Personal Development and Personal Growth

Personal Development (sometimes called self development) and Personal Growth are key elements to having what you want in life. We understand at NLP World, that even though you are undertaking a training using some elements of Neuro Linguistic Programming, that the deep learning you will experience is a very personal event and will move you on in your own evolutionary track.

If you think of your conscious system as the windows and the deeper, unconscious system as the hard drive or dos system, then NLP will be the window for your deeper realisations and ultimately your personal development.

On a 7 day Fastrack Practitioner course, you will be taught the patterns of NLP and how to think about them; yet however incredible the training is, it's only second prize to what's available beyond that paradigm.

Ludwig Wittgenstein remarked that his 'arguments' serve as a ladder to be thrown away once climbed up. This is essential to any long lasting experiment in personal growth.
Most philosophy or religion will try and sound out it's importance and place, long after the 'sell by' date has served it's purpose.

Here's a little more on Wittgenstein's ideas:

The Tractatus
Main article: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
In rough order, the first half of the book sets forth the following theses:

The world consists of independent atomic facts — existing states of affairs — out of which larger facts are built.
Language consists of atomic, and then larger-scale propositions that correspond to these facts by sharing the same "logical form".
Thought, expressed in language, "pictures" these facts.
We can analyse our thoughts and sentences to express ("express" as in show, not say) their true logical form.
Those we cannot so analyze, cannot be meaningfully discussed.
Philosophy consists of no more than this form of analysis: "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen" ("Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent").

So what's this got to do with NLP?

Translated into NLP terminology, we (the NLP family) have created something called the "Human Communication Model ". This model states that over 2,300,000 bits of information (some say 10,000,000) are coming into your senses/system every second (from the book flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi). The system (our senses, visual ,kinaesthetic ,auditory , olfactory , gustatory ) cannot handle such volume, therefore have to delete, distort and/or generalise what we are experiencing. Therefore, we are never really experiencing life directly, we are simply interpreting something in some form of limited way.

This is where Wittgenstein gets his notion "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen" ("Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent").

If you think that's mind boggling, let me turn the screw a little further: None of your memories of life can be absolutely true either! They are windows of truth, bytes of truth or representations/interpretations of a reality that you have translated from an immeasurable source.

That is where we get the saying in NLP "your perceptions are your projections".

So when an NLP Practitioner is looking across at their client, they are thinking "how have you created this limited world out of all the possibilities (unlimited information or atoms of energy) you had to create something different?"

So what is Personal Development?

You could say that personal development is where the memories have become all possibilities again and nothing fixed or solid. To have one fixed view on any event is limited (even if it's a positive slant, it's still a limited view because you have deleted all the possible dark views or not-positive views). The more associations you can have on a memory, the more unlimited your mind becomes and the more unlimited, the more flexible and hence, the more able to react in various different ways and ultimately better at responding, rather than reacting.

Where does NLP fit in here?

NLP has made it's name by being able to interact with the neurons deep inside a persons being. The deep patterns that are held to ransom are not normally accessible by psychology, but Neuro Linguistic Programming aims at accessing the "internet" of possible connections a person has available and literally "rewires" the system; ipso facto gaining more associations from a fixed point of view to an integrated, holistic network.

From this viewpoint, life becomes a process again, not a journey to a fixed point. Even the popular notion of 'enlightenment' has a flawed reality; if any journey has a fixed point of ending, the traveling becomes linear and the method of travel more and more limited. That may be why the common notion of religion has so many limitations and ends up warring with other factions that have to disagree on the methods used to attain the great ending!

Let me end where we started with Wittgenstein: He concluded that any model used to gain insight can be thrown away after the doors were opened because it wasn't the model that was the end goal, the model simply allows access to other doors of perceptions.

And to put it into my own words: The purpose of a plant is growth; it's motivation to grow is to push towards the sun (or towards a sun-like focus), however it can. But touching the sun is not the purpose, to experience life along the way and learn from the challenge, is!

If you want to go deeper into these discussions, please leave your comments, which are read and answered or published if deemed profitable to all.