In the mid 1970’s, Richard Bandler and John Grinder got together and asked the question:
What makes successful people successful? What is the process behind success? How to replicate it?
To answer, they started an in-depth study of 3 of the most successful therapists of the 20th century
- Hynotherapist Milton Erickson (who once hypnotised a woman who could not speak English!)
- Gestalt Therapist Fritz Perls
- And Family Therapist Virginia Satir.
What they found out was that all 3 of them had a very unusual ATTITUDE towards life in general, and their clients in particular.
That created the basis of THE PRESUPPOSITIONS OF NLP.
What are they?
Well, they are just convenient assumptions that allow CHANGE to happen. A deep-seated belief that if something does not serve you, you can change it.
Some of the most important are below. Go through them and see how they work for you.
PRESUPPOSITION #1: PEOPLE ARE NOT THEIR BEHAVIOUR
You are more than how you behave. Have you ever seen someone change behaviour? Well, obviously yes!
So that’s important to keep in mind, accept the person and change the behaviour. People are more than how they behave. (This is correlated to another NLP Presupposition: “people behave according to the resources they have”, i.e. give them more resources, and the behaviour will change.)
By the way, think about children as young as 3 years old who are diagnosed as having ADD and put on medication because of HOW they behave!
PRESUPPOSITION #2: THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY
It means that the words we use are not the events/items themselves. We all have our own maps, and describe our world with our own words. Sometimes communication breaks down not because of the message itself but because of the words that are used. Misunderstandings happen which are sometimes even followed by crisis. Someone said: Everyone knows you can’t drink the word water, but people go and kill each other for what they hold sacred”. We use maps to make sense of the world, and language to describe the world we live in, but don;t mistake the words for the experience they try to describe.
Which is why by the way, in NLP, we do not focus on WHAT people say, but on HOW they say it. Process rather than content.
PRESUPPOSITION #3: THERE IS NO FAILURE ONLY FEEDBACK
Do you know how many times Edison “failed” before he invented the light bulb? 10,000. Did he despair? Not at all! He was celebrating each time he said. Because each time, he got one more way how NOT to do it. If something does not work, do it another way. In NLP, it is called ‘flexibility’. Focus on your results. There is more than one way to get where you want to go.