NLP was born initially as an alternative school of psychotherapy in California, USA, during the mid-seventies. It was initiated by John Grinder, a linguistic professor, and Richard Bandler, a mathematician, at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC).

The two co-founders were at the time students of Gregory Bateson at UCSC, and published their first book "The Structure of Magic, I" in 1975. In this book, they tried to extract the rules of human verbal communication, which would be equivalent to linguistic grammars or to mathematical formulas, by modelling such genius "therapeutic wizards" as Milton H. Erickson, the most important hypnotherapist, Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt Therapy and Virginia Satir, one of the authorities of family therapy.

Since around 1980, NLP has transformed itself from a mere alternative tool to psychotherapy to a full-fledged methodology of "communicational psychology", which assists its practitioners in such areas as 1) personal development, 2) creativity enhancement, 3) increased performance, 4) improved communicational skills and 5) accelerated learning.

NLP provides us with a set of models of the world; they are called NLP presuppositions. NLP doesn't claim that they are necessarily true, but they turn out extremely powerful, in the sense that they will assist those who follow those models of the world in achieving more easily what they really want to achieve.