Neuro-linguistic Programming For Dummies

Introduction

Welcome to the second edition of Neuro-linguistic Programming For Dummies, which is packed with ideas and tips to increase your success and happiness. Most likely, you’re reading this book because you’ve heard neuro-linguistic programming (NLP throughout this book) mentioned as you go about your daily life – in companies, colleges, and coffee shops. We wrote the original version of this book because our experience of NLP transformed our own lives. We wanted to ignite the spark of curiosity in others about what’s possible with NLP. We also believed that the time had come for NLP to move away from academic- and business-speak to real-life plain English, and be used by all people who want to make improvements in their lives.

In recent years, we’ve witnessed NLP growing ever more popular. Part of this popularity is because NLP offers enlightening ‘aha!’ moments, and part is because it simply makes sense. Yet the name itself can be off-putting and the associated jargon may present a barrier to non-NLP professionals. So a little explanation is required:

Neuro relates to what’s happening in your mind.

Linguistic refers not only to the words you use in your communication, but also your body language and how you use it.

Programming tackles the persistent patterns of behaviour that you learn and then repeat.

Some people describe NLP as ‘the study of the structure of subjective experience’; others call it ‘the art and science of communication’. We prefer to say that NLP enables you to understand what makes you tick: how you think, how you feel, and how you make sense of everyday life in the world around you. Armed with this understanding, your whole life – work and play – can be renewed.

It’s hard to believe that six years have passed since the first edition of this book was published. The first edition of Neuro-linguistic Programming For Dummies presented us with opportunities, which came primarily in the form of amazing clients who’ve shared their lives, problems, and successes with us. We have incorporated some of the lessons from this more recent work to bring a fresh perspective to you.

In particular, you have the benefit of two new chapters. The first one (Chapter 19) is about modelling. NLP began with modelling, an approach that enables you to enhance your skills. The second new chapter (Chapter 20) is focused on making change easier. Given that change is a given in the frenetic world in which we live, you’ll find new ideas here to help you mitigate the negative effects of stress, and the application of favourite tools out of the NLP toolkit.

About This Book

This book aims to entrance anyone fascinated by people. Through its experiential approach, NLP encourages people to take action to shape their own lives. It attracts those willing to ‘have a go’ and open their minds to new possibilities.

We try to make NLP friendly, pragmatic, accessible, and useful for you. We expect you to be able to dip into the book at any chapter and quickly find practical ideas on how to use NLP to resolve issues or make changes for yourself.

In displaying the NLP ‘market stall’, our choice of content is selective. We aim to offer an enticing menu if you’re a newcomer. And for those with more knowledge, we hope this book helps you to digest what you already know as well as treat you to some new ideas and applications. To that end, we make finding information such as the following easy for you:

How to discover what’s important to you to pursue your goals with energy and conviction.

What the main NLP presuppositions are and why they’re important to you.

What the best ways are to understand other people’s style, helping you to get your own message heard.

When to build rapport and when to break it.

How to get your unconscious mind to work together with your conscious mind to make a strong team.

In addition, because the best way to discover NLP is to experience it, take full opportunity of playing with all the exercises we provide. Some of the ideas and exercises in this book may be quite different from your normal style of behaviour, but don’t be put off. The NLP approach is about setting aside your disbelief, having a go, and realising your potential.

Conventions Used in This Book

To help you navigate throughout this book, we set up a few conventions:

Italic is used for emphasis and to highlight new words or terms that are defined.

Boldfaced text is used to indicate the action part of numbered steps.

Monofont is used for website addresses.

What You’re Not to Read

We’ve written this book so that you can easily understand what you want to discover about NLP. And although after all this writing on our part we’d like to believe that you want to hang on our every last word between these yellow and black covers, we make identifying the ‘skippable’ material easy. This information is the stuff that, although interesting and related to the topic at hand, isn’t essential for you to know:

Text in sidebars: The sidebars are the shaded boxes that appear here and there. They share personal stories and observations, but aren’t essential reading.

The stuff on the copyright page: No kidding. You find nothing here of interest unless you’re inexplicably enamoured by legal language and reprint information!

Foolish Assumptions

In this book, we make a few assumptions about you. We assume that you’re a normal human being who wants to be happy. You’re probably interested in learning and ideas. You may have heard the term NLP mentioned, you may already work with the concepts, or perhaps it’s just new and intriguing for you. You need no prior knowledge of NLP, but this book is for you if any of the following situations ring a bell:

You’re tired or fed-up with the way some things are for you now.

You’re interested in how to take your living experience to new levels of achievement, happiness, adventure, and success.

You’re curious about how you can influence others ethically and easily.

You’re somebody who loves learning and growing.

You’re ready to turn your dreams into reality.

How This Book Is Organised

We divide this book into seven parts, with each part broken into chapters. The table of contents gives you more detail on each chapter, and we even throw in a cartoon at the start of each part for your amusement.

Part I: Introducing NLP

A wise person said that ‘If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you always got.’ Remember these great words of wisdom as you begin the journey into NLP territory for yourself. In this part, you start to get a feel for what NLP can do for you. As you begin, bear one thing in mind: suspend your disbelief or assumptions that may get in the way of your learning. In this part, we invite you to think about the best NLP question of all, which is ‘What do I want?’, and then to delve into what’s happening behind the scenes in your brain and your unconscious thinking. Interesting stuff, we hope you agree.

Part II: Winning Friends and Influencing People

Ever considered how easy life would be if others just did what you wanted them to do? We’re not claiming to be magicians – that we can make your worst enemies smooth putty in your hands – but rapport is such a key theme in NLP that the heart of this book explores it hand-in-hand with you. In this part, we give you tools for understanding other people’s points of view. We show you how to take responsibility for making changes in how you connect with the key people in your life, and how to discover becoming more flexible in your own behaviour.

Part III: Opening the Toolkit

The heart of NLP opens up before you in this part, as we let you loose on the core NLP toolkit. Loads of practical stuff is here for you to keep coming back to. You discover how you can adapt and manage your own thinking to tackle situations that you find difficult, plus how you can get the resources to change habits that no longer help you. You also whiz into the future and work with concepts of time to resolve old issues and create a more compelling path ahead of you.

Part IV: Using Words to Entrance

This part focuses on how the language you use doesn’t just describe an experience, but has the power to create it. Just imagine how great you’d feel to have an audience eating out of your hands. Building on the skills and styles of powerful communicators, we explain how to get audiences coming back with an appetite for more, and if you consider that life can be described as a series of stories, you find out how to write your own winning narrative.

Part V: Integrating Your Learning

In this part we encourage you to bring together what you read and experiment within the book, and apply it to your own life. You find out about modelling and how to learn from your choice of role model to achieve excellence in your chosen field. In addition, we take a look at what happens in times of change and how you can move forward with grace and ease.

Part VI: The Part of Tens

If you’re impatient to get your answers about NLP sorted quickly, start here. This part takes you straight to some top ten tips and lists, such as applications of NLP, the resources and books to guide you, plus more besides. We design this part for those of you who always like to read the end of a book first and to understand the meaty stuff inside.

Part VII: Appendixes

In the appendixes we include an NLP resource list of useful addresses and websites, plus the two most important templates to use every day to achieve the following ends:

Making your desired outcomes real – we explain more in Chapter 4.

Building rapport with other people – we explore this aspect in Chapter 7.

Icons Used in This Book

The icons in this book help you to find particular kinds of information that may be of use to you.

nlpjargonalert.eps This icon highlights NLP terminology that may sound like a foreign language but which has a precise meaning in the NLP field.

trythis.eps This icon suggests ideas and activities to give you practice of NLP techniques and food for thought.

tip.eps This icon contains practical advice to put NLP to work for you.

remember.eps This icon is a friendly reminder of important points to note.

anecdote_nlp.eps This icon indicates real-life experiences of NLP in action. Some are real, some people have had their names changed, and others are composite characters.

warning_bomb.eps This icon marks things to avoid in your enthusiasm to try out NLP skills on your own.

Where to Go From Here

You don’t have to read this book from cover to cover, but you benefit greatly if you capture everything at the pace and in the order that’s right for you. Use the table of contents to see what grabs your interest. For example, if you’re keen to understand someone else, first try Chapter 7. Or if you want to know what makes you tick, turn to Chapter 6 and discover the power of your senses. Feel free to dip and dive in.

When you’ve read the book and are keen to discover more, we recommend that you experience NLP more fully through workshops and coaching with others. We include a resource section in the Part of Tens to help you on your journey.

Part I

Introducing NLP

In this part . . .

You find out what NLP stands for and why people are talking about it. From seeing how it all started with some smart people in California, to getting you to think about your own assumptions, we help you to set off in the right direction to get what you want out of your life. Very soon you’ll be delving behind the scenes into what’s happening in your brain and unconscious thinking, the part of you that has your best interests at heart.

Chapter 1

Getting to Know NLP

In This Chapter

Setting out on an NLP journey

Exploring the key themes of NLP

Getting the most out of NLP

Here’s a little Sufi tale about a man and a tiger.

A man being followed by a hungry tiger, turned in desperation to face it and cried: ‘Why don’t you leave me alone?’ The tiger answered: ‘Why don’t you stop being so appetising?’

In any communication between two people, or in this case between human and beast, more than one perspective always exists. Sometimes people just can’t grasp that fact because they don’t know to change their behaviour to communicate in a way that gets them what they want.

Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) is one of the most sophisticated and effective methodologies currently available to help you communicate effectively. NLP centres on communication and change. These days everybody needs the skills to develop personal flexibility. Tricks and gimmicks aren’t enough: everyone needs to get real.

So welcome to the start of the journey: in this chapter you get a quick taster of the key themes of NLP.

Introducing NLP

All able-bodied humans are born with the same basic neurological system.

nlpjargonalert.eps Your neurological system transmits the information you receive from your environment through your senses to your brain. Your environment, in this context, is everything external to you, but also includes your organs, such as your eyes, ears, skin, stomach, and lungs. Your brain processes the information and transmits messages back to your organs. With your eyes, for example, the result of this may be that you blink. The information can also create emotions, and you may feel joy, cry, or laugh. In short, you behave in a certain way.

Your ability to do anything in life – whether swimming the length of a pool, cooking a meal, or reading this book – depends on how you respond to the stimuli on your nervous system. Therefore, much of NLP is devoted to discovering how to think and communicate more effectively within yourself and with others.

Here’s how the term Neuro-linguistic Programming breaks down:

nlpjargonalert.eps Neuro concerns your neurological system. NLP is based on the idea that you experience the world through your senses and translate sensory information into thought processes, both conscious and unconscious. Thought processes activate the neurological system, which affects physiology, emotions, and behaviour.

Linguistic refers to the way you use language to make sense of the world, capture and conceptualise experience, and communicate that experience to others. In NLP, linguistics is the study of how the words you speak and your body language influence your experience.

Programming draws heavily from learning theory and addresses how you code or mentally represent your experiences. Your personal programming consists of your internal processes and strategies (thinking patterns) that you use to make decisions, solve problems, learn, evaluate, and get results. NLP shows you how to recode your experiences and organise your internal programming so that you can get the outcomes you want.

trythis.eps To see this process in action, begin to notice how you think. Imagine a hot summer’s day. You’re standing in your kitchen at the end of the day holding a lemon you’ve taken from the fridge. Look at the outside of it, its yellow waxy skin with green marks at the ends. Feel how cold it is in your hand. Raise it to your nose and smell it. Mmmm. Press it gently and notice the weight of the lemon in the palm of your hand. Now take a knife and cut it in half. Hear the juices start to run and notice that the smell is stronger now. Bite deeply into the lemon and allow the juice to swirl around in your mouth.

remember.eps Words. Simple words have the power to trigger your saliva glands. Hear the one word ‘lemon’ and your brain kicks into action. The words you read told your brain that you had a lemon in your hand. You may think that words only describe meanings, but in fact they create your reality. You find out much more about this truth as you read this book.

A few quick definitions

NLP can be described in various ways. The formal definition is that NLP is ‘the study of the structure of our subjective experience’. Here are a few more ways of answering the elusive question ‘what is NLP?’:

The art and science of communication

The key to learning

The way to understand what makes you and other people tick

The route to get the results you want in all areas of your life

The way to influence others with integrity

The manual for your brain

The secret of successful people

The method of creating your own future

The way to help people make sense of their reality

The toolkit for personal and organisational change

Where NLP started and where it’s going

NLP began in California in the early 1970s at the University of Santa Cruz. Richard Bandler, a master’s level student of information sciences and mathematics, and Dr John Grinder, a professor of linguistics, studied people who they considered to be excellent communicators and brilliant at helping their clients change. They were fascinated by how some people defied the odds to get through to so-called difficult or very ill people where others failed miserably to connect.

So, NLP has its roots in a therapeutic setting thanks to three world-renowned psychotherapists that Bandler and Grinder studied: Virginia Satir (developer of Conjoint Family Therapy), Fritz Perls (the founder of Gestalt Psychology), and Milton H Erickson (largely responsible for the advancement of Clinical Hypnotherapy).

In their work, Bandler and Grinder also drew upon the skills of linguists Alfred Korzybski and Noam Chomsky, social anthropologist Gregory Bateson, and psychotherapist Paul Watzlawick.

From those early days, the field of NLP exploded to encompass many disciplines in many countries around the world. We can’t possibly name all the great teachers and practitioners in NLP today. In Appendix A, you can find resources for more guidance on extending your knowledge of NLP.

In the 1980s, Grinder became dissatisfied with some early coding work done in collaboration with Bandler, which he now refers to as Classic Code. Together with Judith DeLozier, he initiated some new models known as New Code (documented in his book Whispering in the Wind) and he continues this work with Carmen Bostic St.Clair.

So what’s next for NLP? The discipline has certainly travelled a long way from Santa Cruz in the 1970s, and since we wrote the first edition of this book the interest in NLP shows no sign of waning. So many more pioneers have picked up the story and taken it forward – making it practical and helping to transform the lives of real people. The literature and applications of NLP are prolific, as any Google search demonstrates. Today you can find NLP applications among doctors and nurses, taxi drivers, salespeople, coaches, accountants, teachers, animal trainers, parents, workers, retired people, and teenagers alike. In Chapter 21, we list just a few such practical applications.

Each generation is going to take the ideas that resonate in its field of interest, sift and refine them, and chip in its own knowledge experiences. Much of the development of NLP today is around the applications rather than core models; people who are experts in one field incorporate NLP tools and take them into their own field. If NLP encourages new thinking and new choices and acknowledges the positive intention underlying all action, all we can say is the future remains bright with possibilities. The rest is up to you.

A note on integrity

You may hear the words integrity and manipulation associated with NLP, and so we want to put the record straight now. You influence others all the time. When you do so consciously to get what you want, the question of integrity arises. Are you manipulating others to get what you want at their expense?

Therefore, when you’re in, for example, a selling situation, ask yourself a simple question: what is your positive intention for the other person – whether that’s an individual or a company? If your intention is good and to benefit the other party, you have integrity – a win/win situation. And if not, you’re manipulating. When you head for win/win, you’re on track for success. And as you know, what goes around comes around.

Encountering the Pillars of NLP: Straight Up and Straightforward

The first thing to understand is that NLP is about four things, known as the pillars of NLP (check out Figure 1-1). These four foundations of the subject can be described as follows:

Rapport: How you build a relationship with others and with yourself is probably the most important gift that NLP gives you. Given the pace at which most humans live and work, one big lesson in rapport is how you can say ‘no’ to all the requests for your time and still retain friendships or professional relationships. To find out more about rapport – how to build it and when to break it off – head to Chapter 7.

Sensory awareness: Have you noticed how when you walk into someone else’s home the colours, sounds, and smells are subtly different from yours? Or that a colleague looks worried when he talks about his job. Maybe you notice the colour of a night sky or the fresh green leaves as spring unfolds. Like the famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, you begin to notice that your world is so much richer when you pay attention to all your senses. Chapter 6 tells you all you need to know about how powerful your sensory perceptions are and how you can use your natural sight, sound, touch, feelings, taste, and smell capabilities to your benefit.

Outcome thinking: You’re going to hear the word ‘outcome’ mentioned throughout this book. This term connects to beginning to think about what you want, instead of getting stuck in a negative problem mode of thinking. The principles of an outcome approach can help you make the best decisions and choices – whether that’s about what you’re going to do at the weekend, running an important project at work, or finding out the true purpose of your life. Head to Chapter 4 to get the results you deserve.

Behavioural flexibility: This term means discovering how to do something different when what you’re currently doing isn’t working. Being flexible is key to practising NLP, and you can find tools and ideas for this developing aspect in every chapter. We help you find fresh perspectives and build these into your repertoire. You may want to head to Chapter 5 for starters on how you can maximise your own flexibility.

Figure 1-1: The four pillars of NLP.

Here’s an example of what these four pillars may mean to you in an everyday event. Suppose that you order a software package by post to store all your names, addresses, and phone numbers of friends or clients. You load it onto your computer, use it a few times, and then mysteriously it stops working. A bug is in the system, but you’ve already invested many hours in the installation and entering all your contacts. You phone up the supplier and the customer service people are unhelpful to the point of rudeness.

You need to bring out all your skills in building rapport with the customer service manager before anyone listens to your complaint. You need to engage your senses – particularly your ears as you listen carefully to what the supplier says – and notice how to control your feelings and decide on your best response. You need to be very clear about your desired outcome – what do you want to happen after you make your complaint? For example, do you want a full refund or replacement software? And finally, you may need to be flexible in your behaviour and consider different options if you don’t achieve what you want the first time.

Discovering Models and Modelling

As we describe in the earlier section ‘Where NLP started and where it’s going’, NLP began as a model of how people communicate and grew out of studies of some great communicators. Therefore, the concept of models and modelling is at the heart of NLP.

The NLP premise begins as follows: if you can find someone who’s good at something, you can then model how that person does that thing and learn from them. You can discover how to model anyone you admire – top business leaders or sports personalities, the waitress at your favourite restaurant, or your hugely energetic personal fitness trainer. You can find out more about modelling in Chapter 19.

Employing the NLP communication model

The NLP model describes how you process the information that comes at you from the outside. According to NLP, you move through life not by responding to the world around you, but by responding to your model or map of that world. The model is explained with examples in Chapter 5.

A fundamental assumption of NLP is that ‘the map is not the territory’ and that each individual has different maps of how the world operates. This insight means that you and another person may experience the same event and yet do so differently.

Imagine that you go to a party – you have a good time, meet lots of friendly people, enjoy good food and drinks, and perhaps watch some entertainment. Yet, if the next day we ask you and another person at the same party to recount what happened, you’d both have a different story to tell. The differences are because internal representations that people make about an outside event are different from the event itself: ‘the map is not the territory’.

Or imagine that you’re suddenly transported to a completely different culture on the other side of the world. The thoughts and assumptions that your new-found neighbours construct of how life operates are going to be very different from your own.

remember.eps NLP doesn’t change the world – it simply helps you change the way that you observe/perceive your world. NLP allows you to build a different or more detailed map that helps you to be more effective.

anecdote_nlp.eps John is an architect who rents expensive office space in a central city location. He used to moan frequently that the offices weren’t cleaned to a high enough standard, the staff were lazy, and he never got any satisfaction from the office manager. On meeting John in his office, we discovered that he worked in chaos, leaving the office with plans and design ideas on every available surface and not tidying anything away. He frequently worked late into the evening and was grumpy if interrupted, and so the cleaners came and went without daring to disturb him.

Through coaching, John came to recognise that he hadn’t considered anyone else’s point of view or noticed what a difficult task the cleaners had cleaning his office around him. His map of reality was completely different from that of the office management team and the cleaners. He subsequently built a new map that incorporated the reality of what life in the office was like for his colleagues, and he became more considerate towards them. By changing this one map of his experience, other aspects of his life also improved, and he grew more aware of the effect of his general untidiness. For example, now he feels more comfortable inviting girlfriends to his neater flat.

Modelling excellence

Modelling excellence is a theme much discussed in this book, because so much of NLP is future orientated and applied to creating change for the better – whether that’s a better qualified individual, a better quality of life, or a better world for the next generation.

The NLP approach is that you learn best by finding someone else who already excels at whatever you want to learn. By modelling other people, you can break your discovering into its component parts. This perspective is empowering, and an encouragement to convert large overwhelming projects into lots of small ones and discover people who’ve already been there and can show you the way.

Using NLP to Greater Effect

As you discover throughout this book, the practical application of NLP is about increasing your options, instead of falling into the trap of being restricted by your experience and saying, ‘this is the way I do things, and this is how it has to be’. In order to get the benefit of NLP, you need to be open and give yourself and others the benefit of questioning and challenging your norms in a supportive way. This section provides a few tips to remind you how to do so.

Understanding that attitude comes first

At its essence NLP brings a positive attitude about life and possibilities rather than dwelling on problems. NLP also provides the ‘how’ to achieve what you want with the tools and support to change anything about your life that doesn’t reflect who you want to be today. So much more is possible when you have the mindset and attitudes to support your success; you tap into your natural human resourcefulness. If your attitudes don’t support you in living a richly rewarding life, you may want to consider changing them. Changing your mind and attitude really does change your life.

remember.eps Many people spend a lot of time looking at the negatives in their lives – how they hate their jobs, or don’t want to smoke or be fat. By conditioning yourself to concentrate on what you do want, positive results can be achieved very quickly.

Being curious and confused are good for you

Here are two helpful attributes to bring with you: curiosity – accepting that you don’t know all the answers – and a willingness to be confused, because as the great hypnotherapist Milton H Erickson said, ‘enlightenment is always preceded by confusion.’

tip.eps If you find that ideas in this book make you feel confused, thank your unconscious mind because confusion is the first step to understanding. Take the sense of confusion as a sign that you’re processing information to sift and to find the way forward, and that you intuitively know more than you realise consciously.

Changing is up to you

Gone are the days when you need to stay stuck in a downward spiral of repetitive behaviours and responses that are tedious and ineffective. Today NLP is all about producing measurable results that enhance the quality of people’s lives without a lengthy and painful journey into the past.

As you read the chapters in this book, you discover the experiential nature of NLP – that it’s about trying things out, having a go. Test out the ideas for yourself – don’t take our word for it.

The responsibility for change lies with you, and this book is the facilitator. If you aren’t open to change, you aren’t going to get the most from the book. So we encourage you to do the exercises, note your new process, and then teach and share with others, because to teach is to learn twice. By the time you complete the book, you may be surprised at how much you’ve already changed.

Having fun on the way!

When Clint Eastwood was interviewed on British TV by Michael Parkinson he offered sound advice: ‘let’s take the work seriously, and not ourselves seriously.’ NLP involves much fun and laughter. If you set yourself up to become perfect, you put enormous and unrealistic pressure on yourself. So pack a sense of your own playfulness as you travel and try to make sense of a changing world: learning is serious work that’s serious fun.

Chapter 2

Some Basic Assumptions of NLP

In This Chapter

Understanding the presuppositions of NLP

Testing the NLP presuppositions

Walking in someone else’s shoes

Developing flexibility to take full responsibility in any interaction

Brenda has a much loved, only daughter, Mary. By the age of ten, Mary was a little spoiled because she arrived after Brenda and her husband had given up hope of ever having a child. Mary was prone to throwing tantrums the likes of which you’re extremely fortunate not to experience. Mary thrashed about on the floor, screaming and flailing her arms and legs.

Brenda made no progress with Mary’s tantrums until one day, when Mary was on the floor exercising her lungs with total abandonment, the long-suffering Brenda took some metal pans out of a cupboard and joined Mary on the floor. Brenda banged the pots on the wooden floor and kicked and screamed even better and louder than Mary. Guess what? Mary lay still in stunned astonishment, staring at her mother. She decided there and then that her mother was the more expert ‘tantrummer’ and that she would lose the tantrum contest every time. She realised that pursuing this particular course of action was futile and the tantrums stopped from that moment. Brenda took control of her interaction with Mary by displaying the greater flexibility of behaviour.

This little anecdote illustrates that ‘the person with the most flexibility in a system influences the system’. This statement isn’t the result of some experiment conducted in a laboratory. Instead, it’s an NLP presupposition (or assumption), which, if practised and adopted, can help to ease your journey through life. Brenda’s story illustrates just one of several presuppositions – also called convenient beliefs – which form the basis of NLP.

Introducing NLP Presuppositions

NLP presuppositions are no more than generalisations about the world that can prove useful to you when you act as if they’re true. In the following sections, we describe some of the presuppositions that we consider to be most influential out of several that the founders of NLP developed.

The map is not the territory

One of the first presuppositions is that ‘the map is not the territory’. This statement was published in Science and Sanity in 1933 by Korzybski, a Polish count and mathematician. Korzybski was referring to the fact that you experience the world through your senses (sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste) – the territory. You then take this external phenomenon and make an internal representation (IR) of it within your brain – the map.

This internal map that you create of the external world, shaped by your experiences, is never an exact replica of the map made by someone else perceiving the same surroundings as you. In other words, what’s outside can never be the same as what’s inside your brain.

Take the following analogy. If you ask a botanist what Belladonna means, they may give you the Latin name for the plant and describe the flowers and slight scent while making a picture of the plant in their head. Whereas a homoeopath may explain its uses in treating certain symptoms and see a picture of a patient they treated. If you ask a murder-mystery writer about Belladonna, they may say that it’s a poison.

Or try another analogy: if you’re driving in London, with your London street map, the ‘roads’ shown on the map are completely different from the roads you’re actually driving along. For a start the tube stations you drive past are in three dimensions and in colour, whereas they are shown as a blue circle with a red line through it on the map.

remember.eps The point is that depending on the context and someone’s background, different people make different IRs of the same thing.

Putting perceptions through your own personal filter

Your senses bombard you with millions of different bits of information every second, and yet your conscious mind can deal with only a handful of individual pieces at any given moment: as a result, an awful lot of information is filtered out. This filtration process is influenced by your values and beliefs, memories, decisions, experiences, and your cultural and social background, to allow in only what your filters are tuned to receive.

trythis.eps When you’re with another person or other people, choose something in your surroundings and have each of you write a short description of what you observe: for example, the view from a window. Notice that people’s descriptions are individually tailored by their own life experiences.

Some Europeans and North Americans experience a major culture shock when visiting countries such as India or Mexico. Because of their cultural background, they may be shocked by the level of poverty in some areas whereas local people accept the poverty as part of life. People accept the familiarity of their own landscape.

Travelling down another person’s map: Unfamiliar territory

The result of this personal filter is that everyone has a very individual map of the world. To make communication easier, a really useful exercise is to at least attempt to understand the IR or map of the person with whom you’re communicating.

anecdote_nlp.eps Romilla was buying some fish and chips for supper and was asked to complete a short form about the quality, service, and value-for-money of the food. The women serving behind the counter were very upset because the man who had just left had declined, quite rudely, to fill in the form. Romilla asked the ladies whether they had considered how the poor man may have felt if he was illiterate, and that perhaps he was rude because he was embarrassed. The change in the two ladies was phenomenal: ‘I never even thought about that,’ said one. Their demeanour changed immediately from one of anger and resentment to one of sympathy. They also felt much better in themselves and were able to let go of all the negative feelings.

trythis.eps The following short exercise helps you to find tolerance, or at least gain some understanding, when you find yourself in a situation where another person’s response or behaviour surprises you, irritates you, or just leaves you puzzled:

1. Count all the blessings in your life.

2. With examples of your own good fortune rattling around in your brain, put on your most generous hat.

3. Ask yourself what may be going on in this other person’s world that would warrant the behaviour.

When you begin to master this process, you may find that not only are you happier with