Nick Owen - Professional Development - Leadership Development Framework

When people ask me to explain what NLP is and what it can do, I sometimes use this story to explain it through metaphor:

Designer Genes

Everything has a structure. When you drive a car you follow a certain pattern of behaviours in a particular sequence if you wish to accelerate smoothly and safely away from the traffic lights. The same is true for all behaviours and all skills. Following the same patterns in the same sequence, all other things being equal, will always give you the same results.

The ability to seek and identify structures, patterns and designs below the apparent surface of experience is the secret to success in communication, relationships, accelerated learning, languages, and many other things beside.

This is not a new idea. The Storyteller recalled a story from an ancient tradition.

A tinsmith was falsely accused and imprisoned. Being poor, he had no powerful friends to influence the judge. He passed each day considering the various choices that were open to him, for he had no desire to waste his life in jail, especially for something he hadn’t done. But the jail was secure and the warders were vigilant.

One day his wife brought him a prayer mat, and every day, five times a day, he prayed on it.

After a while he made a suggestion to his guards. “I am poor, and it seems probable that I’ll end my days in prison. You are poor too, and poorly paid.What can we do?

"I am a tinsmith by trade. I have a skill but lack what I need. If you bring me tools and materials I can fashion metal into things that you can sell in the market. You will gain and so will I.”

The guards agreed. They brought the things the tinsmith requested and soon they were making profits. The tinsmith bought good food to supplement his meagre rations, and the guards bought the things they’d always wanted.

Then one morning the guards woke up to find the jail door open and the tinsmith gone. Some spoke of magic or perhaps a miracle because no prison in the eastern kingdom was considered more secure.

Many years later a convicted thief confessed to a crime he had committed long ago. As a result, the innocence of the tinsmith was established and he was pardoned in his absence. Two weeks later the tinsmith and his family reappeared.

The governor of the province, curious to know what had happened so many years before, summoned the tinsmith to his palace.

When asked how he had opened the prison door and escaped, the tinsmith said, “It is a question of patterns, and patterns within patterns. Or call it design if you wish.

“My wife is a weaver. She designs rugs, mats and carpets. She weaves patterns into the wefts and warps of her fabric.

“By design she found the man who made the lock of the cell door and gotit from him, by design.

“She wove the design of the lock into the fabric of the prayer mat she made for me. And as I prayed my head touched that very place where by design she had woven the key to the lock. As a tinsmith I recognised the pattern as the design of the inside of a lock.

“But I lacked materials and tools. By design I suggested a business proposition to my guards. I then designed certain things that could be sold in the market ensuring the materials I needed for these artefacts would be what I needed to make the key.

“And so, by design, I escaped.”

We are all born with a brain, the Storyteller said, but with no instructions about how to use it. The brain is an instrument of the most amazing power. But many people never learn how to use it effectively. This is a pity because effective ways of thinking and using our brain can be taught and learned.

When we begin to understand the patterns and structures of our thinking, we can start to liberate ourselves from enslavement to our limitations.

Reprinted from: The Magic of Metaphor: 77 Stories for Teachers, Trainers, and Thinkers, by Nick Owen, Crown House Publishing

Original source: Sufi Tradition

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