Chapter 7

JOE’S JOURNAL

Notes from the Workshop

• ‘You’re never done learning.’ If you feel you know everything there is to know, you’re obviously missing something!
• The map is not the territory: your understanding of the world is based on how you represent it (your map), not on the world itself.
• Whatever you think is going on, remember that it’s just a map.
• Trouble begins when your map doesn’t match the maps of the people around you.
• To have better options, better feelings and better interactions with others, you need to expand your map. You need to be able to look at the same things from different perspectives. The more detailed your map is, the more freedom and flexibility you have.
• Do a reality check from time to time. Make sure that your map is up to date. When people stop looking at what’s out there and rely on an old map, they mess up. Either they imagine limits and constraints where there are none or they continue to act as if something should work, and when it doesn’t, they just do more of the same.
• Your future hasn’t been written yet. Life is full of opportunities, and opportunities lie ahead, in the future. Don’t let anyone, not even your own map, convince you of the contrary.
• It’s not about who’s right and who’s wrong. It’s not about what’s true either. A good map is a map that gets you to see things from different perspectives and helps you feel as resourceful as possible about your situation.
• What people say they do or believe they do is often far removed from what they actually do.
• We have the mental tools and skills to get rid of the crap we don’t want and replace it with what we do want.
• You can be whoever you choose to be.
• Change is the only constant in life. Are you going to choose the direction your life will take and the kind of person you will become or will you just sit back and wait for life to happen to you?
• People need someone who can ‘speak their language’, ‘see things their way’ or ‘grasp their inner world’.
• If you want someone to access a certain state of mind, go there first. If you want a person to feel good, go into a wonderful state yourself.
• It’s not your personal history that makes you who you are, it’s your response to it.
• You can make every single thing you do magical, especially when you’re with other people: just remember to go into the right state.
• The voices inside your head have volume controls. You can make them louder, you can make them softer, you can make them say what you want to – and in whatever tone of voice you choose.
• Get into the right state first. You can’t be depressed and expect to help people be cheerful.
• If you go around grumpy, you will meet grumpy people or people will be grumpy around you. You reap what you sow.
• If you take problems too seriously, you just make them more real.
• States are contagious.
• If you go into the right state, you can do just about anything, but if you don’t change your own internal state, then how can you expect anything to change?
• Shyness isn’t a fixed personality trait. Shyness is just a state of mind.
• Building good feelings should be a part of how you do things every day.
• When you think about an unpleasant thing that has happened in your life, make sure it looks like a black-and-white Polaroid, then push it off into the distance and pretty soon it won’t matter so much.
• People make the best choice they can at the time.
• If you want them to make better choices, help them expand their map of the world.
• Understand and respect others’ maps.
• You have to take responsibility for your communication and if you’re not getting the result you want, you need to change what you’re doing.
• You affect others without even speaking to them. Your state affects their state (yoghurt knows yoghurt).
• Building rapport is a natural process.
• When two people get on really well, they tend to match each other’s communication patterns at all levels, verbal and non-verbal.
• Matching means subtly and gradually adapting parts of your communication to that of the other person.
• When people communicate with you, they reveal how they are representing the world by the words that they use.
• Some of us prefer thinking in terms of visual images, others have a keen ear for sounds and words and some rely primarily on bodily sensations to make sense of the world. That doesn’t mean we are that ‘type’ of person, but it does allow us to know how a person is thinking in that particular context.
• When you match the representational system someone is using, it makes them feel as though they are in rapport with you. When you mismatch it, they don’t feel as good because they’re not hearing what resonates with them.
• When we map reality, we delete, generalize and distort the information we receive from our senses. Then, when we describe that map with words, either to others or to ourselves, we do it again: we delete, generalize and distort the map.
• The more you drill down and identify the specific issue, the easier it is to help someone find a solution.
• The more you question a belief using the Meta Model, the more likely you are to sow seeds of doubt in the belief. That creates room for a person to change their belief to a more useful or resourceful one.
• When you find yourself in a difficult situation, the problem generally doesn’t issue from the situation itself but from the way you think about it.
• Usually a person’s problem isn’t the most important problem. The biggest problem is that they spend so much time on it that if they do get rid of it, they just start filling their time up with new crap.
• In order to say no to something, your brain must first make an image of the thing you don’t want and then negate it. The problem is that at this point you’re already heading in the wrong direction.
• Disappointment requires adequate planning.
• If you begin to look at things as if they’re difficult, they will be; if you begin to study what makes things impossible, you’ll find out.
• People really need to learn to orient themselves towards a brighter future. And that begins by learning how to feel really good.
• The only time you ever lose is when you stop.
• If you are doing something and it’s not working, there’s got to be an easier way. And if what you’re doing isn’t working, you’ve got to do something else. And the first thing you’ve got to do is change your own internal state.
• You begin with your thoughts, then thoughts become actions, actions become habits, and habits become part of who you truly are.