Modeling.

NLP originated when Richard Bandler, a student at University of California, Santa Cruz was transcribing taped therapy sessions of the Gestalt therapist Fritz Perls as a project for the psychiatrist Robert Spitzer. Bandler believed he recognized particular word and sentence structures which facilitated the acceptance of Perls’ positive suggestions. Bandler took this idea to one of his university lecturers, John Grinder a linguist, and together they produced what they termed the Meta Model, a model of what they believed to be influential word structures and how they work. They also 'modeled' the therapeutic sessions of the family therapist Virginia Satir.
They published an account of their work in The Structure of Magic in 1975, when Bandler was 25. The main theme of the book was that it was possible to analyze and codify the therapeutic methods of Satir and Perls. Exceptional therapy, even when it appears 'magical', has a discernible structure which anyone could learn. Some of the book was based on previous work by Grinder on transformational grammar, the Chomskyan generative syntax that was current at the time. Some considered the importation of transformational grammar to psychotherapy to be Bandler and Grinder's main contribution to the field of psychotherapy Bandler and Grinder also made use of ideas of Gregory Bateson, who was influenced by Alfred Korzybski, particularly his ideas about human modeling and that 'the map is not the territory.
Impressed by Bandler and Grinder's work with Fritz Perls and Virgina Satir, the British anthropologist Gregory Bateson agreed to write the preface to Bandler and Grinder's Structure of Magic series. Bateson also introduced them to Milton Erickson who was selected as the third model for NLP. Erickson, an American psychiatrist and founding member of the American Society for Clinical Hypnosis, was well known for his unconventional approach to therapy; for his ability to "utilize" anything about a patient to help him or her change, including his or her beliefs, favorite words, cultural background, personal history, or even neurotic habits, and for treating the unconscious mind as creative, solution-generating, and often positive.
At that time, the Californian human potential movement was developing into an industry. Its founders claimed that in addition to being a therapeutic method, it was also a study of communication, and by the 1970s Grinder and Bandler were marketing it as a business tool, claiming that 'if any human being can do anything, so can you'. After 150 students paid $1,000 each for a ten-day workshop in Santa Cruz, Bandler and Grindler gave up academic writing to produce popular books from seminar transcripts, such as Frogs into Princes, which sold more than 270,000 copies. According to court documents, Bandler's NLP business made more than $800,000 in 1980.