The 6 Pillars of NLP

NLP is based on six pillars

1. You
2. The Presuppositions
3. Rapport
4. Outcome
5. Feedback
6. Flexibility.

Read on…

1. You

Have you ever encountered people who attended courses after courses in personal development and then tell you that these things don’t work?  My answer to these people – it’s not that the courses didn’t work, it’s that they didn’t.

You are always the most important part of the equation.  Many people are quick to point to circumstances when they fail to achieve the things that they want in life yet they don’t realise that by doing this, they’re relinquishing control of their lives.

At around 425 BC, the Greek philosopher Socrates, through his words, got people to think through the logical consequences of their thoughts and behaviors.  This is the Law of Cause and Effect, which states that everything happens for a reason.  For every effect that happens in your life, there is a specific cause, or a series of specifc causes.  If you want something in your life (the effect), it is up to you to take the actions (the causes) to make it happen.  Similarly, the undesirable effects that you see in your life currently are also due to the undesirable actions that you’re taking in your life.  If you want to change the effects, you change the causes.

Thus, if you want to use NLP to achieve your goals (effect), it is up to you to take the necessary actions (causes).  Build your resourcefulness and skilfulness, because your success depends on you.

You have to take action to build your competency and walk your talk.

2. The Presuppositions

These are the guiding principles of NLP (see next post).

3. Rapport

For you to succeed in life, you need other people.   No one succeeds alone.  No matter what you do, you need people who trust you to buy your quality product or service.  To help others, you need to gain their trust so that they allow you into their world.

Rapport is of absolute importance for good communication.  By learning to understand how other people see the world and more importantly, learning to respect that, you can build rapport more easily.  And over time, this will evolve into trust.

4. Outcome

Many people know that they want lesser stress, more money, better health, better relationships.  But that lacks clarity.  Worse of all, some people don’t even know what they want – they just know what they don’t want.

In NLP, we always want to act in purposeful ways, which I couldn’t agree more.  Think about it, Time is the only real scarcity that we have in Life.  It is the only thing that cannot be retrieved nor can you choose to buy more of.  The seconds drift into minutes, which drifts into hours and days, which eventually drifts into years.  When you consider that, how could we not learn to use our time purposefully at every moment?

But many people do not live purposely.  It’s not that they don’t want to – it’s that they lack clarity because they haven’t decided for themselves and more importantly, they haven’t defined clearly what they want.  When you know exactly what you want, you can plan the series of tasks necessary to achieve it.

Life is a constant motion, we are always moving somewhere whether we like it or not.  If you don’t make choices, you’ll just be drifting in the waters, going with the flow and more often than not, you’ll find yourself in places you don’t want to be.

So, you learn to think in terms of outcomes.  This involves three things :

1. Know where you are now.
2. Know where you want to be.
3. Plan how to get from where you are now to where you want to be, and how you can obtain the resources necessary for this shift.

5. Feedback

You know that when we plan and take action, things don’t always go the way we want them to.  Most people give up at this point because, they planned well and took the necessary actions but yet were faced with failures.  But failures are merely learning experiences, which gives you feedback, which you can use to correct your course.

Did you know that when planes fly from one place to another, most of the time, they’re not exactly on course?  As a matter of fact, all flights are off-course 99% of the time.  Interestingly enough, they still get to their destination and touch down at the expected arrival times.

Why?

Because despite the winds and weather conditions that repeatedly throws the plane off-course,  it has mechanisms to take all these feedback and self-correct its direction along the way.

The same is true for us.  No matter how knowledgeable, how intelligent or how resourceful we are, there are bound to have times when we go off our course.  The secret of success is to get feedback and keep self-correcting.

You are destined to succeed once you recognise that you are also destined to fail many times and self-correct.

Every failure story has a moral – learn to read these feedback and self-correct.  You are always a winner because you can always get something out of every experience, if you choose to.

6. Flexibility

When feedback is presented to us that our approach is not working, you need to be flexible.  Change your strategy.

Most people always approach problems the same way.  Ask yourself, what else can I do?  Not every problem is a nail just because you have a hammer in your hand.  Maybe it’s time to examine what the problem really is, put down the hammer and choose the right tool.