Living Well NLP

From an Inherent Excellence blog post by NLPer and life coach Erol Fox, who writes some good stuff:

People just don’t understand what love is, so they suffer. Most Westernized people think love is when you can’t live without someone or some object. Any doctor will tell you that actually sounds like a disease.

Atisha, a Buddhist monk in the 10th Century echoed what love really is:

“Love is the wish for others to be happy.”

Really? I disagree.

Merely wishing others to be happy, without taking tangible action to help them achieve happiness, is not love. It is mental masturbation. And delusional, if a person thinks that intending love makes up for their unloving actions.

When you studied NLP, did you learn about “the” kinesthetic modality?

The standard NLP model lumps all “feelings” together as one kinesthetic modality, with one set of accessing cues. These cues include belly breathing, slow speech, use of kinesthetic words and phases (such as “touching base,” “off-balance,” and “warm”), and eye accesses to the (usually) lower right.

This model is simple and easy to learn and use. It’s also obviously inaccurate. Dizziness is not the same kind of “feeling” as happiness, hunger, or warm velvet rubbing across your skin.

That wouldn’t matter to NLPers if kinesthetics all functioned identically when communicating or doing change work. But in fact, subtle distinctions between kinds of kinesthetics often determine whether an intervention will work for a particular person.