We set long term goals for self development, in the style of winners. And moved on –from the last week’s article – to look around the world we live in. 

Moving away from dreams – where discovered your goals – you are now looking at the present; this looking at the present awakens you to the question: “If I wanted to reach there, what am I doing here? Let me get going…” And, that is motivation!

Thus, contrasting the present with the desired future creates a tension: you want to move forward to your dream land, fast.

Mind, you are not operating in the world, directly! 

Awakening to the present reality from your dream has an added advantage: you can choose better the road you would like to take: make informed choices about what you should be doing to achieve goals. 

Its is here that NLP gives you a very valuable insight when it says, even when you explore your options to move forward, remember, you operate in your mind only!

We operate not on the world directly, but on our mental maps about the world. And the map is not the world!

That is, look for options in the mind first! If you find cornered without choices to act upon, go ahead and create more options in your mind.

And, you create options by perceiving what abundant options are available in the world before you! You only need to look sharp, and, ask yourself: If this person can, why not I? That helps to overcome our habit of deleting information.

But, just by removing ‘deletions’ – by becoming aware – can we automatically include more options into life? Just because you see there are others ways of behaving, can you automatically choose between available choices? 

Perhaps not!

Obstacles to Expand Mental Maps

There are many ways to live in this world. We may even be very much aware of them. Yet, we feel unable to adapt some of the different ways of others, even in our wildest dreams!

A life-long vegetarian cannot take to non-vegetarian food just by becoming aware of others who eat non-vegetarian food. The awareness of newer options does not make them desirable. Something is revolting from inside – rejecting the idea from entering the mental map!

Similarly, with the non-vegetarians. They only eat what they are accustomed to! Even if they know others enjoy eating different animals or birds, they don’t try: typically, a goat eater may not like to eat a dog – even if they see people eating them! 

The rejecting of other kinds of meat does not stop with the rejected variety of meat: the rejection could spills over on to those who eat the meat that they reject!

Typically, in India, many who eat chicken may consider beef eaters lower than them, just because they eat beef – and even consider them ‘untouchable’! 

Thus, we don’t create choices in behaviour just by being aware of the behaviour of others. Or, by an awareness of available choices out in the world: 

1. Being aware that there those who don’t smoke does not inspire smokers to quit.
2. Being aware of others who score high marks doesn’t give one the ability to score high!

The problem is twofold: 

1. We are ‘addicted’ to ‘our’ ways of behaving. Our addictions make it impossible to choose anything new. And, even when we want something different, 
2. We don’t know how to giving up the old ways and adapt the new 

Learnt Addictions – Our Ways 

An addiction is an inability to choose, even when there are choices available. One would expect that, being rational, one could choose the good over the bad; the life-enabling over the life destroying. Yet, we humans don’t seem to be capable of using our brains to make intelligent choices.

That is because, to make informed choices, we need to process information first. And much of information that is already fed into our brain is corrupt! They are biased towards favouring one against another… And we lose our rationality!

Note that there is no reason why someone who eats chicken will consider a beef eater low! Yet, such division between people based on what one eats is not all that rare; often racial prejudices are based on eating habits of people! 

Our Maps are not Neutral

The information that fill our mental maps are not neutral. They are (emotionally) charged or tilted towards what one prefers.

In the mind map about the world, there are only two directions – not the usual four, found in world maps: One is marked ‘towards’ – the direction you are expected to take at each step; and the other ‘against’ – a direction that you are expected to avoid. 

The general principle of life appears to be: “Don’t ask why not go ‘against’ what is told. That is the way your culture wants you to move. You stick to what is told. That is the way people around you behave. You learn to oblige your near ones, or get ostracised.”

Thus, using the information inside our heads, it is almost impossible to make cool decisions! The raw data is already biased, even as it was entered into the brain.

You are told: “We are ‘pure’ vegetarians,” even when you are a baby. And it is obviously revolting to think of taking up the ways of the impure.

The chicken eater teaches her child, “We are not like those ‘unclean’ people who eat beef or pork or snake or…” That seals the child’s options!

We teach young children not only their eating habits. We teach them many more things: The dress code; the language; the religion and belief systems… And one could be struck – Unable to experiment with any other way that goes ‘against’ what it learnt. 

Thus, the problem often is not in the world, but in our mental maps! And the world is larger than the map. 

And we all need to learn to deal with the map: to delete what has been written in the map wrongly; to include options that are missing there; and even change the directions set inside: ‘against’ as ‘towards’ and ‘towards’ as ‘against’.

For now, let us be content to know that this confusion in the mental map is called in NLP as ‘distortions’ in the map.