How NLP Looks at Things: Differently
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“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten” – John Grinder
As a study of human subjective experience, and as a study of human excellence, NLP challenges us to first experience the world differently, and then watch the external world change to fit our new cognitive sorting, filters and strategies. Or to boil it down to a very few words, NLP challenges us to experience things differently. See, hear, feel, perceive, sense, calculate, sequence, and learn differently, and the world will change. That is a guarantee.
To an artist, learning to see things differently means that the paintings he or she produces will also come out differently. To a musician, learning to hear through different ears means that the music will take on whole new nuances. To an athlete, learning the locus of balance makes all the difference in performance.
In Life, Change Happens Fast
Many of us imagine that evolution happens slowly, but we see more evidence all the time that species can often turn on a dime in response to a change in the environment, and suddenly a recessive trait becomes dominant. Many species have changed their colors, shapes, sizes, diets, breeding cycles in as little as one generation.
In a human life, deep learning also happens fast. The gradual learning is just filler.
The impetus for change can come from some external event or situation (which we do reactively in response to opportunities, threats, pleasure and pain routinely), or the impetus for change can be driven by one’s own will (which is proactive change). Phil McGraw says there are about 7 events in one’s life that define a person. Can you think of a few of those moments that changed who you were? From one of those moments on, you perceived things differently, became a different person, and the world itself was transformed for you.
How to Experience Things Differently
Why are there so many how-to books out there? My answer is because every book is based on no more than a slice or two of human experience. One book might focus on making money in an up market, and another might talk about how to do it in a down market. One book might focus on how to lose weight by diet, and another one by exercise. One book might focus on how to build things, and another on how to repair things. One book might focus on Eastern meditative practices, and another on Eastern meditative history. You get the idea. They are all slices, just as this article is a slice of my experience with some crumbs of commonality with your own.
So if we’re going to look at things differently, we need to be fed new slices from other people’s experience, or we need a way to generate new experiences within ourselves. (Remember inside-out, and bottom up?)
New Experience Generation
Life is too short and the world changes too fast to make traditional authoritative channels our primary sources of learning. By the time we learn anything through these channels, the information and the meaning are already outdated, filtered, generalized and distorted. Our brains are so much more sophisticated and capable of generating learning and meaning than we give them credit for.
With tools and means that I will discuss more deeply in future articles, it is now possible for us to richly simulate experience in our minds along several key axis, such as timelines, value hierarchies, multiple perspectives, emotional states, scope or focus, categories and experiential submodalities. Any experience, real or imagined, can be re-experienced differently by tweaking the constituents of the original experience, which changes the structure or nature of the experience itself.
What are those tools and means? Your brain and NLP. More later!
