The Map Is Not The Territory – Interview With Andy Smith: Practical NLP Podcast Episode 83

This week’s episode is something a bit different. Instead of me
interviewing a prominent member of the NLP community, it’s someone
interviewing me – about the principles or ‘presuppositions’ of NLP
and how you can use them to be more effective in your life and
work, even if you’re not NLP trained. My interviewer is Deb
Johnstone, an NLP coach based in Cairns City, Australia. Deb
specialises in helping women business owners to achieve more with
less stress, and to this end she put together the ‘Better Balance
Greater Business’ summit, a series of video interviews with 23
experts, one of which was me. You may have seen my messages and
blog posts about this last month – it was a wonderful opportunity
for people who signed up to get a lot of knowledge for free. Now
that the summit has finished, my interview has become available for
release. I think it’s the best interview I’ve done so far. This is
the first half of the audio from the interview – if you want to see
the video (it’s pretty much two ‘talking heads’), I have now put
that up on my YouTube channel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS2LQSpZTDE&t=3s It was
supposed to be a half-hour interview, but we ended up talking for
over an hour. That’s a bit long for a podcast (or longer than my
listeners are used to anyway) so this episode is part one, with
part two coming next week. This episode is all about the most
important (in my view) presupposition of NLP, the idea that ‘the
map is not the territory’. In other words, what you are
experiencing right now, your reality, is not actually the real
world around you, but a filtered and partial representation of it,
that bears the same relation to objective reality as a map does to
the territory that it represents. Most people confuse the map with
the territory. In the interview, we talk about the various problems
that can cause, and how to avoid those problems. To explore this
topic further, you may be interested in the earlier article about
this presupposition, the story of ‘The Ultimate Map’, and of course
my free audiobook ‘Practical NLP: how to use NLP principles to
improve your life and work, even if you're not NLP trained’ that
covers this and the other 'presuppositions' of NLP in depth.
Duration: 31m 16s Listen and/or subscribe to this podcast via Apple
Podcasts here If you want to subscribe using something other than
Apple Podcasts (e.g. if you have an Android phone), here’s the
feed: https://nlppod.com/feed/podcast/ Only the most recent 10
episodes of the podcast are available free on Apple Podcasts. You
can download back episodes (with transcripts!) from the online
store. Finally, it would really help me out if you review the
podcast on Apple Podcasts to raise its profile
so more people can benefit from it! Thanks.