I am going to be revisiting a presupposition of NLP. I want to share one of those NLP presuppositions with you today but tie it into a real-life experience that I had last year. The presupposition in question ‘is all of the resources that you need to succeed are already within you’.
Let me begin by telling you my story, last year I had a plumbing incident. It was was my first weekend off since NLP4Kids training. I was looking forward to having a nice relaxing time but my washing machine decided that I needed to learn plumbing instead so here’s what happened I’d put the washing machine on the night before when I went to bed but I programmed it to come on early hours of the morning. A good tip for saving yourself a bit of money, your electricity is more expensive during peak hours. When I got up in the morning and the washing cycle had completed and the kitchen floor had a puddle on it because I have a very old building all the floors are a little bit sloped, you know, so I didn’t actually realise at the time the water had come from the washing machine because it was nowhere near the washing machine so I stuck on another wash cycle and then it became very clear that the water was coming from the washing machine.
I didn’t want to call out an emergency plumber on the weekend because that was going to get pricey and there is a little bit of me that thinks I can do DIY pretty well. I like to think I’m the man of this house, mainly because I’m the only one who lives here but the point was that I wanted to at least give it a shot so I did some you know googling and looked up videos on youtube. The very first thing that happened was that I tightened up some joints on the pipes and I ran the washing machine again. It leaked even worse so then I realised that the fact that one of the joints had been a bit loose was not the source of the problem then I did a bit more googling and this led me to realise maybe the issue is that my waste pipe is blocked.
I remove the U-bend and check that the blockage isn’t in there, it was not but this then left me with a further problem because then I know the U-bend is clear so it could be in the part where it starts to come across and go down into the proper drain but the problem with that is how do I get the drain on the blocker to pour horizontally? In my brain, I thought there’s going to be something in this house to help you solve this problem.
Here’s what happened I found a piece of old pipe then I was going to use that to kind of thread it through the pipe and pour the drain on the blocker like through the end of it. The problem was the pipe was so stiff and the drain unblocker was so thick that it was never going to pour through now. The only solution that I could come up with was to sit on the kitchen floor and have a little cry and that is what I did and then I realised ‘hang on a moment you are an educated, resourceful, human being and the presupposition came to me – everything you need to succeed is already inside of you. You have all of the resources that you need’.
Eventually, I realised that I could screw the U-bend on the other way up and a half-hour later my drain made a burp at which point I knew that my drain was unblocked. The moral of the story is that you do have everything you need to succeed, to be able to achieve your desired, outcomes in your life. The trick is to tell yourself with absolute certainty that that is the case and to get your brain looking for those particular solutions now I’ve said this before and I shall say it again – you need to ask yourself the right questions in these situations that you come up against!
We want to avoid ‘why’ questions ‘why can’t I do it?’ or ‘why isn’t it working?’ those questions will just direct your brain to look for all of the reasons why you can’t do it can’t solve it and can’t find the answer this is not helpful for us. The best questions to ask yourself is ‘how’ question. A good question always will start with ‘how’. For example, “how can I solve this?” “How can I find what I need?” and “how can I come up with a creative idea here?” When you ask yourself ‘how’ questions, it gets your brain looking into the outside world to find ideas, experiences, resources that you perhaps hadn’t tuned into yet. Those solutions, ideas and resources they were already out there. They already existed but what you have to do is to program your brain to go find them and bring them into your awareness and you do that by asking yourself good quality questions.
When you talk to yourself even though it’s only inside your head (I mean feel free to do it out loud) but assuming you’re going to do it inside your own head, tone of voice is still important in there. You need to ask the question in the right way so these are the things that I want to challenge you to utilise over the course of the next few months is to remind yourself whenever you may need to that all of the resources that you need to succeed are already inside of you and if you cannot find them and you really want to tap into them you’re going to do that by asking yourself a ‘how’ question.
By Gemma Bailey
