Right from the beginning of Bandler and Grinder’s work, NLP has been focused on increasing choices available to people. They were very interested in human potential and began to model how successful communicators like Milton Erickson and Virginia Satir managed to achieve excellent results that others were not capable of. Erickson was capable of creating incredible hypnotic trances and Satir was able to resolve family disputes that other therapists could not emulate. In both cases, the results seemed incredible because the structure of the expert’s communication was not understood. The genius of Bandler and Grinder was to be able to “model” these people’s behaviour, to carry it out themselves, and to teach these techniques to other people.
Today, when people hear the word NLP, they often take it to mean the “techniques” that were modelled from these experts, and this trail of techniques is certainly a valuable result of the NLP founders’ work.
However, there is something much more important that can easily be overlooked. Bandler and Grinder were interested in the extension of human potential–giving people more choices in how to think and how to act.
Increasing choice lies at the heart of NLP. NLP began by modelling therapists before it became widely used in business, education and other areas, and it is useful to consider how it compares with some other models of therapy. The circles at the top show how some forms of therapy attempt to remove the “bad” behaviour. This essentially creates a person with less choices. 
NLP is fundamentally based on the idea that we should increase a person’s choices–giving them more ways to act and to think.
While this model was highly influenced by the therapeutic applications of early NLP, the same rationale can be applied to any sphere of life. Below, I give an example from my own experience in education.
In education, teachers sometimes talk about discipline problems such as students talking out of turn, not listening to the teacher, or sleeping in the classroom. These are all behaviours that are labelled as “bad” in some way, and the teacher is suggesting that the elimination of these behaviours would be helpful in the learning environment. However, this is not always true, for either the individual student or for the whole class. It may take a bit of thought sometimes, but offering the “bad” student an alternative behaviour may often be more beneficial.
At a teachers’ meeting at a high school in Japan, I was surprised to hear that other teachers were all complaining about a student called Hajime. They said that he was constantly talking out of turn, often shouting out answers to questions. Ironically, that was exactly why I liked Hajime. In Japan, it is often difficult to get students to respond to questions or to make contributions to classroom dialogue. As far as I was concerned, Hajime was acting as an excellent role model for the other students by giving unsolicited answers. In NLP terms, this can be viewed as a content reframe, and it is the teacher’s response to the situation that makes a difference.
To take another example from education, I occasionally have students who fall asleep in class, especially when the weather gets really hot and humid in July and the air conditioners haven’t been turned on yet. I used to get angry with these students until a fellow teacher gave me a tip. He always wakes the sleeping student gently and asks them if they are feeling sick. When I tried this out (and it has become my regular method), I found that the student invariably woke up quickly and became involved in the class again. By again employing a reframe, suggesting to the student that I was worried about their health, it immediately changed the situation.
Both of these examples show how increased choice in the teacher’s behaviour can change a situation. One final example from my classroom shows how increasing student choice can be equally or more powerful. I had a student called Rika who was not doing her homework and was quickly heading for a failing grade. I talked to Rika after class and realized very quickly that she was a smart person, but bored by the content of the textbook. She was expressing this boredom in the self-destructive manner of not doing her homework. I asked her if she would prefer to do an alternative form of assignment instead of the regular homework. Rika was really surprised because the education system in Japan tends to be quite rigid. After a few minutes discussion, she said that she was very interested in the Harry Potter series. So I gave her two options. The first option was to carry out the regular homework assignments. The second option was to read two Harry Potter books and give a presentation on each to the whole class. From an objective viewpoint, reading the two Harry Potter books was many times more work than the regular homework and the presentations were an extra workload, but Rika chose the second option and went on to inspire the whole class by giving very interesting presentations.
Choice is a good thing – whether it is in therapy, education, business, or another sphere of life. People won’t always take the hard option that Rika took, but simply having another choice shows people that we respect them, and sends the message that life has many paths.
To conclude, I’d like to paraphrase a remark that I heard from John Grinder.
If you have only one choice, then you really have no choice. You have to do it. If you have two choices, you are forced to choose between them and you have a dilemma. It is only when you have at least three choices that you have a real choice.