Editing Neuro-linguistic programming (section)

=== Commercialization and evaluation ===
By the late 1970s, the [[human potential movement]] had developed into an industry and provided a market for some NLP ideas. At the center of this growth was the [[Esalen Institute]] at [[Big Sur, California]]. Perls had led numerous [[Gestalt therapy]] seminars at Esalen. Satir was an early leader and Bateson was a guest teacher. Bandler and Grinder have said that in addition to being a therapeutic method, NLP was also a study of communication and began marketing it as a business tool, writing that, "if any human being can do anything, so can you."<ref name="Clancy-1989">{{cite journal |last1=Clancy |first1=Frank |last2=Yorkshire |first2=Heidi |year=1989 |title=The Bandler Method |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=DOcDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA22 |journal=[[Mother Jones (magazine)|Mother Jones]] |volume=14 |issue=2 |pages=22–28 |issn=0362-8841 |access-date=26 April 2024 |via=}}</ref> After 150 students paid $1,000 each for a ten-day workshop in [[Santa Cruz, California]], Bandler and Grinder gave up academic writing and started producing popular books from seminar transcripts, such as ''Frogs into Princes,'' which sold more than 270,000 copies. According to court documents relating to an intellectual property dispute between Bandler and Grinder, Bandler made more than $800,000 in 1980 from workshop and book sales.<ref name="Clancy-1989" />

A community of psychotherapists and students began to form around Bandler and Grinder's initial works, leading to the growth and spread of NLP as a theory and practice.<ref>{{cite book |title=Social Engineering |publisher=John Wiley & Sons Inc |last1=Hadnagy |first1=Christopher |last2=Wilson |first2=Paul |access-date=24 May 2013 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=9LpawpklYogC |date= 2010 |isbn=978-0-470-63953-5}}</ref> For example, [[Tony Robbins]] trained with Grinder and utilized a few ideas from NLP as part of his own [[self-help]] and motivational speaking programmes.<ref>{{cite book |title=Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless |year=2006 |publisher=Crown Publishing Group |isbn=978-1-4000-5410-7 |last=Salerno |first=Steve |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=lmmxX81cEmMC}}</ref> Bandler led several unsuccessful efforts to exclude other parties from using NLP.{{citation needed|date=May 2024}} Meanwhile, the rising number of practitioners and theorists led NLP to become even less uniform than it was at its foundation.<ref name="Stollznow-2010" /> Prior to the decline of NLP, scientific researchers began testing its theoretical underpinnings [[empirical]]ly, with research indicating a lack of empirical support for NLP's essential theories.<ref name="Witkowski-2010" /> The 1990s were characterized by fewer scientific studies evaluating the methods of NLP than the previous decade. [[Tomasz Witkowski]] attributes this to a declining interest in the debate as the result of a lack of empirical support for NLP from its proponents.<ref name="Witkowski-2010" />