How I Think About NLP & Behavioural Change

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) is often described as a set of techniques for changing behaviour, improving communication, or changing the way we think. That's part of it, but I think that description misses the bigger idea that makes NLP interesting in the first place.

The way I think about NLP starts with something simple: we don't experience reality directly. We construct our own version of it.

There is far too much information around us at any given moment for us to consciously process all of it, so we filter. We notice some things and miss others. We interpret what we do notice through our previous experiences, beliefs, expectations, and whatever state we happen to be in at the time. Then we build an internal representation of what is happening through images, sounds, feelings, and language. That becomes our experience of reality.

NLP borrows Alfred Korzybski's phrase, the map is not the territory, to describe this. There is the world as it actually exists (the territory), and then there is the internal map we have built to navigate it. The two are never quite the same, and this is probably the most important idea in NLP for me

We construct our version of reality

NLP helps us understand how we construct our version of reality, how we might be unconsciously limiting ourselves, and how we can positively change our reality.

I don't mean that in the manifestation sense of deciding what you want reality to be and somehow making it so. If your business is running out of money, simply changing your internal representation of the bank balance will not put more money in the account.

But two people can face exactly the same situation and experience it differently. They can notice different things, give the situation a different meaning, ask themselves different questions, and see completely different options for what to do next.

Someone who believes they are bad at public speaking, for example, doesn't walk around thinking, I have developed a subjective model in which I perceive myself as a poor public speaker. They just think they're bad at public speaking.

Before a presentation, they might imagine themselves forgetting what they want to say, picture everyone watching them, hear themselves stumbling over their words, and feel the tension that comes with all of that. Then, while they're speaking, they notice the person looking at their phone rather than the ten people paying attention. They become hyperaware of every pause or awkward sentence, and afterwards those are the moments they remember.

So they walk away with more evidence that they are bad at public speaking. They haven't consciously decided to distort what happened. Their mind is filtering an enormous amount of information through a map that already says, I'm bad at this.

The map starts shaping what they can see in the territory.

Language is part of the map

Language is one of the main ways we construct and maintain these maps because the words we use can make something that is an interpretation sound like a fact.

Take a simple statement like:

"I can't say no to people."

It feels definitive. But what does can't actually mean?

Obviously the person is physically capable of saying no. What they might mean is that when they imagine saying no, they expect the other person to be disappointed. Maybe disappointing someone feels like being selfish. Maybe they learned a long time ago that keeping other people happy was the safest way to maintain a relationship.

There could be a lot sitting underneath those five words, but all of that complexity has been compressed into I can't say no to people. Once you describe something that way, there isn't much room left.

The same thing happens with language like I always do this, I have to, that's just who I am, she makes me feel like this, or people don't respect me. One of the things I like about NLP is that it teaches you to slow down around statements like these and get curious about what they mean, which is what the Meta Model is designed to do.

Always?

Have to, or what happens?

She does what specifically, and then you feel what?

Which people?

The questions help uncover what has been left out, assumed or generalised in the process of turning a complicated experience into a simple statement about reality. Sometimes just putting that information back changes the problem.

"I can't say no to people" is a closed reality.

"I find it difficult to say no to certain people because I worry they'll think I'm selfish" is still a problem, but it's a different one.

There are things you can work with in the second version that didn't exist in the first.

We also construct experience through our senses

When we think about something, particularly something emotionally important, we tend to represent it internally through some combination of pictures, sounds, physical sensations, smells, tastes and internal dialogue. NLP calls these representational systems.

If I ask you to think about a difficult conversation you need to have next week, something probably happens internally. Maybe you see the person's face. Maybe you hear what you think they're going to say. Maybe you rehearse what you're going to say back. Maybe you immediately feel something in your stomach.

If you've already had the conversation twenty times in your head and every version ends badly, your body can start responding to an event that hasn't even happened yet.

You can be lying completely safely in bed at midnight while having a very real physical response to a meeting that exists only in your imagination.

The meeting is real. The problem might be real. But the meeting happening in your head at midnight isn't.

What exactly are you imagining? What are you saying to yourself? What are you paying attention to? What are you leaving out? What happens in your body as you do all of this?

You can't make every difficult situation disappear by imagining it differently. How we represent something changes our experience of it, and our experience influences the state we're in when we respond.

Behaviour is part of a much bigger system

A lot of self-improvement focuses on the behaviour itself. Stop procrastinating, exercise more, set boundaries, be more confident, use your phone less, speak up in meetings.

And sometimes that's exactly where you should start. There are plenty of situations where the answer really is to stop thinking about it and do the thing. But I'm much more interested in the situations where someone already knows what they should do and still doesn't do it, or manages to change for a while before eventually finding themselves back in the same pattern.

Someone has an important piece of work to do and keeps avoiding it. From the outside, you could call that a discipline problem.

But perhaps every time they think about the work, they immediately imagine it being judged. They tell themselves it needs to be exceptional. They think about what it would mean if it isn't. That creates pressure, and doing something else gives them temporary relief from that pressure.

So they procrastinate. Then they judge themselves for procrastinating, which adds another layer of pressure the next time they try to start.

At that point, telling them to improve their time management may be technically correct while also being almost useless. The procrastination is the behaviour we can see, but it's sitting at the end of everything that happened before it.

This is one of the ideas from NLP that has stayed with me most. Life and mind aren't collections of isolated problems. They are interacting systems. How you perceive something changes how you think about it. How you think about it affects your body. The state you're in affects the choices that seem available to you, and the choices you make give you new experiences that can reinforce the way you saw things in the first place.

These loops can run for years without us being conscious of them, and what looks from the outside like a lack of discipline or motivation can make complete sense once you understand the system producing it.

None of us are outside this

We all build maps from experience, and we all carry forward conclusions that were formed in moments when we had less context, less perspective and often much less choice than we do now. A lot of the patterns we later describe as people pleasing, perfectionism, avoidance, fear of rejection, difficulty trusting people, needing to prove ourselves or always needing to be in control can begin in surprisingly ordinary experiences.

There doesn't always have to be some enormous traumatic event behind the patterns we struggle with as adults. Sometimes it was something ordinary that happened at the wrong time, happened often enough, or simply meant something to us that the adults around us never realised.

As children, we don't have the perspective we have now. We don't think, Dad is under enormous pressure at work and his emotional unavailability probably has very little to do with me. We are much more likely to make it about ourselves, and when similar experiences happen repeatedly, conclusions start to form.

I have to earn love.

I can't rely on people.

If I make a mistake, I'll be rejected.

My needs create problems.

I need to stay in control.

Those conclusions can make complete sense in the context in which they were formed. Some of them may even have been useful at the time. The problem is that we can keep living by them long after the circumstances that created them have disappeared.

We all have maps. We all made assumptions before we had the full picture. We all learned things about ourselves and other people from a relatively small sample of experiences.

What I like about NLP is that it helps us understand how simple, often unremarkable experiences can end up shaping huge parts of our lives. A conclusion we reached as a child can quietly become a rule we live by for decades, influencing the relationships we choose, what we believe we're capable of, how we respond to conflict, what we tolerate, and even what we allow ourselves to want.

Once you start seeing behaviour this way, some of the patterns that have followed you around for years begin to make a lot more sense.

Changing the map

For me, this is where NLP becomes useful rather than merely interesting. If we have constructed parts of our map through experience, language, beliefs and the way we internally represent things, then some of that map can also be changed.

There are limits to this. You can't reframe your way out of every problem. Sometimes your job really is terrible. Sometimes the relationship really isn't working. Sometimes you're anxious because you're about to do something genuinely difficult. Sometimes the thing you are avoiding actually needs to be done.

What we can do is get better at separating what is happening from everything we have added to it.

What happened?

What did I make it mean?

What am I assuming?

What am I predicting?

What have I decided this says about me?

Sometimes the answer is that your map is reasonably accurate and you simply need to deal with what's in front of you. But sometimes you realise you've been navigating your adult life according to a conclusion you reached at fourteen, treating one person's opinion as though it were an objective fact, assuming that because something happened three times it will happen every time, or rehearsing an imagined future so convincingly that your body has started responding as though it has already happened.

And once you can see that, you have more places to work.

This is how I think about flow

This is also the foundation of Flow by Design. When I talk about flow, I don't mean being in some permanent peak state where everything feels easy. I think of it much more simply as having less unnecessary friction inside yourself.

If one part of you wants something while another part believes getting it isn't safe, you have friction.

If you consciously want to build a bigger business but some part of your identity associates visibility with judgement, you have friction.

If you want a close relationship but have spent years learning that closeness eventually leads to being hurt, you have friction.

You can still push through those things. People do it all the time. But it takes energy.

What interests me is what happens when you understand where that friction is coming from and begin working with it rather than continually trying to overpower it.

Sometimes the change is behavioural. Sometimes you need to change your environment. Sometimes you need to learn a skill you don't have yet. And sometimes the thing getting in your way is an old map of yourself or the world that you haven't questioned for a long time.

For me, NLP is one way of making that map visible.

The goal isn't to create a perfectly positive map or to endlessly work on yourself until you have removed every insecurity, fear or contradiction. It's to have a richer and more accurate map, with fewer old assumptions being mistaken for reality.

Because the more of the territory you can see, the more choice you have in how you move through it.