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.

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.

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.