“ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL
BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE
MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.”
~ George Orwell in Animal Farm
Life changes when you know more because some things are more equal than other things. NLP changed my life from the inside out. Every day I am aware of how limited people are without any legitimate need to be.
The following presuppositions are among those most often associated with NLP:
- The map is not the territory. In the seminal book Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (1933), Alfred Korzybski coined the phrase “the map is not the territory” as a metaphor for the difference between external reality and our representations of it. When we perceive the territory, we delete some information, we distort other information, and we generalize about the information.
- People respond to their maps of reality and not to reality itself. Because our mental maps contain deletions, distortions, and generalizations, our behavior is based on inaccurate and incomplete information. In determining behavior, reality is less important than the person’s mental map. When people communicate, they are communicating about their mental maps rather than about external reality.
- Every behavior is useful in some context. Every behavior, including behaviors you may no longer want, was learned because it helped satisfy a particular need at a particular time or in a particular place. Although a behavior may not be useful to you now, if you change the context, it might be useful again. Procrastination, for example, may not be helpful in the context of completing and filing your tax return, but you might find it a useful skill if you want to stop smoking by delaying having your next cigarette.
- People work perfectly; no one is wrong or broken. Although a person’s current behavior may be undesirable, it represents an achievement in learning. Even an undesirable behavior can be thought of as a skill. If an unwanted behavior, such as a phobia, can be learned and then done perfectly every time, people can learn to do more desirable behaviors perfectly every time as well.
- People always make the best choice available to them at the time. Most behaviors are learned. We choose our behavior based on our accumulated previous experience. Until new choices are made available, we continue to choose the best of our current options. If what you are doing isn’t working, expand your options, and do something else.
- There is no such thing as failure, only feedback. “Failure” is simply an inappropriate label for an undesired outcome. We have only “failed” if we lack the flexibility to try something else. An undesired outcome is feedback telling us to do something new. Success is based on being able to define a worthwhile objective, having the sensory acuity to recognize whether our actions are bringing us closer to that objective, and having the flexibility to change our behavior if necessary.
- All systems, including human systems, obey the law of requisite variety. In any system, the part with the greatest flexibility, the most requisite variety, has the greatest influence on the system. If one person in a relationship changes his or her behavior, others will have to change their behavior as a result. Sometimes the best way to change someone else is to change yourself.
Ah, it is probably not just sometimes that the best way to change someone else is to change yourself….
How would you change if you were to list the top five concerns you have had and then hold them up to these presuppositions? Are you concerned about the environment? About aging? About your health? About politics? About a friend or loved one?
What is your mental map about the particular issue? Do you really experience others (or yourself) as not being wrong or broken? Are you seeing that additional options are available to you now, learning from your experiences, and making wholesome choices?
During some conversation at a meditation group, the idea of karma came up. Someone asked me point blank, “What is karma?” Well, it really matters what karma means to you!
I said karma for sure does not mean punishment.
Preparing to lead worship at Pilgrim UCC on Sunday, May 12—Mother’s Day—takes me to the concept of the Divine Feminine. Reading online, ….eventually you must come to see yourself not only as extensions of God, but as gods in the making. Eventually, you rise to that full God consciousness, where you are no longer co-creators but can now conceive of creating your own universes, your own worlds of form.
Perhaps most importantly of all, are you aware of your awarenesses? Do you hear your self-talk? Is it kind and encouraging or badgering and damning? Are you able to notice the patterns of stress in your body and breathe spaciousness into places that have been tight? When you imagine the future, is what you see bright or terrifying?
I found an NLP-related post online listing 5 Powerful Words to Influence Others With. The five words are: Don’t, You/I, Because, But/And, Means. Hopefully you noticed that is really seven words.
Don’t you and I create our own worlds every moment because we worry about things, but worrying cannot help, and that just means we can do better? We are responding to our mental maps of reality. Enjoying ourselves really is more equal than worrying.
Perhaps reality now means this is a time we can all truly enjoy….