This is a test to see if we have to sink the boat

There is an expression in NLP called "sinking the boat".. We teach this in our NLP courses.

It refers to one of the NLP pre-suppositions that there is no such thing as failure, only feed back.



The story is that you are sailing your little yacht from say Auckland in New Zealand to Brisbane in Australia. After a few days you check your instruments and discover that you are actually on course for Sydney Australia. Not the destination you're aiming for. The question is

Do you sink  the boat?

The obvious thing to do is to adjust your course until you are on the right heading for Brisbane again. And that's what you do.

Next  morning you check your instruments again and discover your on perfect course for Cairns which as you probably know is well North of Brisbane. Once again the question is. Do you sink the boat ?

Of course not. You adjust your course so that you are aiming slightly further South and carry on sailing.

Next morning you awaken to find you are right outside Brisbane harbour but you are pointing at the wrong side of it. You are headed for the South side of the harbour and your Berth is on the North side.

Would you sink the boat?

Of course not. Once again you're going to slightly alter your course so that you are aiming for your destination.

The other part of this that many NLP trainers omit to tell you is that you need to know what your destination is before you start and you also need milestones or some way of knowing where you are in relation to that destination.

In my next post I'm going to talk about how you can define where you want to go in what we refer to as sensory specific terms.

You don't need to know what I mean by sensory specific for now as it will all be explained later...