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We create and carry in our mind a mental map of the world to guide our behaviour. This map is ‘the area’ of our operation – our life! If a detail or a possibility or a way does not exist in the map, we behave as if that detail or possibility of the way does not exist in the world also!
Obviously the most impoverishing factor of human life is one’s own mental map! Often, you can achieve a lot in life just by challenging your map, and by refusing to believe that the limits you see in the map are real.
Just consider the situation of the many who commit suicide: They think there is no way left for them to proceed; As if, they reached the end of the earth and the only option they had was to jump off from the earth!
Surely, there are many others who faced much tougher times and still faired well in life. Such people saw options, even when faced with difficulty.
The Habit of Generalising
As we said, we need maps to make sense of the complex world. In the process of making maps, we saw how we
delete and distort facts.
Today, we see how we need to ‘generalise’ information and how it could also create problems!
If you were draw a map of your village or colony on a piece of paper, you will realize how automatically you start generalising a lot of information.
For instance, you may draw squares to indicate ‘houses’ or ‘buildings’. Not every house is square in shape. Similarly, you may mark a triangle shaped like a Christmas tree to indicate any tree in the area, though different trees vary in shape, size and colour.
You may gather such ‘symbols’ used in the map, in a corner, and list them as ‘legend’. A legend is a myth. Not true. So are the symbols you use. They are not quite true. They are only lines, squares, rectangles, cones or cubes that you drew. But, you
give meaning to them when you say this symbol is equal to, using a ‘ = ’ sign.
Symbols can be understood only under the assumption that all houses can be represented by a square; or all trees by a triangle! That is the legend we carry in head.
If we did not have this ability to generalize, we will need maps to accurately depict the area they represented. That way, you will end up creating replicas of reality, and not simple maps. That will be a waste of energy.
Similarly, we will waste a lot of energy and wellbeing if we needed to learn each time a fresh, without generalising our lessons from limited experiments: Burning your finger in fire once should be sufficient to know that fire everywhere and always burns!
Human language is possible only by generalising your experience.
In my training, I ask trainees to draw what they understand by the word ‘chair’. Then they go around to find if someone else in the group had drawn a similar picture. Hardly ever two people have similar pictures. Even if two agree on shape, each had thought of a different material, size or colour.
But, we cannot have a different word for each and every single chair in the world to ‘accurately’ describe what we mean. We generally understand what we mean by chair – whatever that means: a plastic chair; a chair with one leg or four legs…!
As we use language, we are unconsciously habituated to ‘generalising’ our experience: we use same name for different and varying objects/people! Or, we reach conclusion from one experience that may not be true in a different context. That is where we could go off from reality!
Generalising is Another Limiting Behaviour
Richard Bandler and John Grinder – the founders of NLP – give the example of how a child that fell off from a rocking chair might conclude that all rocking chairs are dangerous and avoid them. And another child with a similar experience might conclude all chairs are dangerous, and avoid all chairs, and so on.
Many times, we tend to think we cannot because we failed earlier once. One failure or even many failures need not necessarily be a pointer that one would fail again. Think of the number of times you fell down trying to learn walking or cycling?
We need to constantly check our ‘beliefs’ and ‘phobias’ in life: How correct am I in my coming to such a conclusion? Are there not others who are succeeding? Can I learn their ways, so that I will succeed like them?
NLP advices that to succeed you better assume that you could achieve what any other human has achieved. You only need to know how specifically the other who achieved. If you know the way, you can also reach that destination. There is no need to despair. You stop making conclusions that proceed from your past failures.
Typically, a person who failed in love concludes “Never again shall I trust any other man/woman.” – A classical case of generalising from one to every other person in the world. And the world is not made of only the one man or woman you loved. There are hopefully many more loveable people around, if you are ready to let go off your generalising habit.
Those who get stuck with such generalisation don’t see other possibilities; and, typically, feel they have reached the end of the earth.
Remember, particularly when you feel you have reached the end of your world, you may be a victim of your own ‘generalising’! Wake up. Challenge yourself. Ask: Are there not others who did extraordinarily better after meeting similar set backs?
Decide to challenge all your ‘fatalistic’ feelings like: I can’t reduce weight; I can’t make a good presentation before others; I can’t make a good speech; I can’t do this or that… You may be a victim of your generalizing habit! Challenge yourself. Look around for others who lost weight; others who make better presentations; better speeches; … And you will have any number of ‘ways’ opening before you.
Better still, you may look around and find how YOU succeeded earlier: extend that success to present situation,
too.
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