headOnce, as the story goes, Buddha was on his rounds seeking alms when he was subjected to verbal abuse by someone. Buddha, enlightened as he was, simply smiled and moved on. When a disciple of his asked him how he could keep himself from retaliating against the undeserved abuse, Buddha observed that the evil words did not at all touch him or his philosophy of life. They only exposed the ignorance of the person saying it. Of course, although Buddha did not have the benefit of NLP in those days, he demonstrated how, due to his mental perception of the offensive as the inoffensive, he remained unaffected by the abuse.  However ancient the story, this is a prime example of how NLP can be applied to real life situations.
 
Obviously, we rely on our sense perceptions in our effort to understand, interpret and interact with our environment.  NLP assigns a lot of importance to eye-movements, to observing and reading others’ body language as well as to controlling our body language or gestures as a means of communicating with others. Synchronizing your body language or non-verbal means of communication with the verbal means enhances the effectiveness of your communication.  Your choice of words and sentence structures delivered using the right tone can a go long way in casting a spell on the audience, in convincing them and in bringing about desired outcomes through them.  Your language, if used appropriately, can appeal to the subconscious mind of a hostile audience in order to obtain conscious compliance from them as a result.  Influencing others’ minds through a captivating speech so as to completely change moods and attitudes in favour of achieving your desired result is not new, but NLP puts considerable emphasis on the techniques involved in the process.  These techniques are concerned with using your head position, eye movements, gestures, breathing rhythms and language as well as visual and auditory senses.