Sue Knight discusses the power of NLP and how 'modelling' can help us learn.
I sit in God’s Own Country as it is known – Kerala, in Southern India – looking out over the Arabian Sea thinking about how this natural and tropically beautiful land might very soon be spoilt with the commercialism that seems to accompany most tourism. I watch the local fishermen throw their nets into the sea and the women lay out their washing on the rocks that bridge the beach and the small road that brings an increasing number of visitors to the region every year. What has this to do with NLP and indeed what is NLP?
The study of excellence
NLP is the study of excellence. By learning how to recognise the (mostly unconscious) choices we make in our thinking and behaviour especially non-verbal behaviour (Neuro), the language that we speak to ourselves and others (Linguistic) and how we combine these intuitive choices to create programmes (Programming) by which we live our lives, we can become increasingly aware of what is working for us and what is not. But more especially we can learn from difference, in particular the difference between how we react when we are at our best compared to when we sabotage ourselves. We can learn from the difference between the way that we think and others think so that we can make the best choices in how we might communicate with them.
You experience a beautiful sunny day – you believe that life is good. Your partner speaks to you in a harsh tone of voice – you assume you have done something wrong. In microseconds you have put a meaning to these events. You will have deleted some of the details, put a name to others and as such distorted them and generalised what you saw and heard and felt to make your personal ‘map’ of what has happened. And this is how we relate to the world – through our maps. This is the difference between what we refer to as deep structure (the truth and richness of our original experience) and surface structure (the result of how we distort that experience – our perception.)
Modelling our lives
We can model the charisma that defines some speakers over others. We can model the thinking that enables some people to achieve mutually compelling outcomes where once there might have been conflict. We can model how it is that some people keep their cool and composure when all about them are losing theirs. The beauty is that you can choose anywhere and anything what you model. The world becomes a sea of resources.
We can model on a small scale – for example how someone chooses to stop eating at a time that is just right for their body and health and we can choose to model on a cultural scale.
I have just returned from a short trip to the southern most tip of India where we stayed at an Ayurverdic resort perched on the hilltop above an expanse of beach known as Coconut Bay. The views of the miles of sand backed by palm trees, the rows and rows of fishermen’s boats and the infinite horizon of the Arabian Sea are breathtaking. And yet as we approached this resort in the taxi from the station alarm bells started to ring as we saw the line of expensive tourist shops lining the road to the entrance. Not many but enough to know that the environment in this immediate vicinity was not designed for locals but for visitors with a much higher income than the local villagers.
Once inside the resort our fears were compounded as we watched non-Indian tourists stroll around the grounds in what would be considered extremely revealing and disrespectful clothing in any of the native towns and country in this southern part of India.
