It’s never too late to have a happy childhood
Sunday, April 26th, 2009“It’s never too late to have a happy childhood” is a phrase attributed to the co-founder of NLP Richard Bandler. This is a reference to how NLP techniques (and in this case especially Time Lines) can help improve the way we feel and interact with the world. Time Lines are a particularly powerful way of generating resources that we have within us or can develop from without to help us make empowering changes for the rest of our lives. Notice that I did not use the term future because if our head is always in the future we will never be able to live in the present. Conversely if our head is always in the past we also will not be able to live fully in the present.
Put simply we are all connected in our minds with thoughts and feelings about past and future that have a powerful bearing on how we feel in the present. If you imagine your past as a line connecting yourself to the present and the same with your goals and hopes for the future you would probably visualise this line behind you for the past and in front of you for the future. This is what in NLP we call a Time Line.
The interesting thing about time and memory is that it is not set in stone and time can change memories as much as two people can have different memories about the same event. The beauty of being able to use this technique is that it gives us the opportunity to make adjustments and empowering changes to how past experiences affect our present and future. So “it’s never too late to have a happy childhood” doe not mean that we can change history but it does mean that it is within our power to use our present knowledge and understanding to alter and adjust the way past experiences affect our present and future.