“The meaning of your communication is the response that you get.”
If you’re into personal development you want to read this book. You can read any of the books by Bandler and Grinder but this is the one I started with and it is a good place to begin. I bought it no less than three times, lent it to people who didn’t return it and bought it again. It’s a keeper.
Richard Bandler and John Grinder’s work is the cornerstone of late 20th Century personal development work, bringing forward nearly 50 years later the architectural thinking behind the granddaddy of all personal development books Think and Grow Rich, which I will review elsewhere on this page. They called their collective ideas “NLP” which stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming. This loosely translates as “how language programs the brain” but covers much more than verbal language to incorporate body language and all the senses.
NLP isn’t a system but is described as “a toolbag”. Dip into it for the life tools you need in any circumstance.
Bandler and Grinder gave technical expression to the principles Napoleon Hill tried to convey in Think and Grow Rich. They describe their work as modelling excellence; people who perform with brilliance often don’t know how they do it; Bandler and Grinder sought throughout their work to find the skeleton underneath the flesh of excellent performance. They did this before there were computers as we understand them today. This is how you take a frog and turn him into a prince. You give him a toolkit that contains the heuristic programming to do this. It is their own brilliant insight that this comes from the language that we use.
I was reading a lot of personal development books in the 1990s. When I read this book it came to me in a flash of light that almost every other book I was reading in this genre was drawing upon NLP applied to the author’s particular discipline. I went on to study Business NLP under Michael Breen, a one-time collaborator with NLP founders, Bandler and Grinder.
Although cutting its teeth in the field of psychology, this canon of work was too radical for the NHS which did, however, adopt its techniques in limited form under the label “CBT” or Cognitive Behavior Therapy, employed as a ‘short-cut’ psychological intervention.
Later, I discovered Think and Grow Rich and I realized that Hill’s book had defined personal development 42 years before Frogs into Princes was published; these two influential works share core interests of defining the architecture of success (both personal and public). And to my mind they both retain timeless and enormous tacit influence underlying the best contemporary thinking.
Thinking for yourself has become more important in 2025 since the young have the temptation to lean on AI to do this for them.
Title: Frogs into Princes: Introduction to Neurolinguistic Programming
Authors: Richard Bandler & John Grinder
ISBN-13: 978-1870845038
Publisher: Real People Press
Publication Date: 1990 (Revised Edition)
This book has one major original edition published in 1979 with occasional newer printings by Real People Press or reprints by other companies.