Neuroscientists refer to the mind as the most powerful computer on Earth. It has over 10 billion neurons and is capable of making more connections than all the telephone systems in the entire world, yet your mind, like all minds, has its limitations.
It must have limitations because, just as a telephone system would overload if everyone placed a call at the same time, you would eventually blow a fuse or have a mental breakdown if you attempted to take in everything that is going on in your world. Just try listening to two people talking at the same time and you will realise how easily such an overload could happen. We have already explained how we deal with this – through a process of generalising, distorting and deleting – in order to make our information processing more compact and manageable. As we do this we go through three fundamental steps:
By now you know that your beliefs and values influence this process. What you believe to be right, proper, sensible, appropriate and allowable occurs as a necessary part of filtering information and putting it into a structure to help you make day-to-day decisions. You create a set of decision-making rules and, for many people, the more experience they have, the bigger their list of rules. By the time some people have reached 40 years of age, their lists of rules allow little possibility for new experiences. This is like locking yourself up in jail in order to limit your freedom, which is the cause of many a teenager’s angst. While the body is not physically restricted, the mind is shackled as a result of all the self-imposed rules collected over time, and the body suffers as a result.
Nina wouldn’t allow herself to do any of the things that she really wanted to, such as take a flight in an aeroplane and visit another country. Even though she talked endlessly about wanting to do so, she would always add at the end of her sentence, ‘I’m too nervous to fly, though, and other countries are not very safe these days.’
Rules should allow you to make smart choices, not limit your potential and restrict your freedom.
What you accept from society as a result of your daily experiences, together with media influences, will build on this rule structure. Add to this your views on life, ageing, health, diet, education, travel, employment, family, individuality, youth culture, politics, religion and technology and you can see how the structure gets more complex, with even more rules. The tendency then is to avoid overload by further generalisation, deletion and distortion. We are brought up and educated to have a view on things, to be a person with opinions because opinions shape the world, but opinions can also limit our progress, learning and ability to adapt and change.
Lesley runs a family hotel business that is struggling to attract new guests. Her bank manager tried to help her by offering ideas on how to improve the customer experience. His intentions were positive, but Lesley was having none of it. She accused her banker of having no experience relevant to customer service and so he was not in a position to help. Lesley felt threatened by him and became defensive, quoting all the things she believed had to happen in order for the hotel to work – rules that she had created about what could and couldn’t happen in the hotel and what was and wasn’t possible. The consequence of her ‘working to rule’ had a negative impact on customer service, but she wasn’t going to change.
Lesley, who had rarely travelled outside her home town of Blackpool, had allowed her rules to take over. She had missed an ideal opportunity to draw on the 10 years’ experience the bank manager had of travelling the world, staying in a variety of quality hotels and being on the receiving end of varying levels of customer service.
All your rules combine to create a map, like a route map, you use every day to make decisions that shape your future and determine your direction in life. The question to ask is, ‘How rich is your route map?’ When you look at your map can you see the limitations you have set for yourself in the following three key relationship areas?
Think about these three sets of relationships for a while, one at a time. Reflect on the rules you have created that perhaps allow only a certain type of relationship to form and deny other possible forms of relationship.
Now let’s take a few life categories and consider the rules you have created within each of them that form either a rich or poor route map. While going through the list that follows, remember you need rules in order to exist from day to day, but there are rules that limit your potential and rules that keep you open to the world of possibility. There is a big difference between the two examples of rules that follow. Imagine what each person might allow and deny themselves as a result of their rule.
Imagine having both rules. Why not? You can have any rules you want. You don’t have to stick with the ones you have now.
Go through the following lists, taking one question at a time and considering each in terms of a rule. The objective is to challenge your existing rules and know that you can have any rules you want.
– qualifications
– experience
– right attitude
– good communication and team-working ability.
– mathematical ability
– an appreciation of art and being artistic?
How did it go? Did some questions cause you to think more deeply than others? Which ones were the easiest to answer? The easiest ones will be those for which you already have a rule. Where you had to think more, you probably have no hard rule or your answer would depend on other circumstances not offered in the question.
Tom, a highly educated chemical engineer, was being mentored by his CEO who saw potential for a top management role. Unfortunately, he was becoming increasingly unpopular amongst the senior team as a result of him pushing his ideas onto them. They responded by cutting him out of the communication on important projects. This caused Tom a high degree of frustration. During a coaching session he realised that he was operating out of a rule that ‘people should do what’s obviously the right thing and not get drawn into politics’. The flaw here is clearly that his rule is not helping, and when frustration sets in he has no alternative strategy. The way out of this self-generated predicament (my rule for others is working against me) came by changing the rule about what other people ‘should’ and ‘shouldn’t’ do. Any rule that is created for the benefit of others needs to be shared with those other people so they can have a say in defining it. In this case, as in so many, the rule only existed in Tom’s head so no one even knew he was using it to assess their behaviour.
So, rules can be limiting or liberating. They can also be hard or soft and for the self or others. Generally, the harder the rule, the more limiting it will be. Softness allows rules to be updated, discarded or changed, depending on your experience. When you have rules for others who don’t share your rules, prepare for a stressful time.
If this section has challenged you to scrutinise your rules and check which ones may not be in your best interest, then that was our purpose. Remember also that, once a set of rules is established, your unconscious mind takes over in applying them. You may not even be aware that others are judging your rules and forming opinions about you and the limitations you place on yourself. It makes sense, then, to give your route map a spring clean now and again.
The world offers a multitude of experiences and is constantly changing. People, technology and the environment never stand still for a moment. One day you may believe that you have everything worked out and the next it has changed again. It’s not just technology that is changing either – people are changing the way they think. In the last 15 years, there has been a boom in personal development, coaching and self-help. Such rapid growth has been in response to people knowing that there is more out there, more to know, more to do, more to get involved with and, above all, more potential to fulfil.
Remember the kaleidoscope? It shows exactly the same pattern each time if left unturned, yet it has the potential to show thousands of variations with just the slightest twist. Take control of your kaleidoscope and create patterns that serve you well. After all, reality is what you shape it to be or, more accurately, your reality is what you shape it to be.
The next chapter gives you some of the central rules or beliefs on which NLP is based. We like to think of them more as guides than beliefs, helping us to understand any interaction more intelligently than we might if we were to be judging our experience from a set of hard and fast rules.
The next time you catch yourself starting to do something as a result of feeling or thinking any of the following:
and you would prefer not to, ask yourself these questions:
In this chapter you have learned that: