NLP Presuppositions are powerful things! If you take these on to be true and act accordingly you will make lasting and positive changes to your relationships and ability to achieve your goals. If, as an NLP practitioner and/or NLP coach you accept these to be true, they will each be useful tools to help you work with people to enable them to change -just don’t assume that everyone wants to change!
Here we are taking each presupposition, along with our translations of them, which we don’t claim to be the perfect translations – just our take on them. We hope you’ll enjoy them.
Hint: One of the best ways to get to know NLP Presuppositions, is just to sit with them for a while. Don’t worry about accepting them to be true, nor relax into “knowing” them for their obvious outcome. Instead just take a little time, and repeat the presupposition to yourself, and see what comes into your consciousness.
After a while of “just sitting”, then take the presupposition and consider “how would things be if I did take this to be true? What event has happened that this presupposition would make a difference to”?
NLP Presupposition #1: The Map is not the Territory.
As an example, when you see a photo or image of the world, we often assume “this is the world”. However, it is only an image, a representation of the world. It is a collection of pixels, some colour, perhaps light. But it is not “the world”. It is only a map, or representation of the world. In order to create a map, it takes tremendous deletions, distortions and generalisations.
More than this, the map is drawn from one viewpoint, it may not be yours, but if you accept this map as the territory, then you are accepting someone else’s viewpoint as your own.
Everyone has a viewpoint. Everyone will envisage something different when asked. This does not make them right or wrong, it is just how it is. And it does give rise to disagreements, as you can imagine.
The key thing is, that whatever anyone’s representation of the world is, it isn’t actually the world.
