NLP
is based upon a series of presuppositions which make life infinitely easier.
No NLP-er would maintain that these are true, they are just a useful way of
thinking, which makes our lives simpler, for example:
The Map is not the Territory
You have your model of reality and I have mine: neither of them is true -
we have made them up in an effort to make sense of the world around us.
We did this by taking in information through one or more of our five senses,
and then coding it and filing it in order to be able to retrieve it.
It is how we coded it and where we filed it that makes us all so
fascinatingly different.
Every Behaviour, however Bizarre, has a Positive Intention
If X mugs old ladies, this is because it makes him or her feel good in some way:
maybe it is the only way X knows how to get money to feed the children -
who knows? Whatever it is, X has nothing personal against old ladies,
he or she just need to feel good.
If we act as though the dreadful Snooks has a positive intention for his or her
objectionable behaviour, it makes things much easier.
Try it, and see what happens.
The Meaning of the Communication is the Response that you Get
If people do not respond in the way that we expect, we need to change
the way in which we communicated, because something that we said or did
caused them to 'take it the wrong way'. How many people do you know who put
other people's backs up - even when they are talking sense?
There is no Failure - only Feedback
Making mistakes is the way that we learn. If we never made mistakes,
we would not learn much. This turns our mistakes into opportunities -
which is far more interesting and exciting.
People make the Best Choices they can,
according to the information they have available to them at the time
If someone panics at the sight of a spider, this is because the information
that he or she has is that spiders are panic-making; the fact that this
information is not necessarily correct is irrelevant at the time.
Life and Mind are Systemic Processes
Unlike machines, people grow and develop throughout their lives;
and each change affects the system that is their life and the system that
is their mind.
The most Flexible Part of any System will Survive the Longest
This is the Law of Requisite Variety from cybernetics (the study of systems.
Any relationship that we have (even our relationship with ourselves)
forms a system; and everything that we say and do affects the system we are in.
If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you always got:
try some flexibility, and see what happens!
You can play around with these presuppositions, and discover for yourself
what differences they make to your thinking about life, the universe and
everything.
What Next?
The book EASY BEING: Making Life as Simple and as Much Fun as Possible, £8.99,
is available direct from Amazon by clicking here.
