The map is not the territory, and these are great news for you!

Today I am going to tell you about one of the most powerful concepts I learned in NLP: The map is not the territory.

What do I mean by this?

Your mind cannot absorb all the information that is around you. It just can’t.
What you do is form models of the world, maps that represent reality through your beliefs.
These are learnings that you develop from the moment you arrive on this planet and that you continue to develop throughout your life.

When you are young, the first source of learning is usually your family or caregivers. In those moments you are super influential because you came into the world almost like a blank paper and you were a sponge to absorb knowledge.

You kept growing you got influenced not only by your family but also by your teachers, friends, the news, movies, your idols…

And also by your own experiences. Besides everything you learn from other poeple you also had experiences to which you gave meaning.

Your mind is a meaning making machine. You need to give a meaning to the experiences you live, even if many times this meaning is not the most useful for you. 

Maybe when you were a child, a school teacher called you infront of the whole classroom to speak in public, you got nervous and the meaning you gave to that was «I am not good at public speaking». You didn’t question it and continued living with this believe.

The positive intention of those believes is that they serve us to understand the worlds that surrounds us and to derive conclusions from it, so you can guide your future behaviours.

That’s great. The problem is that those beliefs are not necessary true, nor useful!

And many times they create the effect of self fullfilling profecy. When some result depends on your performance, you believing X result, whether desired or not can highly increase the likelihood of you making it happen.

You think you are not good for public speaking, when the teacher asks for volunteers the next few times you hide and never show up to speak in public, so you don’t practice it. If you ever have to go out to speak in public as you think you are not useful, you get nervous, your little head filters the information that confirms that you are not good at speaking in public (the teacher’s face, the distraction of your classmates, the nervousness in your inside …) this just makes you more nervous in a state that makes it even more difficult for you to do it right … What’s wrong? That it is very possible that in this state of nerves the exhibition ends up going wrong and you simply accumulate one more experience that confirms your belief.

Look at this scheme:

It is a loop that feeds itself.

Your beliefs determine your actions, your actions produce results, and these influence your beliefs which in turn determine your actions again.

The last piece is the potential. What is the potential you have as a human being? Virtually unlimited.

ut if your beliefs don’t reflect it, your actions won’t reflect it, and neither will your results.

This is how generally the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Like that person who is happy and everything is going well, he has “lucky breaks”, while a skinny dog ​​is all fleas.

Maybe you will tell me, and Clara because my beliefs are a disaster and everything is going wrong for me. Thank you for explaining that I will just get worse.

Hey Wait … There is hope!

The good news? You can change your beliefs! You have already done it other times, there were moments in your life in which you believed in things that you no longer believe in, there were moments in your life in which you were convinced that you could not and now however you can. Your past does not determine your future. You determine your future and you can learn to use your mind to play for you rather than against you.

A belief is neither good nor bad. The measure that you can ask however is the following.

Is it useful or not useful for you to achieve your goals?

Its usefulness or goodness depends on your goal. No more no less.

So, I propose the following for you to start taking control of those beliefs:

1. Determine your goal. What do you want to achieve? To achieve this, what are the beliefs that will be most useful to you? What beliefs will help you generate the energy, determination, and enthusiasm to achieve this goal? (Hint: that achieving the goal is possible for you is absolutely one of them)
2. How can you reinforce these beliefs? What are the reasons why they are true? Write them down, be the advocate for good. Imagine that your job now is to argue and defend them. How would you do it?
3. If you were absolutely convinced of these beliefs, how would you feel? What would you say to yourself? What would you imagine? What would you do differently? Creating these behaviors in your mind is the first step to create them in reality.
4. What are the 3 most significant actions you would take if you believed these beliefs? Commit to taking these actions. As I have told you, one of the things that create and reinforce your beliefs are your experiences. Something that will help you enormously to solidify these beliefs within yourself is to take action and create experiences that reinforce them. And usually, when you take enough action, the results arrive, which will further help you reinforce these beliefs.

There are times when you change the way you see the world in the blink of an eye, other times, it may take you longer.

Sometimes just by becoming aware that what you believe is not necessarily true and that you can change your beliefs, a very powerful change will already take place within you, other times you need to reinforce those new beliefs by focusing on them with your thought or creating actions that reinforce. My proposal? Put it all into practice. Why as a teacher of mine said:

When you change the way you think, you change the way you feel. When you change the way you feel, you change the way you act, and then your whole life changes.

And putting that change in the right direction for you is something worth striving for.

Sending you a big hug,

Clara