“Everyone is doing the best they can at the time with the resources they have available to them”
There is no blame or finger-pointing in NLP. There is no judgment on anything that a patient says to me. This is because the problem that a person came to me about will soon be a thing of the past, and these things will change. We just talk about what is happening now with a view to making positive changes for the future. I believe very strongly that we all do the best we can at any given time with the resources we have.
Learn from the Past and Move On
It is really easy to think back over the past and beat yourself up over something you wish you had done differently. It is very easy to see with hindsight how something could have been done differently. If we’d known at the time to do something different then we would have behaved differently. But that’s the thing about hindsight – it’s after the fact. Rather than beat ourselves up over something we did, (which doesn’t really get us anywhere, other than feeling awful) we can learn from what happened and move on.
If that thing hadn’t happened to you that made you learn that thing, you would never have learned it, would you?!
Why did that thing happen?
And what’s more, when it comes to resources, situations that we were unhappy with could have happened because we didn’t have enough:
• Patience
• Empathy
• Understanding
Or they can happen because we were tied into past:
• Anxiety
• Anger
• Fear
to name a few examples. And in NLP you can find these tools.
So Where Does NLP Come In?
So NLP is not about blame or pointing the finger, it is about asking questions like:
• What is happening that you wish wasn’t?
• What are you not doing that you wish you were doing?
• What is it that you can’t let go of and move on?
What Next?
And then finding out what resources a person needs to make those changes. When you have more resources, you have more tools. And this gives you more choice – you have options about how you can behave rather than just doing the same (unwanted) thing all the time. And this is what NLP is all about – giving you the choice in your behaviour and your life so that you can be happier, more content and more fulfilled.
