The most controversial and easily misunderstood of all the Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) presuppositions:
Every behaviour has a positive intention
Widely contested and misunderstood, until you add in this second half that makes it easier to understand:
Every behaviour has a positive intention, just not always for everyone else
Every behaviour you, I and everyone else engages in, has a positive intention behind it, even destructive behaviours like violence, drugs and listening to euro-trance.
Believe it or not, even Hitler did the things he did for positive intentions. It’s impossible to know for sure, maybe he just wanted people to look beyond his height (the midget) and give him the respect he always wanted. Someone else might also want to get respect, but choose to head up a charitable organization to do that instead of the insane, genocidal route.
His behaviour had a positive intention, but it was only positive for him, and nobody else. And the example also helps outline the third part to this presupposition:
Every behaviour has a positive intention, even if the behaviour isn’t positive.
How Do I Use This?
There are 2 parts to this, on you and on others.
Using This On You
We’ve all wanted to change some of our actions and habits, and sometimes those changes stick and sometimes they don’t. Why? One of the reasons is because we don’t understand that underlying that behaviour we want to change is a positive intention.
If you smoke, and you want to quit, you need to understand the positive intention behind your smoking. Maybe you smoke because it helps you to relax under pressure. If you quit, the positive intention is still there, but there’s no way to fulfill it, which makes it more likely you’d go back to smoking.
But if you recognize your positive intention for smoking, and find other ways that are just as effective to help you relax under pressure, it’s easier to quit.
Using This On Others
Suppose you want to help someone change his mind on something, maybe he believes that ‘there’s no learning experience only failure‘, and you want to help him adopt a more empowering belief, but he keeps refusing to do so.
One way to interpret his resistance is to think he’s being a complete asshole, just for the sake of it. But if you stop there, then you’re stuck. So what if he’s being an asshole? What do you do with that? Smack him on the head with Awaken The Giant Within until he ‘gets it’?
And to do something just to be an asshole is a negative intention, which is in direct contradiction with this NLP presupposition.
But if you can recognize that there’s a positive intention behind his ‘resisting’ your idea, e.g., maybe he wants to ‘remain true to his ideals’, then you gain more understanding and awareness, and you’re more empowered to work around his ‘resistance’ by coming up with a way for the both of you to satisfy your positive intentions, creating a win-win situation.
Why This Is Usually The Most Difficult Presupposition To Believe
Because it forces us to gain a higher level of awareness, and one that might be outside of our comfort zone.
It’s easy enough to understand that people like Mother Theresa, the Dalai Larma, your closest relative, your best friend, have positive intentions at heart when they do something, even if it’s something you don’t agree with.
But what about those terrorists who flew those planes into the World Trade Centre? A serial killer? A child molester? Even that guy who pissed you off this morning?
It can become a little more difficult.
Believing that they have positive intentions doesn’t make what they did all right, it only forces us to look at things from a higher perspective, and is one of the steps we need to take towards creating a win-win world.
Otherwise, they’re all just assholes, and the buck stops there.
If Every Behaviour Has A Positive Intention, What Would Be Different For You?
With that in mind, if you believe that every behaviour every one does has a positive intention, how would your life be different, emotionally, mentally, socially, physically and spiritually?
NLP 101 Series:
NLP 101: What is NLP? Part 1
NLP 101: What is NLP Special for The Super NLP Hardcore
NLP 101: What is NLP? Part 2
NLP 101: So Dark The Con Of NLP
NLP 101: How NLP Changed My Life
NLP 101: The Map Is Not The Territory
NLP 101: There Is No Failure Only Learning Experience
NLP 101: Every Behaviour Has A Positive Intention
NLP 101: The Meaning of Your Communication is The Response You Get
NLP 101: You Cannot Not Communicate
NLP 101 Thoughts: You Cannot Not Change The World
NLP 101: People Are Always Making The Best Choices They Have
NLP 101: People Are Not Broken
NLP 101: You Cannot Not Communicate: The Pygmalion Effect
NLP 101: Everyone Already Has All The Resources They Need
NLP 101: There Are No Resistant Listeners, Only Inflexible Speakers
NLP 101: Life Is A Series of Systems
Recommended Reading for NLP Starters
Unlimited Power : The New Science Of Personal Achievement
Great Reads for the NLP Hardcore
June 10th, 2006 at 12:38 am
Man, was just talking about this today with my wife. You are scaring me with your uncanny timing.
June 10th, 2006 at 1:12 am
Every behaviour (and action) has a positive intent. But what makes a difference is whether it is right or wrong morally. After all, aren’t our moral values the most important?
June 10th, 2006 at 6:54 am
Actually Thomas, NLP Presuppositions doesn’t take into account the moral dimension. What is “moral” by my standards may not be so for others. (Robert) Dilts, a prime developer of NLP call NLP Presuppositions a set of “principles to live by”, they are as vibrant and as practical as we want and need them to be.
With Alvin’s permission, maybe I can further discuss the place NLP Presuppositions have on our journey to become better NLPers; even non-NLPers can benefit from adopting some of these Presuppositions. I’ll do that in a post once Alvin has posted enough Core Presuppositions of NLP.
Imagine if you apply the first one mentioned here that The Map is not the Territory…respect the other person’s Model of the World….and you couple it with Every Behaviour has a Positive Intention, it becomes easier for you to understand why some people don’t change even when they know the status quo is undesirable.
In the example of smoking, maybe we get an insight what secondary gains are there for a smoker to not quit…like it makes him part of the crowd that he socialises in, it gives him time to think away from the usual crowd, it may make her fat, blah blah.
Like Alvin mentioned, these Presuppositions takes into account only what’s useful and what’s appropriate in understanding what we are dealing with. The moral dimension that comes may guide the action we take to address and deal with the issues. But morality, or our subjective sense and belief/value of right and wrong has got nothing to do with this Presupposition.
My 2 cents.
June 10th, 2006 at 11:14 pm
And my 2 cents…
Morals is another thing that NLP would say is are maps that aren’t the territory. Witness the countless arguements and wars fought over what one society deems as the correct morals and the other doesn’t.
Instead of seeing if something is morally ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, NLP would instead ask if it’s ecological, that is, it affects the whole system in a useful way. Being steadfast in your beliefs might be a useful behaviour, for example, unless your beliefs include making everyone else believe what you believe or else you have to bomb them.
To tie in with this post, the higher perspective would then be to ask what is the positive intention behind this behaviour, instead of saying ‘oh, that’s just wrong’, ask, ‘what does doing this get for him?’ and work from there to create more ecological alternatives to fulfilling that intention.
June 12th, 2006 at 4:27 am
So it seems that we have dished out 2 key areas relating to intervention and any change we want to make… from the NLP perspective that is:
One is to note the Ecology of making any change whether self or others, within or without. The change incurred must preserve current benefits while enhancing future new ones.
The other is to consider the Secondary Gains of not changing. Often the perceived benefits of staying status quo may be distorted to outweigh the benefit of changing.