Neuro-Linguistic Programming is the study of subjective experience. Essentially, it is how we experience the world through our senses.
NEURO refers to our nervous system (the mind) through which we gather and process information received through our five senses. It is through them that we represent the world to ourselves, so we never actually experience ‘raw’ reality.
LINGUISTIC refers to Language and other, nonverbal systems. Linguistics filters and alters our internal representations so they are given meaning. For example, the word ‘plane’ will conjure up a different picture for each person. Language is a major filter of our understanding of the world.
PROGRAMMING refers to the patterns, the sequence of instructions in our minds, which make up the strategies that we run in our neurology as a whole, to achieve our specific and desired outcomes.
In other words, NLP is how to use the mind’s own language to change our internal sensory-based representations to consistently achieve our desired outcomes.