Presuppose you believe the following ideas are true!

The foundation for NLP is a set of presuppositions (beliefs) about ourselves and the world in which we live. They can also serve as principles to guide how we live our lives. Practitioners of NLP often include different presuppositions in their list but what follows are the most common.

1. The map is not the territory.

Imagine you and 10 other people went for a walk in the woods and then returned and made a map to represent what you experienced. If one of them were a botanist, one a birdwatcher, one an artist, one a child etc. etc. think how different your maps could be.

We all have external experiences based on pictures, sounds, feelings, tastes, smells and words. Then we try to make sense of an external event we create our own internal representation or map. The map you make depend on your individual filters (beliefs, values, decisions, past experiences…) and everyone's will be unique. 

So what you view as reality may not be quite as real as you believe, seen through another person's eyes things may appear quite different. What is big to a child may not be big to an adult, what is scary to one person may not be to another.

You may not understand or agree with my behavior, but if you had my genetic code, experiences, and learnt beliefs and values, you might do what I do....

2. There is no failure only feedback.

When something doesn't go as we planned we tend to see that as failure. How would your life change if you viewed failure as simply feedback - with this presupposition we are free to form a new plan of action and try again. You then have an opportunity to learn what doesn't work from that experience, allowing much more flexibility in developing a new way to achieve your intended outcome? Every response you get is useful, you may hate that response but the knowledge you gain from it is valuable learning for the next experiment.

• I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work. - Thomas Alva Edison, Scientist and Inventor
   
• It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all. Edward de Bono
   
• A number of best-selling books (i.e. million sellers plus film) were turned down by more than two dozen publishers before they were accepted for publication.
   
• And always remember the poor talent scout at Decca records who rejected the Beatles as having no future in music! and if they had given up because they had failed......

3. Mind and body are part of the same system.

The notion that our body and our brain/mind are separate entities was a developed within the western medical profession around the 1930s and 1940s. If there was something wrong with your body - from a sniffle to malignant cancer - the only solution was some kind of physical treatment.

Only in the last couple of decades has practical, scientifically verifiable evidence come to light that shows beyond reasonable doubt that the immune system, for example, is integrally linked to brain activity so that, for example, mental stress can inhibit the performance of the immune system and thus lead to lowering of general bodily health.

Eastern medicine has always treated the whole person, mind and body combined knowing that they are interconnected. Therefore changing what we feel and think can directly affect our physical bodies.

4. Everyone is doing the best they can with the resources available to them.

People already have all the resources they need for change. Sometimes the resources just aren't lucky enough to be immediately recognizable or available to them. Often motivation may be the resource that has become disconnected.

So no matter how strange, hurtful or inappropriate a person’s behaviour may seem to you; to the person engaging in that behaviour, it makes sense with their model or map of the world. They see the behaviour as the best or only way of meeting their need or achieving their outcome.

Similar ways to express this presupposition are:

• Every behaviour has a positive intention.
• Every behaviour is useful in some context.
• Everyone is always doing what they believe is right.
• This is the best choice available to a person given the circumstances as they see it.

Once you have an acceptance and understanding of an individual's positive intention, you can help them to begin to explore alternative ways to make other choices.

5. If it is possible for someone, it is possible for me.

One of the key activities in NLP is the modelling of people who are recognised (by their peers) as being excellent in some field of activity. This allows us to identify what they do that gives them such remarkable results. If one human has done it, that means it is humanly possible. And if it is humanly possible, any human can learn to do it. All genius, excellence and amazing achievement has structure and a strategy, and for this reason it can be learned. If someone can do something, then it can be modelled and taught to anyone else. 

6. The system (person) with the most flexibility of behaviour will have the most influence on the system.

If what you are doing isn’t working, do something else. Do anything else! - Or you will keep getting the same results for ever.

Have you ever been stuck in life, doing the same things over and over again and each time expecting to get a different result? - Definition of insanity! If you want your life to be different, doing the same things more often, harder, louder, is not the way. You must choose to do something different. If you try one key in a lock and it doesn't fit, would you keep trying the same key over and over again? Or would you be flexible and try other keys until you find the one that works?

Same for your life, be flexible and explore different behaviours/strategies to unlock what you truly want in life or who you are destined to be.

At work, I am sure you have noticed two types of people. One person who is very inflexible and tries to control everything. They live under the illusion that they are in charge. In actual fact, their co-workers are finding workarounds in order to avoid dealing with them. Then there is the other person, people enjoy talking to her and helping her with whatever needs to be done. Why? Because by being flexible in her behaviour, she is able to communicate with everyone and people see her as a valuable co-worker.

If you are a parent, consider the following: There are no resistant children, only inflexible adults.

7. The meaning of communication is the response it produces.

Your intended communication is not always what is understood by the other person. It does not matter what your intention is, what matters are the results you generate from your words, tone of voice, body language, … .

Being flexible, you can change how you are communicating until you achieve your desired result.

Consider the following situation. I am a man and I notice a female co-worker has a new dress and I decide to pay her a complement (my intention). I say to her “Wow you look great in that dress.” She immediately gets mad and leaves the room. I do not know what is going on in her mind, but obviously she heard my message very differently from what I intended. Maybe in her model of the world and through her filters, she felt I was ‘flirting with her’. The next time I see her, I could continue with the same behaviour. Or I can realize that I did not achieve what I intended and find different ways to communicate with her so that we can have a productive working relationship. Maybe by explaining why I said what I did, I may even give her an opportunity to consider how she receives compliments.

8. You are in charge of your mind and therefore your results.

You are the one who chose the filters (beliefs, values, decisions, …) that determine your maps, your model of the world and how you experience different events. You are also the one who can change these filters to gain a different perspective on the world and potentially significantly different results.

To sum up, you can simply read the above presuppositions or you can begin to put them into action by making them a way of life. In so doing, you have the opportunity to change your reality, your results and your life!. Here are two ways you may wish to consider:

1. Begin to incorporate these presuppositions into your life by selecting a different presupposition each day. Read it over carefully and during the day, at work and at home, notice when this presupposition applies and what other courses of action are available to you to achieve what you want in life.
2. Identify a situation in the past in which you did not perform as well as you could have. Take each presupposition one at a time and review the situation from each of these perspectives. As you do, notice what you can learn about yourself, about others and what other choices are available to you to obtain a different result -- should a similar circumstance arise in the future.

9. All the resources we need are inherent to our own physiology.

People already have all the resource they need - Our five senses are the basic building blocks of all our mental and physical resources. We can use them to build up any thought, feeling, or skill we want.

When these differences have been identified they can be communicated to other people who can then learn to perform with a similar level of skill and excellence.

Having said that, the person learning the skill must have the necessary aptitude, and be willing to carry out the necessary self-development.

In other words, whilst it is easy enough to model the activity of a world class sprinter, for example, a person who has only one leg, or is severely overweight or who refuses to take any physical exercise, is unlikely to be able to translate the modelled information into a personal skill.

6. People are always making the best choice(s) available to them - We each have our own unique personal experience (mental map). From it, we must make all of our choices. Our maps can grow and change through learning.