NLP Presuppositions – How to Change Your Reality

How you experience reality is based upon your beliefs about yourself and the world you live in. It can be good to question these beliefs now and again. Read through the list of presuppositions mentioned below. Most of these presuppositions form the foundation of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming). Some of them are borrowed from fields like general semantics and cybernetics. In that sense NLP is not new. It’s philosophy is based upon many ideas by people like Milton Erickson, Noam Chomsky, Alfred Korzybski and also Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey (the founders of the philosophical school of Pragmatism). Before that Plato and Aristotle already discussed some of these ideas. The unique character of NLP is based upon the connections between these ideas and not as much the ideas by themselves.

NLP doesn’t claim that these presuppositions are necessarily true, but they can certainly help in changing how you experience reality. Because they are usually each expressed in a single sentence they are sometimes misunderstood as being vague or idealistic. In reality they are all extremely pragmatic. Many NLP Practitioners see these presuppositions as “gospel”. My advice would be to use them as a guideline – a useful tool.

List of presuppositions

1. The system (person) with the most flexibility of behaviour will have the most influence on the system. The person with the greatest number of choices in a given situation is likely to get the best outcome.
2. The map is not the territory. Words are not the things they describe. Symbols are not the things they represent. Your senses take in raw data from your environment and that raw data has absolutely no meaning whatsoever other than the meaning (map) you choose to give it. If you were to choose a different meaning, this would change your experience of that event.
3. The meaning of the communication is the response you get. How your communication is received is more relevant than your intent.
4. The ability to change the process by which we experience reality is more often valuable than changing the content of our experience of reality.
5. People have all the resources necessary to make any desired change. To use a resource you must first know that you already have it and then you can learn to effectively use it. There are no unresourceful people, only unresourceful states.
6. The positive worth of the individual is held constant, while the value and appropriateness of internal and/or external behaviour is questioned. A person is not his or her behaviour. Accept the person, change the behaviour.
7. There is positive intention motivating every behaviour, and a context in which every behaviour has value. People always make the best choice available to them, given their unique model of the world and of the situation.
8. There is no such thing as failure, only feedback. Use this feedback to learn from the situation and make adjustments.
9. Resistance you get is a comment about your inflexibility as a communicator. If what you are doing is not working, do something different.
10. You cannot not communicate. Through your tone of voice, body language and actions you always communicate.
11. Your mind and your body are indivisible parts of the same system. Mind and body are linked and mutually influence each other.
12. In one person can do something, anyone else can learn to do it. If you can identify what makes someone successful in certain field or activity, you can then achieve the same results if you’re willing to do the exact same things.
13. Genuine understanding only comes from experience. You can read all the books you want, but you will have to actually do it to get the most out of it.
14. Respect for the other person’s model of the world. Everyone has a unique model of the world. You do not have to agree with someone, but try to respect that not everyone does things your way.
15. You are in charge of your mind and therefore your results. You made a choice about how you view reality and you also have the power to change that.

I will discuss some of these presuppositions in more detail in the near future. In the meantime go over this list a couple of times. From now on try to notice when these presuppositions apply and what other courses of action are available to you. Remember presupposition #1.

To your success!

Gerber

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