The first presupposition in NLP is the map is not the territory.

You’ve likely heard that before, right?

Or said another way, the menu is not the meal.

Few people would disagree.

Yet not many people really think about the implications that the map is not the territory has in everyday life.

And how you can use this insight to become far more skilful and effective in how you communicate.

Answer me this:

Do people like to be right?

So much so they are willing to argue to prove they are right?

Even fight.

You don’t need to be Einstein to know that’s (generally) true.

Turn on the TV and you’ll see how people hold rigidly to certain points of view or beliefs — even when doing so can be or indeed is harmful to them.

Maybe you know someone who is like this in your own life?

Maybe it’s someone close to you.

Many times it can be done easily — once you have a few key skills.

The first is the skill with language.

The second is the ability to track the structure of someone’s beliefs or what I prefer to call game-rules.

The third is being creative.

Coming up with many different ways of changing where, when and how someone frames the ideas/beliefs they hold as real.

At this point you may be asking:

“But Tom, what do you mean “to frame the idea?”

And this is where things get interesting.

Given the map is not the territory and any thought expressed is always said by someone, at a specific point in time, and comes from a specific point of view…

…all ideas/beliefs are framed and held as true within a certain point of view, from a specific perspective.

And what does a frame do?

It creates a border, right?

It defines an edge.

It contains and affects how we perceive an idea.

“OK, Tom so what’s all this got to do with changing people’s mind or slow-motion multitasking?”

I’m glad you asked.

I’ll get to that in just a moment and a video to help get you started.

But first, what I want you to take away is that changing people’s minds can be very easy.

In fact, it’s far more easy than you may realise once you learn to understand and work with how people frame things.

Since the map is never the territory and a person’s beliefs are one way of perceiving something…

…you can literally have dozens, potentially hundreds of different ways to shift the frame around how they hold the (problematic) idea and where they are looking at it from.

How?

By training your brain to find new and more useful ways to frame ideas.

Thankfully you don’t need to do this all by yourself.

Someone’s already created a map.

It’s a super handy framework that can you show you how to create new and better frames for changing people’s beliefs on the fly.

I’ll share more on how you can learn to do this in future articles.

In the meantime let me leave you with (probably) a new thought.

Don’t know what that is?

It’s a powerful way to unleash your natural creativity.

In this TED talk, economist Tim Harford shares how innovators like Einstein, Darwin, and Michael Crichton found their inspiration and productivity through cross-training their minds.

Instead of rejecting multi-tasking (like is so popular in productivity circles today) they embraced a variation of it.

Counter-intuitive but it works in my experience.

Throughout this thought-provoking video, Tim demonstrates several of the skills that you need to change beliefs easily.

Watch the video below.

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