Have you ever told a lie?
Ha! I guess this is a rhetorical question. But have you ever told a lie in a very convincing way? The most convincing way you could? Because if you did, and you told it often enough, at some point what happened was that you lost the difference, you couldn’t figure out whether these memories were true or false. It almost became real.
In school, we had to do creative writing. Imagine scenarios (on different themes) and create scenarios out of our imagination making up stories. After one of these classes, one of my good friends got into an argument with another class mate. This class mate was fuming. I remember asking him why he was so furious and he accused my good friend of really doing what she just made up in the previous creative imagination class.
Now, let’s expand this to NLP and the NLP Communication Model, one of the first things we learn in the NLP Practitioner training. We know that there is an enormous amount of information (note the word information) with which we’re bombarded ever moment of every day. Last time I checked there were about 11 million bits of information per second coming onto our nervous system. Every second!
I say information because this is a neutral word describing something we receive through our five senses (visual – what we see, auditory – what we hear, kinesthetic – what we feel in terms of sensations and also emotions, olfactory – what we smell and gustatory – what we taste). Add to that what we don’t perceive with our five senses but which is all around us and you end up to an incredible amount of information.
Out of this enormously large amount of information you end up with an itty-bitty tiny 126 bits which we consciously process and are aware of. Oh, let’s see 11 million VS 126…hmmm… what’s this saying about how little we perceive from reality?
So as you perceive three dimensions out of “n” number of other dimensions, you also select a small number of bits from these three dimensions which you call your reality. Or in NLP jargon, your Model of The World (MOW).
So you settle in your MOW, and after you learn the NLP Model of Communication you realize that this is not all there is. You begin to ask yourself questions or maybe explain to yourself why other people seem to think so differently. But then you go back home and you settle again in your MOW. You don’t look in your notes from the NLP Practitioner training because if you did, you could find the note you wrote to yourself which says:
“To remember: my IR (internal representation) of an event is not the whole truth and the only truth about that event. My map is not the whole territory. Remember other people’s recollection or even interpretation of reality at hand is different from mine. Remember to stay alert and notice this, because if I fall back asleep I will misinterpret reality and I will create a fake life for myself. If I don’t pay attention to this I will live a life that’s someone else’s creative imagination, and someone else’s movie.”
Many people live inside other people’s movies. And they surrender their thinking to the story of someone else’s movie. The content of the movie will distract you from the fact that it is a construct, and eventually you will not even remember that the construct is not even yours.
Suggestions, “common” knowledge not based on facts, television programming, movies and reality shows, family and work input; these are all ways of having someone else run a movie called “reality” for your life. If this is what you want, hey, go for it! Otherwise, with the knowledge and the understanding NLP gave you about how your mind operates, do your best to create and live your own movie. If it’s yours at least you can change it…
Until next time, be well.