John Grinder

John Grinder, co-founder with Richard Bandler, of the Neuro-Linguistic Programming field, graduated in Philosophy at the University of San Francisco (USF), in the early seventies. Later, Grinder got into the army of the U.S, and was useful as being a Green Beret in the European territory through the cold war. He had a gift with languages, so he gave service at a very well known American Intelligence Organism. After that, in the same decade, Grinder returned to college to study linguistics and received his PhD by the University of California, San Diego.

As a linguist, Grinder stood out at the syntax area, supporting Noam Chomsky’s theories of the generative grammar. After studying with the founder of the cognitive theory, George Miller, at the Rockefeller University, Grinder was invited to impart classes of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In his linguistic work, he has titles that co-authored, such as: “A Guide to transformational grammar”(Suzette Elgin, Holt, Rinehart y Winston, Inc., 1973), and “On deletion phenomena in English” (Mouton & Co., 1976).

At Santa Cruz, Grinder met Richard Bandler who invited him to participate in his group therapy sessions. Grinder was fascinated with the linguistic patterns that the effective therapists used. With that, he joined Bandler to create a model based on the transformational grammar theory that could be useful for the language patterns used by the founder of the Gestalt therapy, Fritz Perls, family therapist, Virginia Satir, and those present in the clinical practice of the hypnotherapist Milton H. Erickson.

Seven years later, Grinder and Bandler managed to obtain a model of the different cognitive patterns found in the therapists mentioned above. They presented their model in the next titles: “The structure of magic, I & II”, (1975, 1976), “Patterns of the Hypnotic techniques of Milton H. Erickson, I & II”, (1975, 1977), and “Changing with families” (1976). These written works would be based in Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

Grinder co-authored in numerous books about the NLP. Some of them are: “Frogs into Princes” (1979), “NLP Volume I” (1989), “Trance-formations” (1981), and “Precision model” (1989).

Besides his ability to identify complex models of language and behavioral patterns, Grinder is known for his strong personality and power as a presenter and instructor. In recent years, Grinder has been focused mainly in business consulting, taking the NLP methods to companies and organizations.