Stuff happens right? Life Happens. Moment by moment we are experiencing and reacting to everything that is happening to us, everything we see, hear, touch or feel, taste and smell. We experience “Events”. An event can be anything from: winning the lottery, experiencing a first kiss, having lunch in the park with some friends or even something simple like waking up in the morning and going to work.
Each second of each day our mind is filtering millions of bits of information from the events we are experiencing. Let’s look at an event like being in the park. Being at the park contains a lot of details, the tree next to the swing set, the other the swing set, the next the temperature, the humidity, the smell of the grass, color of the grass, the bee hive in the tree by the picnic table, what is being said around you, the 3 birds in the sky over there, the wind blowing in your hair…..what you are wearing, how your clothes feel against your skin, the smell of the fresh watermelon. There are so many details happening all around us. Details of everything we see, hear, feel, smell and taste.
Because there are more details happening all around us than our mind can keep track of, our mind starts a process of filtering the information down to a more manageable chunk of data. Each person has a different way of processing information however we all have the same basic set of filters for deleting, distorting and generalizing information. We filter this information through our past experiences, our beliefs and values, our attitudes, memories, decisions, meta programs and time/space, matter and energy. Deleting, Distorting and Generalizing will be covered in another article.
Once our mind filters the information that is streaming in through our 5 senses we create an Internal Representation, an overall sensation of what we are experiencing which creates our emotional state and our body physiology. Behavior is the end result of this filtering process.
There is significant amounts of detail that are being deleted every second of the day. We have a filter that deletes, distorts and generalizes the information down to a bucket of information; a lot of information is missing.
This is the reason 2 people can have the exact same experience at the exact same time and have a completely different experience from it. They are filtering the information, processing the information differently.
What if you don’t like the behavior? What if you want to learn how to interrupt this process to create different behavior, different results? Do you have a habit that you would like to let go of? What if you want something different? Welcome to the wonderful world of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP). NLP offers us a set of tools to interrupt this process to create more desirable results in life.
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