We need a balance of certainty and uncertainty in our lives. Too much of either, and life gets either boring or hectic. But, some people do not like uncertainty and do whatever they can to create more certainty around them.
Uncertainty is the unknowingness of what is about to happen. It is often where the good stuff in life comes from! And, it is all around. I don’t know what the weather will be like tomorrow (the weather app is often changing its mind!), I don’t know how a book or movie ends, if a relationship is going to work out or not, how someone will respond to a question I ask, what the traffic is going to be like on my way to work – and many, many other things.
There are so many things in our lives that are uncertain – it is nearly imperative that a person is okay with the unknown.
Needing certainty in life can create a lot of issues – anxiety, depression, procrastination, perfectionism – or the tried and true paralysis-by-analysis. The very aspect of trying to create certainty out of uncertainty is in itself quite stressful and provokes and creates more cortisol and adrenaline to be released into the bloodstream.
When you learn NLP, you can help yourself become more ok with uncertainty by addressing any of the underlying beliefs, thoughts, and behaviors around this pattern. For example, many people lack a sense of security or safety and feel the need to surround themselves with certainty. Others have a fear of failure, and won’t start anything until they know for certain that something will work (this often leads to procrastination, because really – can one ever be absolutely certain about anything?)
In NLP, you will learn techniques that help you to access your warehouse of past memories so that you can find where the unconscious patterns began in your life so that you will be able to review those events from a more mature and dissociated manner. This in turn will allow you to re-evaluate your past experiences and make new choices for now based on what your desires and intentions are currently.
A presupposition from NLP is that all NLP should increase choice and wholeness; and in doing so, this will help you create more congruence with uncertainty – and then create a balance between the known and the unknown in your life – which, in turn, can develop into a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset that often accompanies not accessing uncertainty.
