The original NLP and the ignored third man

Neurolinguistic Programming, better known by its acronym NLP, was born in the United States of the 70s. A methodology that is currently taught and practiced especially within the world of human development due to the capacity of the modeling of the excellence that it provides, but that many apply without knowing its origin and, more importantly, why it is I think.

In many cases we find a teaching of NLP focused only on showing its dynamics and its techniques, which makes the knowledge of the discipline partial: If those who handle this methodology do not know its fundamentals, they will be able to use its tools, but in an empty and limited way. because they do not know the bases on which they are based and all the possibilities that they really have.

We can make a simile with a chef and his kitchen knives. The chef can know very well all the knives and what each one is for. But if, in addition, he knows that the bread knife fulfills its function because it has serrated teeth that facilitate the tearing of the bread without breaking it, he will have a more vision. he widens that knife and he will understand that, in the same way, beyond bread, he can use it in other cases, such as to cut cakes, panettones or other textured foods Similary.

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Going back to the origins of NLP

Thus, in recent years a trend has been consolidating within NLP training that advocates study the theoretical foundations that made the birth of the methodology possible in order to better understand it in its entirety and, with this, get much more out of the techniques and tools that support it.

One of the main proponents of this trend is Frank Pucelik, unknown to many, but a key figure in the world of NLP: he is one of the co-creators of Neurolinguistic Programming with the two figures whose names are always associated with his birth, Richard Bandler and John Grinder.

Why has Frank Pucelik been "erased" in some cases of the "paternity" of NLP? The truth is that there are no bizarre stories or hidden intrigues. We can say that it has been the result of the evolution of the study of NLP itself and the way in which Frank's career subsequently developed.

The birth of Neurolinguistic Programming

Frank Pucelik served in the Vietnam War and returned to the United States in the late 1960s at the age of 21 and psychologically shocked. for what I lived there. Trying to respond to the ‘demons of his’ he resumed his psychology studies that he had abandoned without very good results, a career that culminated in excellent certifications on this occasion, which allowed him to transfer to the University of California Santa Cruz in the early 70s, nerve center of the great thinkers of the moment, to continue investigating Gestalt, the psychological current on which he based his race.

While there he met Richard Bandler, passionate about the psychology that he was doing at that time transcription works of the lectures by Virginia Satir and Fritz Perls and to which Frank also used to go. Observing these famed therapists, as well as Milton erickson, they realized that they always achieved successful results in their therapies and decided to do a modeling their way of working to check for themselves if applying those models they obtained the same results. The Gestalt seminars they gave by doing ‘their experiments’ soon acquired spectacular fameThe two young men achieved the same successful results as prestigious therapists with many years of experience.

But there was a problem. Bandler and Pucelik couldn't explain how it happened, what made these methods work. And then they invited the linguist John Grinder to attend those seminars, which finally served to answer his question through transformational grammar. What Grinder showed is that there were some structures of language, some patterns that they used and that were repeated and that were what managed to model the behaviors in a masterful way and achieve the desired results.

After obtaining these conclusions, they realized that if they could extract a methodology based on how they acted, how they spoke and talked to each other those excellent people, that methodology, those tools, could be used by others to also achieve surprising results in their lifetime. Thus was born the germ of NLP, what at first they called ‘Study of Excellence’ or simply Goal (beyond).

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The subsequent evolution and disappearance of Frank Pucelik

Although the three authors mentioned were the parents who created the Goal (it was not yet known as NLP), they were also surrounded and supported by a group of 15 students.

The disparity of views of a group as large as it was heterogeneous led to Frank Pucelik being invited to leave the study group in the mid-1970s. For that reason, the books published immediately after by Bandler and Grinder, 'The Structure of Magic' I and II, where it is spoken by Neurolinguistic Programming for the first time, Frank Pucelik is not included: he had already taken another course in the study of discipline.

Frank Pucelik took the name Meta with him and created Meta International Inc. in 1977, the association that continues to exist today under the name Meta international. Soon Bandler and Grinder also parted ways, and newborn NLP was fully developed in the following years already in the hands of other authors such as Roberts Dilts, Stephen Giiligan, Judith Delozier or Leslie Cameron, among others.

Although Frank Pucelik never stopped working on the plane of psychology, he disappeared from the media focus of NLP by not continuing to publish anything about it, something that the other co-creators did in the following decades, which may be another key for them to be considered by many the only parents of the methodology.

At the end of the 1980s Frank Pucelik moved to Moscow and began to successfully develop his role as a business consultant there using his knowledge of NLP. At the same time, he focused on designing successful programs to overcome drug addiction both in the United States and in Eastern European countries.

The original NLP

Starting in the 2000s, NLP was exponentially increasing its worldwide fame thanks to the interest in coaching. What Pucelik realized then is that, as a result of the uneven evolution that the discipline had after its creation, the people who were approaching her were studying in an overly simplistic way, since what It was not explained in many cases where the methodology came from or why it had been created, which limited his true potential.

In this way, Frank Pucelik decided to return to the public focus of NLP by sowing the seeds of what is known as Original NLP (Meta), which is already being taught in Spain and Latin America. It is a return to that moment when the three co-creators were at the University of California conducting their studies on Meta to understand really the complexity of its use and really take advantage of all that this form of modeling of excellence can achieve in those who use it. know.

If you want to train in NLP and you want to do it with Frank Pucelik and knowing the fundamentals and original bases, at D'Arte Human and Business School we help you.