As a half-time wrap up to our NLP 101 series, I thought I’d share with you my recent privilege of watching someone crash and burn on stage 
In a way, this presenter, I won’t name him so we’ll call him Professor Snuggles, violated every one of the NLP presuppositions I’ve talked about so far. I’ll talk about how he did that, because it shows you how the presuppositions blend as a whole nicely, and because sometimes it’s useful to learn from a bad example what not to do.
The events have been slightly dressed-up to protect the innocent and make a better parable
1) His Map Was The Territory
Professor Snuggles made a mistake I’ve seen a lot of bad presenters do. When he stepped up on stage, I saw his pupils dilate and glaze over, and when he talked, he avoided eye contact and looked at nowhere in particular, a lot.
Professor Snuggles had deleted everyone else in the room and retreated into his own little Professor Snuggles world!
And then he started to lay down his material like it was the law, and I could see I wasn’t the only one in the room uncomfortable with his approach. When he was questioned about a few things he said, he was visibly unhappy and kept insisting that the way he said it was the way it was; that he had the only map in the room and everyone else’s map of the world was non-existent.
2) Every Behaviour Has A Negative or Positive Intention
Because he didn’t realize that every behaviour has a positive intention, and the people who were questioning him weren’t looking to shoot him down but looking for him to give a reason to listen to him, he couldn’t adapt.
All he saw were attacks on him, and that caused him to attack back.
3) The Meaning of His Communication Was the Response He Gave
When he got questioned more, if he could have taken a step back he would have realized that because the meaning of his communication was the response he got, he could have gotten instant feedback and used it to turn his presentation around.
Instead, he became hotly defensive, and raised his voice to repeat himself, totally regarding any response he got from his audience.
Ironically, resisting the audience’s responses made the audience resist his response to them.
I caught someone rolling his eyes up.
4) You Can Not Communicate
Obviously Professor Snuggles thought he could hide his insecurities and lack of knowledge to the audience by puffing himself up, but at this point everyone in the room knew he had no idea what he was rambling about.
The saddest thing was that he was probably the only one in the room who didn’t know we knew, and instead of being hostile towards Professor Snuggles because of this, I could feel that most of the audience were mildy embarassed for him instead.
5) There is No Learning Experience, Only Failure
Needless to say, the whole thing didn’t end well.
I don’t have anything against Professor Snuggles, in fact I’m sure he had the best of intentions at heart. But the worse thing Professor Snuggles could take from this experience is if he believed there is no learning experience, only failure, because there’s no way to grow upwards from there.
How to Turn These 5 Lousy Beliefs Around
In the spirit of wishing Professor Snuggles well, I hope he adopts the attitude that there is no failure, only feedback/learning experience, and take responsibility for the responses he got as the meaning of his communication to the audience.
What would make that easier for Professor Snuggles is to think about the postive intentions underlying the audience’s and his own behaviour.
And even though they may be similar positive intentions, because the map is not the territory not everyone has the same meaning attached to the intention or the same way to fulfill it as he does, he can become more aware of the many different ways to do so.
By adopting these 5 Beliefs of Powerful NLP Presenters instead of 5 Beliefs of Highly Ineffective Presenters, Professor Snuggles can look forward to a growing sense of awareness of the people and spaces around him, and persuade with more eloquence, flexibility and power.
Not to mention leaving behind more smiles instead of frowns in the audience 
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