I just found this post by Tom Hoobyar.
It’s very cool for a few reasons.
First, because it embeds NLP straight into another discipline, which, in my opinion, is the easiest way to learn and make sense of it.
In his case, he uses marketing. But you can use anything. Psychotherapy, sales, parenting, public speaking, etc.
Often times, I hear people say that “such and such is doing NLP.” That’s a mistake. Such and such is doing, persuasion, selling, hypnosis, leadership, whatever. NLP, as a discipline, adds precision and power to whatever field you’re working in.
As I said in a previous post, the word that sums NLP up is results.
For that reason, it’s always easier to learn and master NLP when you wrap a context around it. Similarly, it’s easier to consume sugar when you wrap a context around it. For example, it’s much more nutritious to eat an apple (that contains natural sugars) than to eat a spoonful of white sugar.
The second reason for which I really enjoyed Tom’s post has to do with elegance.
The NLP Presuppositions are a pain in the butt to memorize. Not that memorizing them is important. It’s just that having those principles on the tip of your brain at all times unleashes your creativity when it comes to solving a communication problem.
Tom did a nice job of carving the NLP Presuppositions into two categories:
- Focusing on your clients
- Focusing on you
In other words, according to Tom’s model, some NLP Presuppositions are more other-oriented and some are more self-oriented.
Creating categories, also known as “carving out the world”, enables to multiply the power of our mental maps. Now, when you’re able to create categories elegantly, you exponentially expand that power.
Tom’s categories lead me to believe that we could carve the NLP Presuppositions even further to achieve maximal elegance, that is, perhaps 3-4 groupings of 3-4 presuppositions each.
For a great example of elegant categories, look at Michael Hall’s Mindlines. He took the Sleight of Mouth model that Robert Dilts pioneered and re-organized it into simple framing categories that make it very easy to access each pattern in our memory.
Go ahead and check out Tom’s post. It’s a fantastic example of how you can accelerate learning and mastering NLP.
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