I remember exhausted nights spent eyes wide open laying on hard beds freezing under fluorescent hospital lights.
I remember cords and catheters jutting from what felt like every piece of exposed skin.
I remember the endless pokes and prods and voices that always seemed too loud, too harsh speaking words about me I’ll never forget.
I remember the shame.
I remember the confusion.
I remember the fear throughout my entire body I just barely allowed myself to acknowledge.
I remember thinking “there’s got to be a better way” …
Now I know there is.
I am living it.
And I’m on a mission to share it.
It was 5 years ago now that neurolinguistic programming or what’s often referred to as NLP came into my life.
And I will be forever grateful that it did because NLP changed my life.
NLP was one of the tools that, along with clinical hypnotherapy and life coaching facilitated me to break free of a mentally and physically debilitating illness I’d been trying to recover from for 15 years of my life, anorexia nervosa.
After my own recovery I went on to train in NLP because honestly, my world had been so changed that at that stage it felt like magic. It felt like anything was possible and I wanted others to know and to feel this to. I believe many, arguably all people would benefit from the foundational concepts of NLP.
So how could I not learn these skills?
I am now a Master NLP practitioner and use NLP daily as a component of the work that I do with others who are wanting to overcome their own challenges.
Beyond using these skills to assist others in creating the lives they want the principals and concepts that underpin NLP continue to enhance my life in numerous ways from how I relate to and communicate with other people and in the way I speak to myself inside my mind.
The value of NLP cannot be underestimated.
Which is why in this blog post I am taking the opportunity to sit down on a glorious Sunday afternoon at the end of a weekend that has been filled with friends, family and fun to share with you a selection of 7 of the 16 NLP Presuppositions or what are also more affectionately known as “the lies of NLP”. I will tell you why at the end.
But first let us get into a brief description of each of the 7 presuppositions because each and every one of these directly contributed to my recovering from anorexia nervosa and I can’t wait for you to discover them and have a play around with them in your own life and see what you can change. See how you can use them in ways that work for you.
It feels very exciting to pass them on to you now!
Beginning with…
- Behind Every Behaviour is a Positive Intention
In NLP we work on the premise that behind every behaviour that human beings do is a positive intention.
The outcome or consequences of the behaviour may not be so positive but the reason why our unconscious chooses to do that behaviour is always positive.
To give you an example when I lived with an eating disorder I over exercised immensely.
That behaviour was detrimental to my health and wellbeing. There was no denying that, but I felt I was incapable of changing it.
I felt I was not in charge of choosing that behaviour and was told a number of times that the reason I continued to do the exercise was as a form of intentional self-harm, self-sabotage or as a punishment. I learned through NLP it wasn’t. I learned that the intention of that behaviour was stress reduction. I learned it was a means of coping in a world I didn’t otherwise know how to cope in.
I learned it was the opposite of intentional self-harm.
I learned it was my body doing the best it could to cope in a difficult world.
Most of all I learned that I could get the intention behind that behaviour met in other ways and NLP helped me first recognise the intention and then two develop the skills to make those old behaviours no longer necessary.
2. There Are No Incapable People, Only Incapable States or Circumstances
One of the cornerstones of NLP is “the modelling of excellence”.
The modelling of excellence works on the premise that if one human being can achieve a certain result, for example running a 4-minute mile, winning a gold medal in gymnastics, writing a bestselling book or building a multi-million-dollar business, then all human beings are capable of achieving the same result.
The caveat is that they are capable only if the same conditions that it took for the original person to achieve these feats are met.
The same goes for “negative” results or “failures”. We are all capable of achieving negative results or failing should our circumstances and our mental states set the stage for this.
I know that when I was sick with anorexia nervosa, I believed I was “different” and that I was incapable, that even if others had achieved recovery, it was impossible for me.
I now know what is possible for one human being is possible for all others and if you want to achieve anything that feels difficult it is a great strategy to find someone who has done it or something similar and model them. Model the practical steps they took and equally importantly model their psychology or their mental state that allowed them to achieve that result.
3. There’s No Such Thing as Failure, Only Feedback
This one “there’s no such thing as failure, only feedback” is a direct quote from Milton Erickson MD. One of, if not the greatest clinical and medical hypnotherapist to live. In fact, Milton Erickson is one of the people that NLP was modelled off.
The concept that there is no such thing as failure, only feedback, should you choose to adopt it, is incredibly liberating.
The example that is commonly given in NLP workshops is if you imagine a baby or toddler learning to walk or to speak. They get up, fall down, get up, fall down, get up, hold onto something wobble and fall down. Again and again and again. They say the word completely wrong, slightly wrong, a little better. Again and again and again.
Until they get it.
What they don’t do is tell themselves that their inability to walk the first time or say the word correctly the first time means that they are a failure.
They don’t take it to mean anything about themselves at all.
They just keep trying.
NLP is all about the process, the journey and through the NLP lens you get to reframe failure as a necessary component of success.
4. Choice is Better Than No Choice
I love this one!
I love all the “lies of NLP” because I think about how they’ve changed my life.
With this one in particular I can remember how stuck I felt living with anorexia nervosa. I can remember how much the anorexia thoughts, feelings and behaviours felt like my only choice. I can remember how hard it was to see another way of doing things and quite literally how impossible it felt to do differently.
I felt I didn’t have a choice.
NLP works to increase opportunities and choices for people because NLP presupposes that choice is better than no choice and that when given choice all human beings choose the best choice for them at that time.
It is when we have just one available choice that we really have a choice at all.
5. We Cannot Not Communicate
Have you ever had the experience of someone asking you to do something you didn’t really want to do? For example, clean your room, drop into the shops on your way home after a big day at work or go to a party you don’t feel like going to.
Have you ever noticed the sinking feeling in your stomach? Butterflies in your belly? Have you ever blushed or got hot in the face with embarrassment?
These are all examples of your unconscious communicating.
We can’t not do this.
We’ve all had the experience of someone lying to us. They can say all the right things, but we feel there’s just something off. Even if we couldn’t explain how we know they’re lying, we know. This is an example of both their unconscious communicating and our unconscious picking up on those communications.
NLP works on the premise that no matter what someone is saying in words their unconscious is always communicating their true feelings.
When you are aware of this and actively using this, you can understand what a person is really feeling about a situation versus what they are saying.
6. The Body is a Reflection of the Mind
This one is similar to the above and perhaps what would have been considered a little more “woo woo” a few years ago but is no longer up for debate. Our physical body reflects the health of our mind.
If our mental health is flourishing our body tends to follow suit, we experience less illness and less pain. Similarly, if our mental health is suffering our body tends to follow suit in that we experience more illness and pain.
There are all sorts of illnesses and pains that people present with that have no underlying physical explanation and if you’ve ever been sick or in pain you will know that if your mental health is down your experience of that sickness or pain will be heightened.
Ultimately our body and mind are one and the same and the health of either cannot be fully separated from the other.
7. The Past Is Not a Prediction for The Future
When I was first introduced to NLP I had been living with anorexia nervosa for going on 15 years of my life. At the time that was the bigger part of my life.
Knowing how long I’d lived with anorexia for and how many times I had attempted recovery it was very hard to maintain any optimism over my future being any different.
I now see in my daily practice many clients who want to give up smoking who have very low hopes because they’ve tried before, often numerous times, and “failed”.
NLP invites us to ask who said you had to give up smoking the first time in order to succeed!?
The truth is your successful attempt now is independent of any and all of your past attempts.
One of the greatest things I’ve ever come to understand is that your past need not have any say over your future.
What does predict your future are your choices only in the here and now and you can make a choice right now that is completely independent of anything that’s happened in your life prior.
Isn’t that freeing to know?
Summary
After reading through 7 of the 16 presuppositions of NLP can you get a sense of the power and the usefulness that would come through adopting these presuppositions as attitudes to live your life by?
Back at the beginning of this post I said I’d let you know at the end why these presuppositions are affectionately referred to as the “lies of NLP” amongst NLP practitioners and if you’ve read through them, you may be able to take as guess as to why this is the case.
If not, the reason is because at the essence of NLP is the presupposition that we do not know for certain exactly how things are.
The word “lies” is a reminder of how little we actually know.
It is a reminder to above all else foster and live by the attitude that is at the core of NLP; curiosity.
Or in the words of someone a little more clever than I am “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious” ~ Albert Einstein.
With my whole heart I hope you found this information useful and inspiring.
Become Great. Live Great.
Bonnie.
