Would you like to gain more specificity and clarify meaning? was originally published July 19, 2020, and it is now available in video format too!
You can watch the videos in the Vlog section, or directly in my Youtube Channel https://youtu.be/whu2S3WQHNY
To me Neuro Linguistic programing (NLP) is about creating more choice. The map we create for ourselves through our filters has plasticity and therefore it can be changed. If it isn’t useful to you, what would be the purpose of keeping it? Or better yet, if something is very effective, how can you use your language to reinforce it?
If you have read my blogs “It sure looks like Holmes”, “Would you like to gain more specificity and clarify meaning?” and “Would you like to free yourself from the linguistic boundaries you use?” you already know a fair bit about how we delete, distort and generalize information when we communicate and that playing Sherlock Holmes using the Meta-model you can recover some of the information that has been stored in the deeper structure of the brain.
There is one of the pattern that particularly puzzles me and that is when we mind read other people, we look at them and decide that we know what they are thinking and feeling. If you think about it, it takes a fair bit of speculation. Has anyone ever surprised you by saying things like “you did that because really you were thinking this”? And have you responded by denying or confirming or did you ask? “how do you know? Do you mind read?” And if so what would happen if you asked instead?
Another way to limit choice it when we make value judgments like “it is bad to ask too many questions”. here we open up the door of choice when we challenge the statement that has been expressed as a fact, we can do that by asking “according to whom?” or “how do you know it is bad?” Or even when we put responsibility outside of ourselves in statements like “you make me mad”, here you can recover valid information by asking “how does what I did make you mad?” or even as simple as “how specifically?”
Then there are more complex ones where we make two different factor the cause of one another, for example “he is always late, therefore he doesn’t love me”. In this case we change the perspective of the statement by asking, “Have you ever been late meeting someone you love?” Or “ how does him being late mean he doesn’t love you?” Or even teasing a bit asking, “Is possible to be on time and not love someone?”
This way when an experience is expressed in words it not longer has to be the only reality, we open up the possibility of having more than one truth when we allow for more than one reality. Remember: your map of the world, or my map of the world is not the territory, it is a constructed reality that is plastic and we can change its form with a little practice.
I hope you have found this useful and that you are as happy as you want to be.
Remember being kind is for free.
Best wishes
Ivalo