From Victor With Love

Next, O’Connor goes to list the 13 pressupositions of NLP, its central principles that have to be pre-supposed as useful to your work.

1. People respond to their experience and not to reality itself

What is reality? Here we could enter the delicate and infinite debate on philosophy and What-Is-The-Matrix type of discussion. The fact is that we can only perceive reality through our senses and interpretation. We do not know the territory, only the map.

What???

Think of this: we still do not know exactly how a fly sees the world, but we know that it is certainly not the way we humans see the world. This is because our sensory organs to capture the light reflected from the objects are different. And we make different images in our respective heads, even though we live in the same reality.

Neither we nor the fly can see the reality. We see a map of reality.

Don’t even have to go so far away: color-blinded people see the world differently. Another map of reality.

Now, we can explore this even beyond the realm of colors and shapes, but also to the emotional associations. A melancholic gothic drinking wine under the moonlight in a cemetery certainly has a different map of reality than a hedonistic playboy drinking his poison in a boat party.

What is interesting about NLP is that we will learn how to manipulate the maps of reality in our heads so we can better achieve our outcomes.

2. Having a choice is better than having no choice

In creating our maps, it is positive to have maps that give us the widest number of choices so we can become freer.

3. People make the best choice they can at the time

This is tricky. Seems obvious, but in my interpretation there is a subtlety here. The person always makes the best choice they can see, even though it is negative, self-defeating or evil.

I remember what Tyler says in his presentation in the RSD Transformations DVD program: he says with no trace of doubt that if he gives one million dollars to his audience, in some years 90% of them would get back to their original financial level. They would spend all the money with parties and unnecessary things throwing the money away.

Similarly, sometimes a woman without enough self-esteem will prefer to be with some average dude or even with an abusing jerk than with a man with lots of positive qualities and who really adores her. If she does not believe she deserves to have a great man, she will reject him at a certain point in the relationship.

She is not worthy.

The same thing applies to men. Countless times I remember I was interacting with an absolutely gorgeous woman, a perfect 10, and I sabotaged myself.

Some weeks ago I was in Poland having an instant date with a fashion model I met in a shopping mall. Instead of chilling and be an attractive man, I spent the whole interaction being needy and thinking to myself “oh my God this woman is soooo beautiful – I cannot believe she is here with me”.

I was not worthy.

At the end, it was an average interaction, no sexual tension, no romance in the air. Just some random talk in the cafe and exchange of email and numbers. Never saw or heard from her again.

So that is why it is important to have a healthy map in your head and know which that the best choice for you is the best one! In that case the best choice for me was second best, which meant women who were less physically attractive and therefore more appropriate for me.

A perfect 10 would just ignite “I cannot believe” type of thoughts and I would sabotage myself, because it seemed to be the best choice.

(continues)

Discuss this post in the From Victor With Love Forum