NLP: Changing Your Perception Filters
Phobias and obsessive states, difficulties in communicating with society, healing psychological trauma, and perceiving reality correctly—this is just a partial list of issues that NLP techniques can help you overcome. But to truly benefit from these practices, you first need to understand what Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) actually is.
What Is Neuro-Linguistic Programming?
NLP is an interaction of models and principles such as the mind, speech, cognition, body language (facial expressions, gestures, etc.), and their influence on the formation of an individual’s subjective reality. By understanding how your internal models work, you can program the mechanism of their interaction, using the behavioral models of famous and successful people.
One of the NLP exercises is called “Walking in Someone Else’s Moccasins.”
Essentially, NLP is a powerful system of thinking that helps accelerate the achievement of your personal and professional goals. It’s a special type of interpersonal communication dedicated to studying the relationship between behavioral models and an individual’s subjective experiences, especially the mindset underlying them.
NLP as an Alternative Therapy
NLP-based alternative therapy aims to use self-awareness combined with effective communication methods to completely change (or replace) your patterns of mental and emotional behavior. This “user manual for the mind” allows you to use body language to consistently achieve desired results. You choose a successful person and copy their behavioral model using NLP techniques.
By studying NLP, you learn specific skills and techniques necessary for positive changes in your consciousness, discover new ways to break bad habits, and trigger the self-destruction of your old, ineffective behavior patterns. This way, you begin to understand yourself and those around you more fully.
How We Perceive Reality
Let’s take our perception of reality as an example. We experience the world through a set of filters. First, our senses filter this experience. What they can perceive is only a tiny piece of the world that actually surrounds us. So, we are out of touch with reality, because the “material” filtered by our biological tools then passes through another complex system of filters: family, education, culture, friends, enemies, social institutions, teachers, and so on. NLP teaches that after all this filtering, we perceive only a small patch of the territory, not the whole map of the world.
When you learn to see things differently and perceive reality more accurately, your behavior model will also change for the better. It’s hard not to change something in yourself—except for very old habits—when you know how to do it. Simply put, NLP teaches you to distinguish, recognize, see, shape, choose, define, notify, hear, understand, comprehend, and implement the knowledge you gain, turning it into concrete results. When you perceive something, you react to it, right? And how you react determines your behavior. Your behavior, in turn, directly affects your results in life and at work.
The Boundary of Perception
The boundary of perception determines what you get out of life. If you don’t feel where it lies, you can’t adjust your filtering system and will deprive yourself of the full vision of the world, leaving the “tuning” of your perception filters to your subconscious. NLP methods and practices are designed to help you find and consciously change this boundary by adjusting your individual perception filters.
These methods deeply influence how you feel and react. They bypass all the beliefs, postulates, and assumptions drilled into us by education, religion, society, social status, family, teachers, trends, TV ads, depression, and so on. All of this makes up your current spiritual “self.” You unconsciously and habitually perceive your world through thick lenses of beliefs and assumptions.
How to Change Your Perception
Intuitively, you probably sense that there are levers you can pull to change your behavior. You can only do this by changing your perception! Questions like, “How would you feel if…?” or “Look at it from another perspective,” help people sense the boundary of perception and retune their filtering systems, seeing reality in a new way. This is called “filtering your thinking.”
This way of thinking allows you to receive information that is useful and beneficial, helping you feel more complete. This filtering system weeds out erroneous, inaccurate, or humiliating information that makes you feel helpless and weak.
The Challenge of Seeing Differently
But here’s the problem: How can you start seeing things differently than you did before? Albert Einstein said, “The world we have created is a product of our thinking; it cannot be changed without changing our thinking.” People don’t know what they don’t know. Few can see the world through new lenses using only their inner resources. The easiest way is to borrow someone else’s filters. This helps you quickly see the world in a new way.
“Walking in Someone Else’s Moccasins” Exercise
NLP programs include one of the easiest and most painless methods that anyone can master to start changing their perception filters. This exercise is called “Walking in Someone Else’s Moccasins.” It’s a mental immersion into another person’s experience and an attempt to see the world through their perception filters. The big advantage of this method is achieving mutual understanding with almost anyone, regardless of gender, age, social status, or other differences.
How can you do this? Start by practicing with a friend or colleague who wants to participate. Let’s call them the “model.” You’ll be the “modeler.” Ask the model to go about their usual daily activities. Your task is to become their shadow—completely copy their behavior: movements, voice, walk, head tilt, posture, breathing rate, and so on. The modeler should become the model and enter their mental perception space.
After about ten minutes, the modeler stops the exercise and shares their experience and perception as the model. For example: “I noticed the petals changed color, the leaves changed shape, my fingers became more sensitive, I noticed more small details than before, the birdsong became louder.”
With a little practice, you’ll be able to use these techniques even with strangers in a crowded room, like in an airport waiting area or just walking down the street. What are the benefits of this method? You’ll truly see and hear things that previously escaped your attention. You’ll also experience a real sense of understanding with the person you modeled. This can be very useful when working with children, giving public speeches, or negotiating. Plus, it gives you a starting point for further, deeper study of other advanced NLP techniques. By copying the models of experts in various fields, you can discover new horizons by using their perception filters.