This Month's Audio Special:

NLP first came into being in the early 1970s, when Richard Bandler, an undergraduate student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, was transcribing therapy sessions of Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt Therapy, from audio recordings, as part of a project for one of his lecturers.

Bandler became aware that he was able to reproduce startlingly similar results to those Perls was achieving with his clients.

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Impressed by their work, the British anthropologist and epistemologist Gregory Bateson introduced Bandler and Grinder to Milton Erickson, who would become the third model for NLP.

Erickson, an American psychiatrist and founding member of the American Society for Clinical Hypnosis, was well known for his unconventional approach to therapy, for his ability to "utilize" anything about a patient to help them change, and for treating the Unconscious mind as creative and solution-generating.

Their modelling of Milton Erickson led to the development of what became known as the Milton Model.

An entire school of hypnosis and hypnotherapy has also developed out of Erickson's profoundly rich and ground breaking work, now universally known as 'Ericksonian Hypnosis'.

Bandler and Grinder worked together until the 1980s, when they went their separate ways, yet both continue to develop the field of NLP today.

John Grinder works with Carmen Bostic St Clair, in what he describes as New Code of NLP.

Richard Bandler has continued alone to develop the area of Sub-Modalities, and has collaborated with John LaValle, among others, developing a number of systems and aproaches, including what he describes as Neuro-Hypnotic Repatterning and also Design Human Engineering.