What is Neuro-Linguistic Programming?

What is NLP ?
Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) is a psychological approach that involves analyzing strategies used by successful individuals and applying them to reach a personal goal. It relates thoughts, language, and patterns of behavior learned through experience to specific outcomes.
In this series I will talk about the thought provoking and life changing presuppositions of NLP which are helpful in changing and redefining our thought pattern and developing a more practical approach to looking into a situation.

What is NLP PRESUPPOSITIONS

NLP presuppositions are an unbiased and compelling set of beliefs that one can incorporate into their lives, either personally or as an NLP professional helping a client. NLP presuppositions give form to the underlying beliefs and attitudes that competent NLP practitioners work and commonly live their lives by.
Today let us understand one of the most influential NLP presuppositions :

CHOICE IS BETTER THAN NO CHOICE

We always have choices.
We just need to create them.
The human imagination creates choices by lateral thinking – reframing and changing perspectives.

The choices we make are up to us. Every morning we can choose to have a good day or a bad day. We can complain or count our blessings.
We are the choices we make.

Have you ever felt stuck because you felt you didn’t have a choice about something? Or perhaps stuck because the choice you have are both unsatisfactory?
Every day we are faced with choices. So many choices in fact that it would be virtually impossible to list them all. What to wear, what to eat, what to do…. they are the minor decisions.

Whatever the situation we always have options available to us and sometimes we are simply stuck because we haven’t yet considered other alternatives.

This is because the more choices I am aware of, the more informed my final decision would be.
In other words, to create change in a person’s behaviour we don’t have to take away a choice or a behaviour but we have to help the person become aware of more choices. Choices that will help him get the expected result more effectively.

This one can be so easily summed up as “not having choice = dead”.
The fact is – there is ALWAYS choice. And yet so often we say “we have no choice”.

Viktor Frankl’s book: “Man’s Search for Meaning”, is one of the most profound works on the idea of choice, and his quotes here are equally meaningful:

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.