NLP: A Glossary of Key Terms & Concepts

Ab-reaction: The sudden and violent release of repressed emotion.

Accessing Cues: Subtle behaviour will help trigger and indicate which representational system a person uses to think. Typical access cues include eye movements, voice tone, tempo, body posture, and breathing patterns.

Alignment: The stage when you enter your client’s ‘model of the world’.

Analogue: Information is presented in a continually variable form rather than in discrete packages. The changing speech volume is ‘analogue’ while the actual words are ‘digital’.

Anchoring: A stimulus or trigger is paired with a specific response. Anchors may be set deliberately or inadvertently, openly or covertly.

Anchor Collapsing:  When two different anchors fire simultaneously, the end result is a mixed or neutral state. Neither anchor will remain intact.

ANLP: The professional body for NLP in the UK.

Associated: You are experiencing through your senses (seeing with your eyes, hearing with your ears, feeling with your feelings).

Auditory:  It is related to hearing or the sense of hearing.

Away From: A motivational pattern is marked by avoiding an unwanted experience rather than accomplishing a desired outcome.

Behaviour: The physical actions (and reactions) through which we interact with people and the environment around us.

Behavioural Flexibility:  The ability to vary one’s behaviour to elicit a response from another.

Beliefs:  Robert Dilts, the well known NLP developer defined beliefs as Closely held generalisations about (1) cause, (2) meaning, (3) boundaries in a) the world around us, b) our behaviour, c) our capabilities, and d) our identities.

Belief Change Flexibility:  The ability to try out new beliefs briefly to test their usefulness.

Calibration:  The process of learning to ‘read’ the unconscious, nonverbal responses of others.

Cause and Effect:  The actual or perceived casual relationship involves two or more events in time.

Chunking: Chunking may refer to:

1. Organising or breaking down some experience into bigger or smaller pieces;
2. Chunking up consists in moving to a more significant, more abstract level of information;
3. Chunking down consists in moving to a more specific and concrete level of information;
4. Chunking laterally consists in finding other examples at the same level of

Cold Reading:  The ability to appear to be an effective palm reader, clairvoyant, etc, without any psychic ability.

Congruence:  When a person’s internal beliefs, strategies, and behaviours fully agree and are orientated to securing a desired outcome.

Consciousness:  Everything that is in current awareness.

Content: The ‘story’ associated with a problem—can be the product of reflection, interrogation and psychoanalysis.

Context: A context is the framework surrounding a particular event. This framework will often determine how a specific experience or event is interpreted.

Criteria:  The values or standards a person uses to make decisions and judgements It is helpful to understand your own and other people’s criteria in both business and personal situations.

Deep Structure: The sensory maps (both conscious and unconscious) that people use to organise and guide their behaviour.

Digital: Data presented in discrete packages, rather than in continuously variable form. Words, for example are digital whereas the changing volume in which they are spoken is analogue.

Ecology: It genuinely benefits yourself, those closest to you and maybe mankind and the universe.

Exit Point: A point in a strategy that allows the client to know when to stop the processing.

Expectancy:  The positive (or negative) anticipation of both coach and client regarding the outcome can affect the outcome.

Strategy Notation (Four Tuple): A method used to notate the structure of any particular experience. The concept of the four tuples maintains that any experience must be composed of some combination of the four primary representational systems – A, V, K, O where A = auditory, V = visual, K = kinaesthetic and O = Olfactory and Gustatory.

Future Pacing:  The process of mentally rehearsing oneself through some future situation to ensure that the desired behaviour will occur naturally and automatically.

Frame: The construct of how a situation or event is perceived or the ‘rules’ behind any interaction can significantly impact the outcome. Thus, changing the frame (reframing) can significantly affect the outcome.

Gustatory: Relating to taste or the sense of taste.

Hypnotic Language:  A way of leading people into a hypnotic state, often initially focusing on what is true for them and leading them into useful hypnotic states.

Installation:  Facilitating the acquisition of a new strategy or behaviour. A new strategy may be installed through some combination of NLP skills or techniques and/or any combination thereof.

Kinaesthetic:  In NLP, the term kinaesthetic is used to encompass all kinds of feelings, including tactile, visceral, and emotional, related to body sensations.

Layering:  Using two or more different techniques towards a given outcome increases the likelihood of success.

Mental Maps: The idea is that our experience of life is built up from our unique mental maps based on our experiences, values, beliefs, etc. If we can work from their maps rather than impose our own, we are more likely to help others change and develop.

Meta Model:  The meta-model, developed by John Grinder and Richard Bandler, defines syntactic environments by which one can detect and challenge deletions, generalisations, and distortions. Using questions from the meta-model (albeit with care) can help raise our clients’ unconscious strategies into consciousness and help them solve their own challenges without us having to make direct suggestions.

Meta Programs:  A process by which one sorts through multiple generalisations simultaneously. As such, meta-programs control how and when a person will engage any set of strategies in a given context.

Metaphor and Stories:  Stories, parables, and analogies communicate a particular idea. Throughout history, stories have been very effective means of communicating ideas and stimulating change.

Milton Model:  A model developed by Richard Bandler and John Grinder through the hypnotic language patterns of Dr. Milton H. Erickson.

Modelling:  NLP is the act of creating a model that describes a given system. It comes from modelling successful people. Modelling people who ‘aren’t successful yet’ in a specific context can also be helpful, as it may give the person ideas on how to improve on their own or what the coach needs to do next. From our point of view, a model doesn’t need to be ‘true’, it just needs to work!

Modalities:  Referring to our five senses, especially when describing how subjective experience is created.

Nominalisation: Verbs transformed into nouns; a ‘process’ represented by a ‘thing’, inferring that it can’t be changed easily. For example, Communication is a nominalisation of the verb To Communicate. “Communication is awful at work” feels set in stone. “We need to communicate better at work” is full of possibilities.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming:  Co-founded by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. There are many valuable descriptions of NLP. Richard Bandler describes it as ‘The study of the structure of subjective experience and what can be calculated from that’. We describe it as exploring how we think, communicate and change. Whichever definition you choose, NLP involves a study of attitudes that lead to success, modelling great performance and distilling both into techniques that enable others to produce improved results in a given context.

Neuroplasticity:  The ability of brain architecture to be changed by experience.

Olfactory: Relating to the sense of smell.

Outcomes:  Goals or desired states that a person aspires to achieve. The essential purpose of an outcome is to be significant and motivational enough to set a direction.

Overlapping:  We expand our processing ability and experience by moving from one representational system to another.

Pacing:  A method used by communicators to establish rapport by matching certain aspects of their behaviour to those of the person with whom they are communicating.

Parts:  A metaphoric description of programs and strategies of behaviour that may appear to function independently from the client. While we may use ‘parts’ as part of an intervention, we’re particularly keen to ensure all ‘parts’ are integrated into a functioning whole.

Predicates:  Process words (like verbs, adverbs, and adjectives) describe a subject. Predicates identify which representational system a person is using to process information. (Discover your Predicate Preference via our free online assessment)

Pre-framing:  Setting the boundary conditions of an experience or event in advance can significantly affect the outcome.

Presuppositions:  Information assumed, but not overtly stated, to be present for a statement to be understood. (NLP Presuppositions are a set of beliefs that can be very effective when coaching a client – e.g., there is a positive intention behind every behaviour.)

Rapport:  The presence of trust, harmony and cooperation in a relationship.

Reframing:  Changing a negative response to an experience into a positive or neutral one by placing it into a different context or meaning.

Relaxation Response:  The opposite of the fight-or-flight response it is brought about by specific meditative and relaxation techniques, which increase the functional relationship between the two hemispheres in the brain.

Representational Systems:  Senses through which the brain receives information about the environment – e.g. visual, auditory, kinaesthetic etc.

Secondary Gain: Some seemingly negative or problematic behaviour carries out some positive function at some level. For example, smoking may help a person to relax or help them fit a particular self-image.

Solution or Outcome Frame:  Construct aimed at orientating the subject towards solutions rather than avoiding problems.

Solution Orientated Thinking:  Seeking solutions rather than spending all the available time on analysing problems.

Stacked Anchor: Two or more different responses are set to be activated by the same stimulus. Stacking is most commonly used to create a particular resource state.

Synaesthesia:  The process of overlapping between representational systems is characterised by phenomena like see-feel circuits, in which people derive feelings from what they see.

State:  The total ongoing mental and physical condition from which a person is acting.

Strategy:  A set of explicit mental and behavioural steps used to achieve a specific outcome.

Submodalities:  The unique sensory qualities perceived by each of the five senses. For example, visual Submodalities include colour, shape, movement, brightness, depth, etc., auditory.   Submodalities include volume, pitch, tempo, etc., and kinaesthetic sub-modalities include pressure, temperature, texture, location etc.

Surface Structure:  An utterance without any deep structure background – or unconscious – information.

Structure:  The way in which a specific behaviour functions, as opposed to the reason it exists (content).

Timeline:  A subjective construct that metaphorically organises your client’s past, present, and future time.

Time Distortion:  Subjective temporal experience that differs from ‘objective’ clock time.

T.O.T.E:  Developed by Miller, Galanter, and Pibram, the term stands for the sequence.   Test-Operate-Test-Exit, which describes the basic feedback loop used to guide all behaviour. It is useful in establishing strategies.

Towards: Motivational pattern is marked by seeking to accomplish or achieve a particular goal.

Trance:  A natural, altered state of consciousness, usually marked by reduced awareness of external events and increased focus on specific thoughts or feelings. Hypnosis is often described as a way of using a naturally occurring trance.

Trans derivational Search:  The act of locating through meaning(s) which may not be explicit in a surface structure.

Translating:  Connecting the meaning of one representation to the same meaning in another representation.

Unconscious:  Everything that is outside conscious awareness.

Values:  A label that indicates what’s important to a client.

Value Rules: What has to happen in sensory experience for a value to be met?

Visual:  Relating to sight or sense of sight.

Well-Formedness Conditions:  In NLP, a particular outcome is well-formed when it is:

1. Stated in positive terms
2. Initiated and maintained by the individual
3. Ecological – maintains the quality of all rapport systems and
4. Testable in experience – sensory specific (see, hear, feel).

The WHAT Coaching Method™:  Developed by Tony Nutley, the the WHAT Coaching Method was originally developed as a training drill student coaches, however since the early development phase it has developed into a model of its own merits and ensures the criteria for the NLP concept of Well Formed Outcomes