NLP: How Do You Create Meaning And How It Affects Your Life.

Meaning is the bread we eat every minute of everyday. We create meanings all the time about all sorts of things: ourselves, others, food, nutrition, exercise, God, wealth, happiness…etc.

Meanings don’t exist outside. You won’t say: “Please go to the fridge and get me some meaning” or “Oh my gosh! Look at that meaning over there; this is disgusting” or even “Wow! I can hear this great meaning and it’s very beautiful.

Meaning is an inside job and it takes a meaning maker, with meaning making powers, to create associations in the mind.

First, we select an experience. Of all the events that occur in a given day, we make a selection, according to our own standards, beliefs, values and principles. The same event can be, and in fact is, interpreted differently from one person to another.

In fact, if 1,000 people attend the same seminar, the same show, the same event, if they see the same sunset or hear the same music, there is going to be 1,000 different responses and therefore 1,000 different meanings.

The information comes through our 5 senses, and then we create a movie in our mind. A movie that is an interpretation of what we see, hear and feel. And then the beauty of all this is that we can edit the movie. NLP calls this ability “shifting the submodalities”. We can play with this movie, make some images brighter or some sounds louder. We can even transform the movie in black and white. We can tell the movie to do whatever we want and as we’re the master of our thoughts, it will obey. It has to obey.

And then we create associations with our past experiences, we evaluate the experience according to our principles, values, beliefs and understandings. We reject part of it and we validate another part. We generalize and even distort things. That’s how you create beliefs, understandings and how you create your own reality. So, the good news is, if you create your own reality, you can change it at will, and make your life a masterpiece.