Book: NLP, the New Technology of Achievement

NLP, the New Technology of Achievement, edited by Steve Andreas and Charles Faulkner (Harper, 1994)

First of all, NLP stands for Neuro-Linguistic Programming. A book with an (unexplained) acronym in the title was really confusing for me when I was trying to find it in the library database, but oh, well. And what does neuro-linguistic programming mean? This book is about how to 'retrain' or 'train' your brain to think in positive ways about what you do want, and negative ways about what you don't want - to put it very, very simply. It is ostensibly aimed at anyone and everyone, although it is obviously coming from a business perspective - most of the examples are examples from business and other "achievement" oriented parts of life.

Since I usually need to understand things on a very personal level before I can grasp them on an external/structural level, this may not have been the best "NLP" book for me. I was also extremely off-put by the attitude of the authors that NLP is the solution to everything! I am off-put by almost anything that claims to be the one solution to everything, a cure-all, a panacea. "There is no one right way." Anything that seems to be claiming to be the or even a one right way bothers me.

On the other hand, I am fascinated by the exercises in the book, I can see how important they are in application in Birthing From Within work, and I need to get a copy (or a similar book - I'm going to ask around to see if there's one that would fit my learning style better) so I'll have it around to actually do the exercises.

One idea I've already used is the principle of assuming positive intent. In a disagreement with my husband, I took a deep breath, reminded myself that he had some positive intent in his behavior somewhere even if I couldn't see it for the life of me, and asked him what it was. And guess what, he told me. When you've been married for 10 years and known each other even longer, your communication patterns tend to get kind of set in their ways sometimes. So that may not sound like a lot, but it actually felt pretty big to me to be able to stop in the middle of an unpleasant feeling discussion, really listen to what he thought, and just accept it - because it's hard not to accept a positive intent, even if you know it didn't produce the outcome you would have liked.