Got a day or two? Want to overcome a phobia? Quit smoking? Solve your marital problems? Improve your professional life? There are thousands of people all over the world who will tell you that Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) can get the job done.

Skeptics may find this claim doubtful. But practitioners of NLP from coast to coast, such as Steve Linder of Synergistic Results, Inc., in Los Angeles, Jan Walker of Ultimate Dynamics of Knoxville, Tennessee, and Sabine Price, a clinical hypnotherapist on Bainbridge Island, can provide dozens of anecdotes of people that have shed crippling phobias, put away their cigarettes forever, healed a troubled marriage, and more, in as little as a day.

“It’s nothing short of mind-boggling,” said Linder.

According to the Web site NLPInfo.com, “Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) studies the structure of how humans think and experience the world. Obviously, the structure of something so subjective does not lend itself to precise, statistical formulae but instead leads to models of how these things work. From these models, techniques for quickly and effectively changing thoughts, behaviors and beliefs that limit you have been developed.”

Richard Bandler, a mathematician, and John Grinder, a linguist, developed the founding principles of NLP in the late 60s and early 70s using models of linguistic patterns. More recently NLP was popularized by Tony Robbins, who used NLP for a number of years as part of his enormously popular training and personal growth seminars.

NLP is made up of a number of different techniques designed to literally “rewire” the brain, including parts integration, integrating the unconscious mind and the conscious mind for a common goal; meta modeling, a set of questions designed to find the explicit meaning in a person’s communication; and submodalities, qualities or attributes of the representations people make using the five senses. These techniques are often used in conjunction with other, related therapeutic tools, such has hypnotherapy and timeline therapy, which is a process designed to completely eliminate any negative emotions from past events.

NLP can be used one-on-one or in large groups.

To use NLP is “to use linguistic patterns to create new neurological connections in the brain,” said Price. Price holds a doctorate in clinical hypnotherapy and uses NLP and hypnotherapy together to help her clients overcome traumas and eliminate bad habits.

To illustrate how NLP works, Price gives the example of a person with a bad back. If that person focuses on the pain, and says only “Oh, my bad back,” that person will get stuck on that negative idea: that their back is injured and they are in pain. But if that person were to say “Oh, my improving back,” instead, it would bring that person’s thoughts in a new direction, and put them on a different path.

“NLP is a collection of therapy tools to help people achieve their desires on a consistent basis,” said Linder.

Linder has been involved with NLP since the early 90s and works with clients all over the world. He is a certified NLP trainer and offers certification programs through his company, Synergistic Results, Inc. Linder also spends part of his time working with Tony Robbins as a performance trainer and crew director for many of Robbins’ seminars.

Linder likens NLP to the steps you would take to learn to bake a cake. If you wanted to find the best way to bake a cake, you would clearly want to gather the greatest chefs together for their input. But, said Linder, you would also want to gather the worst chefs, as well, so that you would also know what not to do.

This is part of the modeling techniques that make up the underpinnings of NLP. If something isn’t working, you must substitute ingredients to make it better, and NLP, said Linder, can help people make those changes.

“The thing is for people to get out of their heads and get it into their wiring,” said Linder. “Then they don’t have to think about it, and success comes naturally.”

One of the things that makes NLP remarkable is the short period of time that practitioners seem to need to work with clients to solve problems.

“You can get rid of what’s bothering you in a session or two,” said Walker, who has trained with both Robbins and Linder. As an example she told the story of a client whom she helped overcome a childhood trauma in about three hours, using a combination of parts integration and timeline therapy.

“At the end of the session the client said, ‘I just can’t believe I let this go on so long,’” said Walker. “If they are ready to let go they can make the shift.”

Why does NLP work so quickly when the more traditional and mainstream talk therapy is often a process that can take years to work?

According to Linder, talk therapies mostly address the “when,” “who,” and “why” of problems: when did you start feeling this way, who put the hurt there, why did your parents do that to you? And that, in a nutshell is what’s wrong with talk therapy. You very rarely get a therapist that says “how do you change that, what would you give up to change it,” and so on.

“With talk therapy people say ‘help me, help me, but don’t take away my problem because that’s all I know,” said Linder. “NLP helps you not just understand the structures of life, but helps you model better builders and substitute broken pieces for what works.”

As you can imagine, some people are quick to label NLP at best a quick fix that won’t last, and at worst a scam to bilk people out of their money. Linder acknowledges that there are some practitioners of NLP out there that give them all a bad name.

With no one governing body to oversee certification of trainers (there are currently three or four boards that endorse certifications), Linder said, you do sometimes get schools that are simply churning out trainers to make money, or NLP practitioners that use the skills they’ve been taught to hold seminars on such unsavory things as “how to get a woman in bed in under an hour.”

Linder’s own certification program is stringent and he is quick to refuse certification to individuals who he feels do not understand NLP thoroughly or who may want to use NLP for manipulative purposes. Sloppiness when it comes to dealing with how brains are wired is something that Linder has zero tolerance for when it comes to his certification programs.

“I ask, would I send a relative to them,” he said. “No, make that, would I send a relative that I liked to them?”

Ultimately, according to Linder, NLP is only effective if it allows clients to own the change. And that won’t happen if people feel manipulated.

“When you have such a tool you have to use it wisely,” he said.