Curiosity Killed The Cat… And It Reincarnated As A Puma.

Rachael Maunder reflects on her first encounter with NLP, and how it changed her life...

Before I encountered NLP, I used to think I was trapped in this life.  I’m not surprised - what with the countless limiting beliefs I had about myself and others. I was one of those people you hear say: “People can’t change,” and “Once a cheat always a cheat.”  Ask yourself: have you ever heard people saying things like this?  More importantly, have you ever heard yourself saying things like this?  There was this strong idea in my head that the potential I had experienced up to now was all I was ever going to have.

Despite my best efforts, from time to time, my situation would change.  For instance, the place where I live might change, or my place of work.  When this happened I would notice myself naturally taking a different role within new peer groups.  For a time I struggled with this because, for one, it conflicted with my belief that people are incapable of change and, two, even though I didn’t always like who I was at the time, I felt that I was losing a part of my own identity. This was a very scary thing as I would often find myself tying to "get back" to who I once was.

This sparked an internal conflict in me.  How could I change when I wasn’t trying to at all?  And why was it that when I tried and tried not to be who I was, it was a wasted attempt?  Little did I know that the answer is right here in this paragraph.

You know, they say God loves Triers because they provide him with hours of entertainment...

What really changed things was my innate sense of curiosity, which came out one day when I was having coffee at a flat whilst I was on a date.  Being nosey I picked up this overwhelmingly large, heavy ring binder labelled NLP. I was turning through the content and finding terms I’d never heard of before, such as Meta Model, Milton Model, presuppositions and Meta programs, amongst many other equally scary words. I couldn't help it - I teased my friend about this silly technology that was aimed at personal growth.

But my friend had the last laugh.  For the next few days, I couldn’t help but think about NLP.  It was a very cloudy image that I had at that time, made even cloudier with words and promises of which I had no comprehension.  And research online at first made it only more frightening. Generally a description for NLP is made up of at least 3 paragraphs and I have never seen one (and probably never will) that defines it as a black and white science. It seemed at the time that NLP was made up of various shades of grey and every single colour you can think of.  There seemed to be as many definitions of NLP as there are people on this planet. This only fuelled my curiosity and I started searching for people who could explain this thing to me verbally (at that time reading was not an enjoyable thing to do).

As I started to find people who knew a bit about the subject and as I continued to read up, buy books and listen to personal enhancement CDs, I already started to see my perspective on life altering slightly (for instance, reading started to become one of my favourite pastimes).  Eventually I was convinced to sign up on the Practitioner seminar.  The following month I went on the Master Practitioner. 

The difference in my life is that I now know that if I set my mind to it, I can achieve anything that I want to.  That I can change easily, and I can decide on the things that I want and pursue them relentlessly with a sense of excitement and joy.  And what is strange is that I hadn't realised that I had been capable of this all along.

I learned a saying in my NLP classes - if you always do what you’ve always done, then you’ll always get what you’ve always got.  And of course, it meant that if what you've got isn't what you want, then it's time to do something different.  That's why I've learned that it's okay to love change.

My advice to anyone thinking about going on an NLP course is this: ask yourself, do you want your life to be different?  What changes would you make if you knew that you could not fail?  

Because if you are interested in improving your life, then you will be interested in NLP.  If you are curious like I was, then remember, it's absolutely right that curiosity can kill the cat.  And a good thing too.  Because this cat got reincarnated as a puma!