Through the pioneering work in NLP, we began to understand that maps are infinitely changeable. Change your map, change your reality. Change your map, change your experience of life. Change your map, and how you understand and relate to yourself, to others, and to your involvements in life can all change. Where there was limitation, there can be new choice and new opportunity. Anywhere! Whatever you are doing! Whomever you are with! Whatever the context!
Take a moment now to think of an aspect of your life that is presently not how you would like it to be. What stops you from having the experience you want is what is or isn’t on your map. As your own mapmaker, you can move or remove what is outdated or inaccurate and that no longer serves you. You can add and rearrange in new ways to provide the opening for exciting new choices and fulfilling new experiences.
Maps of Reality
Through our neuro-linguistic programming process, we each create our own unique internal map of reality.
We each go through life operating from a self-created, internal map that represents our understanding of what is real. Actually, this map is much like a “Thomas Bros.” book of maps with individual maps for the different areas of our lives, the pages of which are all interconnected and interrelated. It has often been observed that, “the map is not the territory.” The map merely describes the territory, yet we operate in life as if the map were reality itself.
As human beings, we cannot NOT operate from an internal map of reality. Our ability to generate and operate from internal maps of reality is part of what makes humans so wonderfully complex and fascinating. Maps are different from person to person, even when life experiences and circumstances appear, to the casual observer, to be nearly identical. Like physical maps, our internal maps are only as accurate as we can make them at the time and, unfortunately, they are often not updated. Therein lies the problem. Inaccurate and outdated though our maps may be, we live our lives as though our maps were our reality!
Our inner maps of reality comprise nearly all of what we deal with as human beings. The structure and content of these maps determine what is real and unreal, achievable and unachievable, believable and unbelievable—uniquely for each of us. In this way, our maps determine the choices and responses each of us is able to make in life.
NLP – The Study of Human Excellence
Neuro-Linguistic Programming has its origin in speculative wondering: “How is it that people with amazingly similar backgrounds can be so different in their ability to generate meaningful and fulfilling life experience for themselves and for others?”
That wondering led to two questions: “Is it possible to identify the differences that make the difference between excellence and the lack of it?” and “If so, can we make these differences teachable and learnable to enhance life experience for everyone?”
The Structure of Experience
Three decades ago, the originators of NLP answered both questions with a resounding “Yes!”
NLP provides us with the ability to gain access to human experience at the structural or process level—the level of our inner reality maps. At the structural level, our experience is made up of endless combinations of internal pictures, sounds, feelings, tastes, and smells—many, if not most, of them outside of our conscious awareness. It is through its ability to rearrange these combinations that NLP has the ability to so profoundly change experience—personally and interpersonally.
Study of the structure of experience led Bandler and Grinder to notice external signals and cues that were the keys to understanding the “how” of certain kinds of thought processes and behavior. They were able to assemble this understanding into a system that allowed its user to know how another human being creates his or her experience—how they organize and maintain their unique internal maps of reality that correspond to and organize their experience of the external world.
Understanding our own maps of reality empowers us to make changes that lead to the life experiences we want.
Understanding and having access to another’s map of reality makes it much easier to step off our own map and respectfully step onto the other’s. When this happens, the other person most often experiences it as a precious gift. They often comment, “Finally, someone understands me!” As a result, connection, interaction, cooperation, and accomplishment of desired results are all enhanced.
To experience what is meant by “structure of experience”, see Exercises.