At its heart, and despite its complicated name, neurolinguistic programming is made up of simple ideas and practices. It wasn’t developed to fit a theoretical model or to gain status in an academic world. Instead, it was designed to allow ordinary people to learn and change more effectively.
Some of the ability to make change depends on being able to understand other people. The process is simple but not easy:
- Observe the other’s behaviour closely and without judgement
- Use your observations to form an interpretation of the behaviour
- Find a way to verify your interpretation
It’s clear, direct, and effective. Except that many people are tempted to cheat the process. They don’t observe enough detail before making an interpretation, and they don’t verify their understanding. In other words, they observe only enough to jump to a conclusion, and then they act as if that conclusion were true.
Our brains are good at jumping to conclusions: it’s more energy-efficient than paying attention to details and it quite often leads to a good-enough interpretation. Brains recognize patterns more quickly than we can recognize them consciously, and immediately produce a feeling or idea to represent the pattern they recognize.
But when we encounter someone new or when we find ourselves in new territory, our “close enough” patterns are often not close enough. We need to hold off judgment until we have paid attention to more details than seem necessary and wait longer than feels necessary before interpreting what we have noticed. That takes both practice and discipline.
