NLP's (Neuro Linguistic Programming) history and assumptions

"Believing that someone else is responsible for your emotional state is giving them a kind of psychic power that they don't have over you... we actually generate our own feelings. No one else can do that for us. We respond and are responsible. To think that other people are responsible for our feelings is to think that we are a billiard ball, an inanimate universe." - John Seymour in "Introducing Neuro-linguistic Programming: The New Psychology of Personal Excellence"

History

1. Created in the 1970s by Richard Bandler and John Grinder at the University of California
2. Based on the modeling of successful people - sought to understand what these people did to achieve such results
3. Based on the work of Milton Erickson (Psychotherapist and Hypnotherapist), Virginia Satir (Family Therapist) and Fritz Perls (Gestalt Therapist) 
4. They sought to understand how the human brain works: How do we work? Can we choose more satisfying ways to function? What mental strategies do successful people have? 
5. The language of the brain is images, sounds and sensations. Knowing this, we can program it as we wish. The brain does not distinguish between past, present and future 
6. Our experience is the result of the way we represent the world. Want to get satisfying results (consistently)? Change the internal representation
   

What is internal representation? It is the way we "register" external reality. This "registration" depends on:

1. Our senses (sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste)
2. Filters we apply (omissions, generalizations we make, distortions we have, our beliefs, our values, our memories and our metaprograms)
   
3. Therefore, our internal representation does not correspond exactly to external reality. In other words, our "map" does not represent the territory 
   

NLP assumptions

1. The map is not the territory (people respond based on their experience, not reality itself)
2. Events are neutral, people give them a certain meaning according to their mind map
3. People work perfectly (everyone does the best they can given the context and resources they currently have) 
4. All behavior has a positive intention (well-being, happiness or protection) for one's own
5. Instead of error or failure, see results. We can learn from every experience 
6. People have or can seek access to the resources they need to act effectively 
7. If you are not getting the desired result, give flexibility to your action. If you continue to do things exactly as you have always done, you will continue to get exactly the same results
8. The person responsible for communication is the communicator 
9. Communication is evaluated by the result it produces