Certainty

If NLP is applied wrongly then NLP practitioners try to give people certainty on positive things. NLP becomes positive thinking.  Or worse, positive believing. It leads to wrong ideas like: “if you believe it strongly enough it is true”. What follows are the horrors of NLP. For instance arrogance without competence. “I believe I can do it, therefore I actually can do it.” Or blaming the victim: “you are still ill because you didn’t believe strongly enough you would become better”.

Such bad NLP practitioners overlook the fact that certainty closes off other possibilities and therefore limits someone’s world model. In fact when NLP is applied correctly it teaches how to deal positively with uncertainty. Only because a situation is uncertain doesn’t mean you ought to feel bad about it. You can have good feelings in uncertain circumstances. Your feelings are independent of your current situation. If you are ill there is the possibility that you get better. Feeling relaxed and promoting the chance of getting better are smart strategies without the need to believe with absolute certainty. If you want to do something, but you can’t do it yet, there is the possibility that you may learn to do so in the future.

To him who feels himself predestined to seeing and not believing, all believers are too noisy and obtrusive; he guards against them.

Beyond Good & Evil paragraph 112

Empathy

Many people think that when you work with other people empathy is important. Yet, the opposite is the case. You help people better when you do so without empathy.

Closing one’s ears to lamentation. – If we let ourselves be made gloomy by the lamentation and suffering of other mortals and cover our own sky with clouds, who is it who will have to bear the consequences of this gloom? These other mortals, of course, and in addition to the burdens they bear already! We can offer them neither aid nor comfort if we want to be the echo of their lamentation, or even if we are merely always giving ear to it – unless, that is, we had acquired the art of the Olympians and henceforth edified ourselves by the misfortunes of mankind instead of being made unhappy by them. But that is somewhat too Olympian for us: even though we have, with our enjoyment of tragedy, already taken a step in the direction of this ideal divine cannibalism.

Daybreak paragraph 144

Entertainment

Although nowadays there are many NLP trainer who are themselves trained badly and their NLP training programs are boring, NLP has specific strategies and techniques to make any training entertainment.

The new passion. – Why do we fear and hate a possible reversion to barbarism? Because it would make people unhappier than they are? Oh no! The barbarians of every age were happier: let us not deceive ourselves! – The reason is that our drive to knowledge has become too strong for us to be able to want happiness without knowledge or the happiness of a strong, firmly rooted delusion; even to imagine such a state of things is painful to us! Restless discovering and divining has such an attraction for us, and has grown as indispensable to us as is to the lover his unrequited love, which he would at no price relinquish for a state of indifference – perhaps, indeed, we too are unrequited lovers! Knowledge has in us been transformed into a passion which shrinks at no sacrifice and at bottom fears nothing but its own extinction; we believe in all honesty that all mankind must believe itself more exalted and comforted under the compulsion and suffering of this passion than it did formerly, when envy of the coarser contentment that follows in the train of barbarism had not yet been overcome. Perhaps mankind will even perish of this passion for knowledge! – even this thought has no power over us! But did Christianity ever shun such a thought? Are love and death not brothers? Yes, we hate barbarism – we would all prefer the destruction of mankind to a regression of knowledge! And finally: if mankind does not perish of a passion it will perish of a weakness: which do you prefer? This is the main question. Do we desire for mankind an end in fire and light or one in the sand? –

Daybreak paragraph 427

Freedom

NLP is not about only good feelings or prescribing only one way of living. NLP is about getting the freedom to make sure you live the life you want to live.

What we are at liberty to do. – One can dispose of one’s drives like a gardener and, though few know it, cultivate the shoots of anger, pity, curiosity, vanity as productively and profitably as a beautiful fruit tree on a trellis; one can do it with the good or bad taste of a gardener and, as it were, in the French or English or Dutch or Chinese fashion; one can also let nature rule and only attend to a little embellishment and tidying-up here and there; one can, finally, without paying any attention to them at all, let the plants grow up and fight their fight out among themselves – indeed, one can take delight in such a wilderness, and desire precisely this delight, though it gives one some trouble, too. All this we are at liberty to do: but how many know we are at liberty to do it? Do the majority not believe in themselves as in complete fully-developed facts? Have the great philosophers not put their seal on this prejudice with the doctrine of the unchangeability of character?

Daybreak paragraph 560

Good feelings

It is a mistake to think that NLP is about peak experience. NLP is about feeling good for most of the time.

It is not the strength, but the duration of high feelings that makes great men.

Beyond Good & Evil paragraph 72

Lofty Moods. — It seems to me that most men do not believe in lofty moods, unless it be for the moment, or at the most for a quarter of an hour, — except the few who know by experience a longer duration of high feeling. But to be absolutely a man with a single lofty feeling, the incarnation of a single lofty mood — that has hitherto been only a dream and an enchanting possibility: history does not yet give us any trustworthy example of it. Nevertheless one might also some day produce such men — when a multitude of favorable conditions have been created and established, which at present even the happiest chance is unable to throw together. Perhaps that very state which has hitherto entered into our soul as an exception, felt with horror now and then, may be the usual condition of those future souls: a continuous movement between high and low, and the feeling of high and low, a constant state of mounting as on steps, and at the same time reposing as on clouds.

Gay Science paragraph 288

Having much joy. – He who has much joy in his life must be a good man: but he is perhaps not the cleverest, even though he has attained precisely that which the cleverest man strives after with all his cleverness.

Human, All Too Human, part 2, paragraph 48

Happiness

Because happiness is a nominalization one of the insights that NLP has, is that you do happy rather than be happy. For most people happiness is too big. Also, unlike many people think happiness is not high up in people’s hierarchy of values.

The new passion. – Why do we fear and hate a possible reversion to barbarism? Because it would make people unhappier than they are? Oh no! The barbarians of every age were happier: let us not deceive ourselves! – The reason is that our drive to knowledge has become too strong for us to be able to want happiness without knowledge or the happiness of a strong, firmly rooted delusion; even to imagine such a state of things is painful to us! Restless discovering and divining has such an attraction for us, and has grown as indispensable to us as is to the lover his unrequited love, which he would at no price relinquish for a state of indifference – perhaps, indeed, we too are unrequited lovers! Knowledge has in us been transformed into a passion which shrinks at no sacrifice and at bottom fears nothing but its own extinction; we believe in all honesty that all mankind must believe itself more exalted and comforted under the compulsion and suffering of this passion than it did formerly, when envy of the coarser contentment that follows in the train of barbarism had not yet been overcome. Perhaps mankind will even perish of this passion for knowledge! – even this thought has no power over us! But did Christianity ever shun such a thought? Are love and death not brothers? Yes, we hate barbarism – we would all prefer the destruction of mankind to a regression of knowledge! And finally: if mankind does not perish of a passion it will perish of a weakness: which do you prefer? This is the main question. Do we desire for mankind an end in fire and light or one in the sand? –

Daybreak paragraph 429

The Joyless Person. — A single joyless person is enough to make constant displeasure and a clouded heaven in a household ; and it is only by a miracle that such a person is lacking! — Happiness is not nearly such a contagious disease; — how is that?

Gay Science paragraph 239

History

One of the basic tenets in NLP is that what we remember of our past has little to do what actually happens. And that, as long as you leave intact what the community sees as strict facts, you can create for yourself a history that makes you feel good. This process is often called “Change Personal History” within NLP, although most of the time this term refers to an outdated NLP technique. Modern NLP establishes this through the use of timelines.

Facta! Yes, Facta ficta! – A historian has to do, not with what actually happened, but only with events supposed to have happened: for only the latter have produced an effect. Likewise only with supposed heroes. His theme, so-called world history, is opinions about supposed actions and their supposed motives, which in turn give rise to further opinions and actions, the reality of which is however at once vaporized again and produces an effect only as vapor – a continual generation and pregnancy of phantoms over the impenetrable mist of unfathomable reality. All historians speak of things which have never existed except in imagination.

Daybreak paragraph 307

 

NLP Master Practitioner

The difference between the NLP Practitioner and the NLP Master Practitioner course ought to be that in the NLP Practitioner you get all kinds of recipes to learn how to use NLP, but that in the NLP Master Practitioner you are learned to let go of these recipes.

A few theses. – Insofar as the individual is seeking happiness, one ought not to tender him any prescriptions as to the path to happiness: for individual happiness springs from one’s own unknown laws, and prescriptions from without can only obstruct and hinder it. – The prescriptions called ‘moral’ are in truth directed against individuals and are in no way aimed at promoting their happiness. They have just as little to do with the ‘ happiness and welfare of mankind’ – a phrase to which is it in any case impossible to attach any distinct concepts, let alone employ them as guiding stars on the dark ocean of moral aspirations. – It is not true, as prejudice would have it, that morality is more favourable to the evolution of reason than immorality is. – It is not true that the unconscious goal in the evolution of every conscious being (animal, man, mankind, etc) is its ‘highest happiness’: the case, on the contrary, is that every stage of evolution possesses a special and incomparable happiness neither higher nor lower but simply its own. Evolution does not have happiness in view, but evolution and nothing else. – Only if mankind possessed a universally recognised goal would it be possible to propose ‘thus and thus is the right course of action’: for the present there exists no such goal. It is thus irrational and trivial to impose the demands of morality upon mankind. – To recommend a goal to mankind is something quite different: the goal is then thought of as something which lies in our own discretion; supposing the recommendation appealed to mankind, it could in pursuit of it also impose upon itself a moral law, likewise at its own discretion. But up to now the moral law has been supposed to stand above our own likes and dislikes: one did not want actually to impose this law upon oneself, one wanted to take it from somewhere or discover it somewhere or have it commanded to one from somewhere.

Daybreak paragraph 109

Plan

One of the more important techniques within NLP is working with time lines. With time lines the most important thing you can do, is creating the thirty year plan. The thirty year plan gives direction to life and calms the unconsciousness. If you don’t update your thirty year plan when you change your life then old ideas from your past will still be part of the direction you are going.

Our evaluations. – All actions may be traced back to evaluations, all evaluations are either original or adopted – the latter being by far the most common. Why do we adopt them? From fear- that is to say, we consider it more advisable to pretend they are our own – and accustom ourself to this pretence, so that at length it becomes our own nature. Original evaluation: that is to say, to assess a thing according to the extent to which it pleases or displeases us alone and no one else – something excessively rare! – But must our evaluation of another, in which there lies the motive for our generally availing ourselves of his evaluation, at least not proceed from us, be our own determination? Yes, but we arrive at it as children, and rarely learn to change our view; most of us are our whole lives long the fools of the way we acquired in childhood of judging our neighbors (their minds, rank, morality, whether they are exemplary or reprehensible) and of finding it necessary to pay homage to their evaluations.

Daybreak paragraph 104

 

Psychiatry

One of the central ideas within NLP is that someone who has problems is not ill, doesn’t have a mental disorder and isn’t broken. For that reason he doesn’t need to be cured, healed or fixed. In most cases what is at issue is that someone hasn’t learned yet how to deal happily with difficult circumstances.

Physicians of the Soul and Pain. — All preachers of morality, as also all theologians, have a bad habit in common: all of them try to persuade man that he is very ill, and that a severe, final, radical cure is necessary. And because mankind as a whole has for centuries listened too eagerly to those teachers, something of the superstition that the human race is in a very bad way has actually come over men : so that they are now far too ready to sigh ; they find nothing more in life and make melancholy faces at each other, as if life were indeed very hard to endure. In truth, they are inordinately assured of their life and in love with it, and full of untold intrigues and subtleties for suppressing everything disagreeable, and for extracting the thorn from pain and misfortune. It seems to me that people always speak with exaggeration about pain and misfortune, as if it were a matter of good behaviour to exaggerate here: on the other hand people are intentionally silent in regard to the number of expedients for alleviating pain; as for instance, the deadening of it, feverish flurry of thought, a peaceful position, or good and bad reminiscences, intentions, and hopes, — also many kinds of pride and fellow-feeling, which have almost the effect of anaesthetics: while in the greatest degree of pain fainting takes place of itself. We understand very well how to pour sweetness on our bitterness, especially on the bitterness of our soul; we find a remedy in our bravery and sublimity, as well as in the nobler delirium of submission and resignation. A loss scarcely remains a loss for an hour: in some way or other a gift from heaven has always fallen into our lap at the same moment — a new form of strength, for example: be it but a new opportunity for the exercise of strength! What have the preachers of morality not dreamt concerning the inner “misery” of evil men! What lies have they not told us about the misfortunes of impassioned men! Yes, lying is here the right word: they were only too well aware of the overflowing happiness of this kind of man, but they kept silent as death about it; because it was a refutation of their theory, according to which happiness only originates through the annihilation of the passions and the silencing of the will ! And finally, as regards the recipe of all those physicians of the soul and their recommendation of a severe radical cure, we may be allowed to ask: Is our life really painful and burdensome enough for us to exchange it with advantage for a Stoical mode of living, and Stoical petrification ? We do not feel sufficiently miserable to have to feel ill in the Stoical fashion!

Gay Science paragraph 326