NLP techniques are at the heart of NLP. NLP is a toolkit of techniques designed to increase self and client awareness, remove limiting beliefs and help you and your clients to achieve goals. NLP techniques are what make NLP so effective.
Here, you’ll find a non-exhaustive list of some of the most powerful NLP techniques from the NLP Practitioner and NLP Master Practitioner programmes that you can use in your NLP practice.
Our NLP trainings don’t just teach you how to use NLP techniques; our trainings teach you how to master them. We have trainings throughout the year – check out our event page for more info and book your place today.
This page also includes some meditations that can help you to build a mindful practice. For more meditations visit our meditation page.
NLP Techniques
The Meta Model
Used for: Discovering and interrogating limiting beliefs
Nature: A way of looking at language patterns to discover unconscious deletions, distortions and generalizations. There are 12 such patterns, and for each there are set questions to challenge these and free up the client’s awareness of themselves and the possibilities around them
Logical Levels Alignment
Used for: Reducing internal conflict
Nature: A meditation exercise that makes the client aware of each of six logical levels of motivation
Micro-muscle modelling
Used for: Establishing rapport
Nature: Mirroring a client’s gestures without apparent movement
The Well-Formed Outcome
Used for: The classic NLP technique for setting goals
Nature: The client is taken through a set of questions that lead them to establish a ‘SMART’ goal, and to understand their internal barriers to achieving that goal
The Permission Pattern
Used for: Overcoming inner resistance (often from an internalized ‘parent’) to a course of action
Nature: A set of questions, leading up to an act of sponsorship by the coach
Mindfulness of Breathing
Used for: Establishing inner calm
Nature: A meditation exercise
The Meta Mirror (a.k.a. Integral Mirror)
Used for: Understanding and lessening external conflicts
Nature: The client uses spatial anchoring (in other words stands on bits of paper in different parts of the room) to examine a stressful situation from a number or viewpoints: theirs, that of their adversary and that of a detached observer
Pacing and Leading
Used for: Establishing rapport
Nature: Copying some aspect of a client’s external state, then leading them to adapt that state, in order to change their internal state
Calibration
Used for: Improving awareness of own and others’ states
Nature: Involves close observation of the client, and matching their physical condition with what they are saying (and behind that, what they are feeling), so you end up with a ‘dictionary of their body language’
Golden Light meditation
Used for: Establishing inner calm
Nature: A meditation exercise
Somatic Syntax
Used for: Understanding one’s own body language and using it to communicate better
Nature: Noting gestures and their meaning, then exaggerating them
Eye accessing cues
Used for: Calibrating a client’s internal state
Nature: Noticing the direction in which someone is looking, and learning from that what they are thinking
Strategy analysis
Used for: Self-analysis and modelling others
Nature: Examining, in precise detail, the actual steps you and others take to get things done
Visual Translation Process
Used for: Helping clients address issues
Nature: The client creates a picture of the problem and of a desired solution
New Behaviour Generator
Used for: Learning new behaviours
Nature: A simple self-training exercise using visualization
Mapping Across
Used for: Accessing useful states in difficult situations
Nature: An exercise using spatial anchoring to imagine and practice new ways of responding to stressful situations
Swish
Used for: Removing troubling mental imagery
Nature: Changing the ‘submodalities’ (ways) we represent things to ourselves, with a fast, dramatic gesture
New Light through Old Windows
Used for: Removing the power of troubling memories
Nature: A visualization exercise to distance ourselves from bad memories while retaining useful lessons from them
The Circle of Excellence
Used for: Preparing for difficult situations
Nature: A way of combining positive memories and having them to hand in stressful situations
Anchoring
Used for: A key component of many NLP processes
Nature: Creating easy-to-use triggers for desirable states
Collapsing anchors
Used for: Replacing a negative state with a positive one
Nature: Anchoring two states, one negative and one positive, and letting the energy flow from the former to the latter
Chaining anchors
Used for: Moving elegantly from a negative state to a positive one
Nature: Creating a line of anchors that take you on a journey from one mood to another, for example from hate to love via irritation, indifference and affection
Stacking anchors
Used for: Increasing the power of a positive memory
Nature: Anchoring other states to an existing pleasurable one
Spatial anchoring
Used for: Using physical space as a trigger for states
Nature: Creating a link between a space and a state
Spatial anchoring in presentations
Used for: Using physical space to improve presentations
Nature: Anchoring states in an audience, then recreating those states in the course of a presentation
Disney Process (a.k.a. Imagineering)
Used for: Boosting creativity
Nature: Using spatial anchoring to access and integrate different aspects of the creative process. Creativity is not just about arts, but about finding solutions to problems or new ways of doing things
Change Personal History
Used for: Changing a current unwanted pattern
Nature: By going back into the past, and acting as if we had certain resources that we actually lacked at that time, we can lessen the negative influence that a past event has over our current self
Timelines
Used for: A key component of many other NLP Techniques
Nature: A way of spatially representing time
Fast phobia cure
Used for: Curing phobias
Nature: Discovering the traumatic event that caused the phobia and distancing our current selves from it
Metta Bhavana
Used for: Creating forgiveness and inner calm
Nature: A meditation exercise
Hero’s Journey
Used for: Personal change at the level of identity
Nature: The exercise uses spatial anchoring to take the client on a change journey modelled on Joseph Campbell’s ‘Hero with a Thousand Faces’
IDEAS
Used for: Decision making
Nature: A process that anchors various mindsets needed for effective decision making
Recoding decisions
Used for: Dealing with ‘unfinished business’
Nature: Revisiting the past with new resources
Ericksonian hypnosis
Used for: Enabling clients to go into ‘generative’ trance states, where their unconscious is freed up and empowered to find solutions for problems
Nature: A way of speaking to someone that creates the trance state. Note: for all hypnosis techniques, we teach you how to use hypnosis ethically.
Using stories and metaphors
Used for: Influencing clients towards healthy decisions
Nature: A form of indirect communication (implication is more powerful than injunction)
Setting intentions
Used for: Ensuring you (or your clients) begin any task in the best possible state of mind
Nature: A simple self-talking process
Rescripting
Used for: Helping clients ‘rewrite their life story’, to remove any double binds
Nature: A complex and powerful process where clients write, examine then retell a metaphorical version of their life, the first version of which includes a ‘curse’ that needs to be broken
Contracting
Used for: Setting clear boundaries when working with clients
Nature: A key coaching process where a number of parameters are agreed
Reframing
Used for: Overcoming negative views of something or somebody
Nature: Looking at the subject in a contexts
Belief change cycle
Used for: Changing beliefs
Nature: The process uses spatial anchoring to take the client through a set of mental stages
Parts integration
Used for: Resolving inner conflict
Nature: A powerful process that identifies aspects of the personality, gives each one a voice and leads them through a structured interaction.
Dancing SCORE
Used for: Problem solving.
Nature: A way of turning the problem-solving process into a set of physical moves.
Releasing enmeshment
Used for: Dealing with ‘co-dependency’ or other kinds of unwanted dependence on someone else or on an addictive substance
Nature: A process using metaphor and physical gesture.
The Seven Parallels
Used for: Both aligning our own levels of consciousness and motivation, and aligning these with organisations to which we belong
Nature: An examination of ourselves and the organisation using the logical levels.
The Five Aggregates of Clinging
Used for: Calm and self-awareness
Nature: A meditation exercise
Three Mind Meditation
Used for: Inner alignment
Nature: Meditation exercise
Implicit modelling
Used for: Gaining an intuitive understanding of how a master of something actually does what they do
Nature: Physically copying actions and examining accompanying thoughts
Explicit modelling
Used for: Examining the mindset of a master before, during and after they do what they do best
Nature: A set of questions
Criteria exercise
Used for: Establishing the criteria by which an individual evaluates and decides
Nature: A set of questions
Values hierarchy
Used for: Establishing clarity of motivation
Nature: An initial eliciting and ranking of values, followed by regular re-evaluation
Forgiveness pattern
Used for: Dealing with ‘unfinished negative business’
Nature: Exercise using submodalities and spatial anchoring
Grief / loss pattern
Used for: Dealing with grief that gets ‘stuck’
Nature: Exercise using submodalities and timelines
Core Transformation
Used for: Working at a very deep level to examine and, if desired, change values, perceptions of self and mission.
Nature: This very powerful exercise, working very intensely with the ‘parts’ of the personality
Compelling Future Process
Used for: Boosting motivation
Nature: Timeline exercise
‘Repair, Transcend and Include’
Used for: Understanding our (or client’s) personal evolution and where we (or they) are on the process
Nature: Exercise using timeline structured on Spiral Dynamics principles
Integrating Conflicting Beliefs
Used for: Reducing inner tension
Nature: Exercise using timelines
Embedded Commands
Used for: Influencing behaviour (Note: can be, and is often abused)
Nature: Hypnotic NLP Technique
Instigating transderivational search
Used for: Freeing up client’s creative unconscious
Nature: Hypnotic NLP Technique
Nested Loops
Used for: Presenting information
Nature: A way of structuring information to ensure it is memorable
Timeline visualization
Used for: Release emotional blockages from (often very distant) past
Nature: Exercise using timelines
Re-imprinting
Used for: Dealing with impasses and double binds
Nature: Complex and very powerful exercise using timelines and working in a ‘gestalt’ way with people from the past
For more in depth information on NLP Techniques, check out the NLPU’s archives.
