NLP wouldn’t probably be the way we know it today, hadn’t Milton H. Erickson, MD (1901 - 1980), become a key influence on NLP's founders. A remarkable man, and a highly effective psychotherapist, he had a major impact on the practice and understanding of hypnosis and the mind. As a teenager he was stricken with polio and paralyzed, but he remobilized himself. It was while being paralyzed that he had an unusual opportunity to observe people, and he notice that what people said and what they did were often very different. He became fascinated by human psychology and devised countless innovative and creative ways to help people. He healed through metaphor, surprise, confusion and humor, as well as hypnosis. A master of ‘indirect hypnosis’, he was able to put a person into a trance without even mentioning the word hypnosis. He theorized that hypnosis is a state of mind that all of us are normally entering spontaneously and frequently. This idea that hypnosis is an intrinsic part of our life as a potent tool of relaxation and self-empowering has immensely contributed to the development of NLP, or Neuro-Linguistic Programming.