As an unfolding of pressuposition 4, we are resourceful people. Maybe we can be temporarily in a state of mind that does not help much, but this can be changed.

10. Mind and body form a system. They are different expressions of one person.

This one is key to using NLP for better relationships. Think of the last time you and your friends were in the car driving to a party, banging your heads, shaking your shoulders and arms to the rhythm of your favourite music. Can be a classic rock n’roll, a cheesy Hed Kandi house hit of the season or anything else that puts you into state.

Now with this song in your mind, do exactly the same movements you did in the car. Shake your bones. Don’t worry, nobody is watching.

If you followed this simple exercise you noticed that with these movements of your body your mental state has also changed. Perhaps even your breathing and heart beats have got accelerated as well.

Point being, the mind and the body are two entities of a single unity: you. When we want to promote changes in our mind, we can use our body and the other way round is also true. Thinking differently will make our body respond differently.

This can be used make yourself more relaxed and less analytical. Very useful to deal with approach anxiety. We will discuss more on the practical uses later.

Something that derives from this pressuposition that is also equally important is that by being a good observer of the body you can be able to read which mental state the other person is probably in. This is a powerful tool for communication.

Tyler has an excellent article describing how women can be in lockup or unlocked states. Not only you should be able to notice this according to the blowoff answers she gives, but also by her facial expression and body language, which reflect her mental state.

11. We process information through our senses

Thus, to get “superpowers” it is important to develop our senses. The more precise they are the better information will be processed by us.

12. Modelling successful performance leads to excellence

This is one of the reasons that From Victor With Love goes into the minimal details of the reviewed products of the selected Mentors.

Remember pressupositions 4 and 9: you work perfectly and you have all the resources. You can learn from successful models and replicate the success and get better results. For that, it is important to understand that each person is different (remember the fly vision example?). As your map is different from the map from your Mentor, you should not try to clone him. You can get some results, but these will not be optimized to your reality.

Instead, it is important to examine why each of these models are successful and then, understanding the underlying reasons, adapt and incorporate their patterns into your personality so you can organically improve your own maps of reality. Learn from your Mentors, but do not copy-paste what they do.

Just to illustrate, I’ve seen some friends trying to use Mystery Method in telling, word by word, the same DHV (demonstrations of higher value) stories… from Mystery! I know one guy who completely stole the story of the stripper girlfriend who was chased by Biff-from-Back-to-the-Future bullies that Mystery tells in one of his seminars. Sometimes some girls fall into it, because it is indeed a story with lots of emotional spikes and DHVs. But I am sure that deep inside he does not feel proud of telling a story he stole from someone else. And for the good observer, it looks incongruent in some points, no matter how good his delivery is.

The punch line is: adapt the methods to your character and life experiences. You can borrow some lines as a training wheel for some time. But do not become a social robot.

13. If you want to understand, act

This is what you have seen many times before. Do not become a seminar junkie! Just trying to understand all this without practicing, as Tyler says, is like reading a book on lifting weights and never actually lifting weights!

The other opposite is also true. If you just do things without having absolutely no theory from some Mentor or a good ability to examine your actions, take feedback and be flexible with different approaches (and then creating your own theories), you will hardly progress.

The balance is in between. Get the knowledge. Apply it. Go experiment. It does not matter if you do not get it right on the first times. It is not failure; it is feedback to calibrate your knowledge into applied practice. Just do it.
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Nobody is wrong or broken, says O’Connor. If we are doing something that can be considered wrong, it is because we are applying the wrong strategy. The strategy is wrong, we as people are not.

Because of that, it is important to understand which strategies we use and, to maximize results, we have to improve our strategies.

5. All actions have a purpose

We are not robots doing random movements. We have a purpose to what we are doing, even if we are not fully aware of the reasons to keep doing what we do.

6. Every behaviour has a positive intention

This one is connected to pressuposition 5. Everything we do we do for a purpose. We want to accomplish something of value. If we have a choice (see pressuposition 2) that also achieves our positive intention, we take it.

7. The unconscious mind balances the conscious; it is not malicious

The unconscious mind has all the resources we need to live in balance.

8. The meaning of the communication is not simply what you intend but also the response you get

Here I also relate to one of the experiences that Tyler mentions in the Transformations program. At a certain moment of a relationship with a girl he adored, she said she would love to talk to him every single day.

As Tyler wanted to be nice, he phoned her daily.

So, after some days, to his surprise she says she is getting annoyed that he is calling her too much.

To that, Tyler says: but that is what you said you wanted me to do!!

And to his dismay she replies “No, I never said that!” And they broke up.

He wanted to communicate how caring he was. On her side of the communication, she felt he was needy and boring. The meaning of the communication comprises what was intended and also the response got.

How many times we don’t experience this type of situation?

How do I look?

The point is that in communications it is necessary to understand what happens in the two or more poles that are part of the communication. What are your intentions as a communicator do matter, but it is also necessary to understand the responses you will get.

Much of NLP is about results. If you do not get the desired results, it is time to use this failure as feedback and be flexible, using other approaches. You are responsible for the communication.

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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???

Flies do not see the world as humans do. We have different maps of reality. Similarly, two different people may see the same thing, but have completely different associations to what they see.

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.

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