own behaviour. That is because behaviour often follows patterns or habitual methods. This is referred to as programming

Most of us care about our behaviour and our performance. If we feel effective, we might not be drawn to unreasonably scrutinise what we do, but when we feel ineffective for whatever reason, this is when we can learn a lot through these tools.

How is ineffectiveness demonstrated?

Often external measures drive our performance and tell us we are, or are not, doing well. That can come in the form of someone, or something telling us we’ve got it right, or wrong.

In my view NLP can be a very useful process or model and the tools within it help us to understand ourselves better and to correct or enhance our behaviour.