Things your mind doesn’t tell you

There are approximately 14 fundamental common sense principles that form the foundation of NLP.

A presupposition is a form of a perceptual filter; it’s an attitude, point of view, bias or assumption about an object, situation or person.

It is this attitude that affects our perceptions of the world around us.

Presuppositions are essential parts of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP).

Think of them as the guiding principles or beliefs that hold the NLP model together.

NLP doesn’t proclaim these beliefs as being ‘ultimately’ true, but we presuppose that they are.

In NLP, what is important about these beliefs is whether they are useful or not.

Here are some insights about one presupposition I found to be very useful in coaching.

The map is not the territory

This is one of the most important presuppositions in the whole of NLP.

It represents how you see the world and was originally developed by Alfred Korzybski, the founder of General Semantics.

It simply means that we are always ‘slightly separated from ‘reality’.

We receive millions of bits of information every second of every day, but we only acknowledge or register 7 plus 2 bits consciously.

We can never really know the world as it is.

Simply because the information we receive through our five senses is filtered through things like our values, beliefs and experiences.

Because everybody experiences the world differently from each other, their perception of reality is also different.

Two people may experience the same event differently; one may be happy, the other sad and angry.

These differences in how we experience our reality are neither right nor wrong.

In NLP, we only ask if your current map is useful for you at the moment.

The benefits of this powerful presupposition are that it points to the fact that our beliefs do not always reflect our reality correctly.

You may have lived your whole life believing in the ‘easter bunny’, but that doesn’t make it so.

It is possible that holding a belief like “being wealthy is only for ‘special’ people” can limit you.

You may have formed the belief while very young; it has now become a habitual belief that you must be ‘special’ to acquire wealth.

Understanding that the map is not the territory helps you to realise that being ‘special’ is not a prerequisite to acquiring wealth.

It’s not something written in stone but a representation of your map.

This is good news because it allows you to break free from the limiting belief that has kept you poor.

Now when the current map is over-written with something more useful, for example: ‘anybody can achieve wealth when they set goals’.

You will then work with the territory in a ‘different’ way than you used to, making your experiences more resourceful.

We all create maps based on how we experience the world around us.

These maps are representations of our reality, not necessarily reality itself.

This is why ‘the map is not the territory’ is fundamental to inner change and balance in our lives.

It means nothing is written in stone and can be altered or changed.

Amazing!