THE EXERCISE THAT CHANGES OUR PARTICIPANTS
Andreas Dorn 
NLP is built on a set of core assumptions. They are called the NLP Presuppositions.
Things like:
👉 People already have the resources they need to succeed.
👉 There's no failure, only feedback.
👉 You are in charge of your mind, and therefore your results.
These are called the NLP Presuppositions and there are 14 of them.
Every NLP Practitioner programme covers them.
Here's how that usually happens, and this is genuinely the standard, not a criticism.
You go through the list together.
Each participant picks the one that resonates most and says why.
Then everyone's invited to carry it forward as a new lens for seeing the world.
I was in the room when Tad James said it himself. In his experience, very few programmes ran a structured exercise around these assumptions at all.
Not that the ones he'd seen did it poorly.
That the exercise, as we now run it, was rare.
We do something different, and it only works because of what comes before it.
By the time our participants reach this point, they've already spent a full day on something called the Meta Model, a set of precision questions that expose exactly where someone's language is vague, distorted, or missing information.
Not an introduction to it.
A full day, with detailed examples, written practice, and a complete live coaching round.
Then participants take these assumptions somewhere nobody's ten-minute version goes.
They use precision questioning, directly, on a partner's actual thinking.
Not to discuss the assumptions.
To use them, in real time, in conversation, to challenge and shift what someone else genuinely believes about their own situation.
That exercise runs three to four hours.
No roleplay, no shortcuts.
It's not a longer version of the standard ten minutes.
It's only possible because the precision tool was given a full day to land first. Skip that day, and there's nothing to actually do with the assumptions beyond agreeing they sound nice.
This is one of the reasons our NLP Practitioner runs across ten days, and why the days run past 7 pm.
Here's what that extra time actually buys.
An assumption you've only discussed stays a nice idea. An assumption you've used, on a real person, in a real conversation, under real pressure, three to four hours of it, stops being something you learned and becomes something your hands know how to do.
This is the exercise our graduates come back to most often, unprompted, months and sometimes years later.
Not because it's the most comfortable three to four hours of the programme.
Often it isn't.
Participants regularly tell us they didn't see something about their own situation until this exercise forced it into view, a perspective they'd been missing entirely, and more than a few have cried getting there.
Not because we ask them to. Because that's what actually noticing something you've avoided for years tends to do to a person.
That's the difference between carrying an idea and having it live in you.
Here's the honest question, whether you've done NLP training or not.
Think of the last idea you found genuinely convincing, in a book, a course, a conference.
Did you do anything with it beyond nodding along?
And three months later, was it actually changing how you think, or had it quietly become just something you remembered agreeing with?
Send me an email and share your experience.
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Categories: : asia mind dynamics, nlp exercise