Last night, I bought some dragon fruit at my local supermarket.
This is very exciting, because it’s the first time I encounter dragon fruit here. I tasted them over ten years ago in Viet Nam and got hooked. It became, along with the persimmon, my favorite fruit.
The reason I enjoyed it so much was because of its delicate citric, sweet taste. You can feel its cleansing effect the instant it hits your tongue and it’s lightly sweet, making it very palatable. Yet, it doesn’t present the strong sugar charge that other citric fruit like oranges offer.
This morning, after waking up, I delightfully split open my dragon fruit.
Very exciting!
Another suprise!
The dragon fruit I got accustomed to eating in Viet Nam were white. The dragon fruit I was holding was purple. I knew of at least two species of dragon fruit but had never encountered the purple kind before.
Curiosity took hold of me as I sank my little spoon into the delicate flesh of the fruit. Purple juice started emanating from it, reminding me of beet juice.
I brought it to my mouth, in great expectation of re-living the pleasure I felt over ten years ago.
But I was disappointed.
The fruit was tasteless.
But here comes the interesting part. Unfortunately, my NLP teacher mind was out to lunch and I offered some to my two kids. My daughter is almost 4 and my son just turned 2.
Big mistake.
Why (and this is where we actually get to talk about NLP)?
Because the instant the fruit hit their taste buds, my children created a taste-reference for dragon fruit.
And they now have a reference that dragon fruit doesn’t taste very good. Doesn’t taste bad either. To them, it’s just this bland, weird looking thing.
Compare that to my reference, the one I shared with you at the beginning of this post.
My experience makes me long for dragon fruit, leads me to desire it, makes me excited when I see one, because my first impression of dragon fruit shines in my memory every time I pause to think of it.
And this leads us to the importance of reference experiences and how they shape our day-to-day.
Tony Robbins, in his seminars and audio programs, discusses the importance of evaluations and how they determine the meaning we assign to our experiences. In a nutshell, we evaluate by comparing and constrasting our ongoing experience with our references. Of course, this happens mostly outside of our awareness, unless we choose to focus specifically on this.
You can be certain you do this with regard to everything in your life — so does everyone else. Whenever you’re going to buy a sandwich, you compare and contrast the price of the sandwich in front of you to prices of other sandwiches or stores where you’ve made purchases before. A “shortcut” way of describing this process is to say you’re evaluating. Your previous experiences in buying sandwiches serve as references in the process.
In NLP, we generally refer to the first reference as an imprint. It serves as the primal reference. As you progress in learning NLP and then mastering it, you’ll come across change patterns such as the Re-emprinting Method, The Generative Emprint and the Change of History Pattern. These particular patterns target our references with the intent of recreating them or at least wipe out their disempowering characteristics.
Life would have been different for my children had I offered them a first experience with dragon fruit that stunned their taste buds, leaving them with a reference that made them look forward to another serving.
Creating empowering references for fruit
This example certainly brings up the importance, in the context of teaching outstanding nutritional habits to our children, of choosing and engineering empowering references for fruits and vegetables.
McDonald’s certainly does a fantastic job for hamburgers.
