COLUMN
The Presuppositions of NLP What you do isn’t you! By Caitlin Collins
It means recognising that things are more complicated than they seem
The NLP presuppositions can help us transcend limiting beliefs about ourselves and our world. You don’t have to believe any presupposition; just consider the implications of acting ‘as if’ you believed it and imagine the differences doing so could make to your life.
H
ow we speak has an enormous influence on how we think. Speech is often imprecise, whether for brevity or out of laziness. I suspect that most of us sometimes find ourselves saying things like: ‘She’s so awful; she’s rude and horrible and I can’t stand her.’ When we notice what we’re doing we may correct it: ‘No, I don’t really mean that. It’s her behaviour I dislike, not her.’ This distinction is thought so important in the NLP world that it features high on the lists of presuppositions, usually worded along the lines of, ‘A person is not his or her behaviour.’ Let’s look at why it’s so important to
make this distinction, not only in our speech but also in our thought. If ‘she’ is a rude person, then this implies that she is always rude; there is no occasion on which she is not rude; and the possibility of her being anything other than rude is closed. It also isolates her, ignoring the fact that rudeness can only be significant in the context of relationship, which removes the responsibility – and therefore power – of anyone else in the interaction. If someone is rude to me, and I think of her as a rude person, there’s nothing I can do about it; but in denying my responsibility I also disempower myself.
Caitlin Collins: www.naturalmindmagic.com cait@globalnet.co.uk
12 | Spring 2010 - rapport
This also applies when we apply the same sort of sloppy thinking to ourselves. We evoke guilt when we identify with our own bad behaviour – ‘I’m a bad person’ – and complacency or arrogance when we identify with our virtuous actions or achievements – ‘Aren’t I marvellous!’ Both mistaken views are potentially damaging, leading to what NLP terms ‘limiting beliefs’ about ourselves. An infinitely complex network of causes and conditions, including what NLP calls the ‘deep structure’ of our conditioning, beliefs, values, habits, experience and learnings, underlies our actions.
Understanding this doesn’t mean negating personal responsibility; it means recognising that things are more complicated than they seem, and that blame is not the best response. So we need to remember that any action involves interaction, and at every moment we have the opportunity to ‘do something different’ and change the course of events. And if remembering this helps us to be more compassionate and forgiving towards ourselves and others, well, wouldn’t that be nice!