Magic Valley NLP

NLP Presupposition:  The Map is not the Territory

Events are real, however names have been changed. 

In NLP we adopt a set of suppositions for the way we view the world.   One of those suppositions is “The map is not the territory.”  This supposition is a way of saying that each of us has a different view of the world.  No one sees the world in exactly the same way.  We want to accept this divergent view in our students, accept them as they are.  We understand that they each have a different map, and to them their map is the world.

I have a student in my class. Let’s call him Dirk for today. Dirk comes in each morning.  He tosses his backpack carelessly across his desk and throws himself on his chair, sinking down until his head rests on his desk.  He carries the entire weight of the day on his shoulders already.  He immediately starts in with, “I hate school. It is so boring.”

          I started noticing that each morning people immediately begin to cajole him into a new view point.  “Oh, come on, Dirk, it isn’t that bad. Look at the bright side.”  On and on it goes, but Dirk still sees only the dark side and revels in the attention.

“What if we accept his map of the world,” I queried to the other adults in the room.  We changed our way of reacting.  “School does seem to be boring to you,”  we agreed. 

He looked up in surprise.  “It’s stupid. School is really stupid.”

Again we agreed that he saw it as stupid.  We accepted his map, but we didn’t make it our map, only accepted his map.  An interesting thing happened.  In just a couple of days we no longer heard about how stupid and boring school was.  He started walking in with a lighter step. He felt accepted and was then able to set down his dreary map of school and begin to look at other maps instead of resisting our futile attempts to make him see things in a new light.  Maybe other maps were more interesting. 

We learned that by accepting we did not provide the child with something to rebel against.  Feeling accepted he was then able to begin exploration of other viewpoints.  He could begin to accept that there might be other maps of the territory. 

It was interesting new way to look at his world.

© Debrah Roundy 2008