In or Out of Europe?
A look at making huge decisions from an NLP perspective as well as my own views.
A client was booked to see me a while back and our appointment was at 12 noon. When she didn’t arrive until 12.40pm a time boundary had been crossed obviously. And she came with an amazing excuse. One of those “because” pieces of armoury that it’s sometimes difficult to challenge. Her “because” was that as she left her house in good time to make the appointment, there had been a fire at the end of her cul-de-sac road. That made it impossible to get her car out of the road as a fire engine had blocked it.
So there she was, sitting in front of me. A very nice, friendly woman who had been the ‘victim’ of circumstance and now was looking to do work on her life (aside from this event of course). And something inside me wanted to move on “poor thing, what a day you’ve had”- and something inside me could not move on. So, I prodded and pushed around the event and what it had meant to her without knowing where I was going, exactly.
After about 20 minutes of doing this, I was convinced I had gone a little mad to keep pursuing this line, yet something told me not to let it go. Eventually, it was almost like she cracked and a light bulb went on inside her. “Oh my gosh”, she said, “I just got something. I’ve never, ever believed I had any power over circumstances. My whole life I have been pushed around by circumstances – and coming to see you would have been just a plaster on the thing we came to work on with this huge ‘life sentence’ hanging over me”.
So we cracked the underlying pattern and the whole session became about finding where she had made a decision in life that she had no power over circumstances, or that she had given that right away at some point. We visited some old memories, went into that garden and cleared the weeds, leaving a landscaped vision that she know could add to – with nothing getting in her way. Two things there were prevalent after the session. Firstly I had to totally trust my intuition that something was there to be had – that logic dictated there wasn’t. And a presupposition (a powerful belief) that there is in life, inbuilt, interwoven into the fabric, that people have power over circumstance.
“Dare to believe that something inside yourself is more powerful than circumstance” Terry Elston
So when it comes to huge decisions like the UK is going through (in or out of a political liaison with the rest of Europe), major presuppositions would need to be in place to support the vote that would cause most turbulence (the out vote). If people are voting out, that may seem negative. They may seem like they don’t want any part of Europe. And that is dangerous if the underlying language is what we call “away from” in NLP. If we only create our language with what we don’t want, those thing seem to come to pass. Don’t think of a red tree in a blue field – etc.
So the out vote would have to be very conscious, and what the ‘outers’ wanted instead of Europe very clear. Otherwise they may get a red tree in a blue field! Or the alternative is, the turbulence would happen in the ensuing drama – and then we’d have to struggle our way out of that mess to make things work again.
The in vote seems much safer, but would inevitably cover up many cracks and some monetary issues that are not being dealt with at present. Our debt in the UK is huge, yet it’s managed via many strings being pulled for us and by us. If we don’t want to deal with that head on, best to vote in.
My mother is 83, has lived through the war era and has experienced poverty, rations and hardship in the UK. You can see our family in the photo here – they were not unhappy living in a caravan! My mother is an intelligent woman who had run her own business for a long time, lived in Europe (the one outside the UK) and has much wisdom. She’s voting out. And as an empowered 83 year old, she doesn’t look at the pennies and pounds to make a decision. She makes a decision on the wealth (internal) of people here and the wealth of talent.
We’ve always been an island of creative beings, that’s part of our identity. We collaborate where we can, and like to make our own rules, as adults do. Where people base their argument on finances, they forget our individual innate abilities and our collective ability to rise from any situation. It is a little bit like the NZ way, where you can throw a box of pieces with not much money attached at a New Zealander and they will build you a faster vehicle than a factory could. If we forget that we can create from nothing, we forget part of who we are.
Yet also, there has been a continuity built of wealth and material goods that is pretty hard to leave behind, even if it’s for a few years. Our house prices may go down and if we are perceived as weak as a race and as a business, our credit rating and currency conversions may also suffer. In or out of Europe? Or is it more about who are we as a creative race and can we manage that on our own?
The presuppositions (powerful beliefs) needed for the ‘out’ vote would be.
1. People have all the resources they need to succeed
2. There is no failure only feedback (you can read an enlightening article here, about a sports team coached from that belief primarily)
3. The meaning of the communication is the response you get (tough one if you haven’t been trained as an empowered communicator, yet take a look to see what it means.)
4. You can always have power over circumstances
5. Your intention is what creates your results
For the ‘in’ vote
1. Unity is power
2. The problems we have can always be overcome by the solutions we bring
3. There is no “I” in TEAM
4. There’s nothing that’s so bad we can’t overturn by what’s good
5. We are stronger as a committed, influential race and will have more power for change this way