Today, NLP is widely used in business to improve management, sales and achievement, boost performance, and increase interpersonal skills. It's been used in education to better understand learning styles, develop rapport with students and parents and to aid in motivation. The "guru industry" has also latched onto NLP and uses the practice as a set of tools for personal development.

So what exactly is NLP? The name gives only the barest of clues, in my opinion. If you combine the words that make up the name Neuro-Linguistic Programming, you get "neuro," for mind, "linguistic," for language, and "programming." Reassembled, you get something like the "programming the language of the mind."

The easiest way to think of NLP is as a discipline that helps you refine how your mind goes about thinking about things. It takes some of its practice from hypnosis, some from psychology, some from therapy, and combines it all together into a relatively understandable discipline. NLP has been used in practices from family therapy to cancer treatment to peak performance in business. Because NLP has techniques that would help increase rapport and improve communication, Denise and I decided it merited further investigation.

The skeptic's view
I'm a natural skeptic. I've never been a fan of the fru-fru stuff, the fluffy, new-age things that are supposed to make you feel all warm and fuzzy. As you might imagine, I was a bit skeptical about NLP. At first, it seemed like something you'd buy from a late-night informercial. Interestingly, it turns out, it is.

Tony Robbins, arguably one of the gurus of the infomercial, appears to have based much of his program on the basic NLP research. He rebuilt it for the masses, added some things, and renamed it. Reports are that people find value from Robbins material, but there's also a lot he left out.

I, of course, was curious. I needed to know if this NLP thing was for real. So I did a little research. I found three reports particularly interesting.

The first was from Psychology Today. They wrote, "NLP cannot be dismissed as just another hustle. Its theoretical underpinnings represent an ambitious attempt to codify and synthesize the insights of linguistics, body language, and the study of communication systems." I've read a number of things in Psychology Today and they seem pretty credible.

But, what I wanted to find out was whether there was a chance that NLP could help us at work. Strangely, I found the clue in a magazine called Real Estate Today. According to the magazine, "Real estate brokers and salespeople use Neuro-Linguistics to enhance their communication skills and provide them with more choices when working in a difficult situation. It shows how we make sense of the world around us and communicate."

Finally, I found a reference that was pretty wild. It didn't particularly apply to my needs as a manager, but definitely got me thinking. Dr Richard Bolstad and Margot Hamblett have done research on using NLP techniques to...get this...heal cancer. According to their research, cancer can be healed using "mind-body processes." They conducted a research study based on over 300,000 people, which shows a mind-boggling 95% effectiveness.