Reasons People Learn NLP #2

Reasons People Attend Neuro Linguistics #2: It is About Learning To Dance in the Rain

“Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass, it is about learning to dance in the rain.” – Vivian Green.

This is one of my favourite quotes.

There is no one true reality, there is only the subjective reality, the meaning that we make. If it is your wedding day and you look out on the pouring rain, you may feel sad. If you are farmer and it is the end of a drought, you may feel jubilant. The rain is neither intrinsically good or bad, it is the context that you see it in that creates its unique meaning to you. In this way, all meaning depends on its context.

When you can notice the frame within which you perceive things, you start to discover what Victor Frankyl called ‘the last of the human freedoms’ – the capacity to make your own meaning. Someone else can do their worst to you, but they cannot, ultimately, control the impact it has on you because only you can control the meaning you make.

If you are optimistic and you have a pessimistic friend or colleague, you may find yourself ‘reframing’, saying ‘that is one way to see it, or you could see it this way?’. You might do this just for your own sake, to defend your optimistic reality from the pessimistic cloud of meaning that is floating your way.

You may also be the master of the self-pep talk and notice that after one thing occurs to you, you are capable of flipping the same facts into a different meaning. That is, you might be reframing yourself in your self-pep-talks.

So reframing is a conversational change tool. You know it works with someone else when he or she actually says ‘yeah’, or looks thoughtful, or goes ‘mmmm’…

But on a bigger level, noticing ‘frames’ that create meaning can be very, very powerful. Some ‘frames’ leave us feeling and acting ‘resourceful’ than others. That is, they help people be resilient, empowered, energized and happy.

One of my favourites is the difference between the frame of ‘failure’ vs the frame of ‘feedback’. In NLP we have an assumption (a handy belief) that ‘there is no failure, only feedback’. If you understand the world you live in to be one great big system with feedback loops back at you, and if you understand that when you do something new, or for the first time, or risky, sometimes that loop comes back with a result that you did not intend or want, you could understand that in the frame of ‘failure’, or you could understand it as ‘feedback’.

In science, when an experiment comes back with one result, the Scientist’s frame is one of learning – so it is a constant learning.   After the experiment is over the hypothesis may be proven or disproven, but there is no failure because there is always learning. More is known, whatever happens, there has been a growth of knowledge. It is not a matter of ‘success or failure’.

Imagine what you could do if you had a frame of feedback when something unexpected happens and things don’t go the way you expect them? Imagine what you would be capable of trying, if life was an experiment that was all about learning?

You can discover more about the Neuro Coaching Practitioner here…