The widely known as neurolinguistic programming (NLP) can be defined as an “instruction manual of the relationship we maintain with others”, according to the NLP specialist Mónica Pérez de las Heras in her work Write, speak, seduce. In essence, they are the techniques through which we know ourselves better, and also others. Since it starts from the premise that “we can achieve practically everything we set out to do”, this tool is very successful in the field of sports and business.
If we analyze the term, this is nothing more than the union of the following: how we make our brains work (programming) (neuro) and how we express what we think (linguistics). A series of basic postulates have been established, among which the classification of people into three types stands out: visual, auditory and kinesthetic (the latter have a predilection for physical or manual things and also for the world of emotions).
The origins of neurolinguistic programming go back to the 70s, by the hand of the Americans Jonh Grinder and Richard Bandler. Both began to question why at the university there were professors who had the gift of knowing how to communicate and attract large masses of students when they taught their subjects and how, on the other hand, others noticed that their classes were emptying due to their poor ability to transmit knowledge .
Although, according to numerous international studies, this discipline inherited from constructivism “can also play a therapeutic role to mitigate learning disorders, fears, phobias, anxieties and even allergies or colds”, its main mission is focused on the improvement of communicative processes, as well as oratory. In this way, through NLP you can learn to build speeches, star in incredible presentations and captivate when speaking in public thanks, in part, to gaining self-confidence .
But why do NLP experts attach so much importance to non-verbal communication ? Everyone tends to think that we communicate only when we use the word but, according to authors such as Albert Mehrabian, this only accounts for 7% of the sending of the message in an emotional communication .
Mehrabian argues that 38% of what we communicate is through paraverbal language, the use we make of our voice and 55% of our transmission of information is non-verbal language : gestures, postures, micromanages, etc. Therefore, they defend that, more important than what we say, is how we do it and what we are expressing with our body about it.
NLP, science or pseudoscience?
Neurolinguistic programming is, in many cases, defined as ‘science’, something that in recent years has caused a lot of talk among the scientific community, since, within this, it is considered one more pseudoscience, without proven scientific basis and that tries almost fraudulently gaining ground on valid psychology techniques.
In 2010, Tomasz Witkowski analyzed each of the controlled empirical tests of NLP that had been published up to that point and showed their results in the journal Polish Psychological Bulletin . Of a total of 33 relevant studies, only 18.2% had positive results to validate NLP ; almost 55% were negative, and the remaining 27.3% were quite ambiguous.
