NLP Concept of Personality

NLP Concept of Personality

           Many people think that personality is something that can be made by a couple of days training session. I know a number of personality development experts who charges hundreds of dollars per training session. They provide certain tips on how to talk, how to walk, how to dress, how to deal etc. Many people believe that dressing well and talking nicely are the symbols of a good personality. As part of our personality development struggle, we wear tie and shoes even without considering the climate!

         

          According to the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung personality comes from the word ‘Persona’ meaning of which is a ‘mask’ used in dramas to create different characters on stage, designed on one hand to make a definite impression upon others and on the other to conceal the true nature of the individual. That means the personality which we develop in a training session is just a physical adjustment for an immediate requirement, say for example to get over an interview.

          The personality of a person represents his character which stands out from that of others or it is the behaviour that makes the difference for the person from others. Personality should include physical, mental, emotional and social characteristic of an individual. Therefore you cannot develop it in a mere training program. Of course you can help a person to build a ‘mask’ for him.

          A ‘pleasing personality’ doesn’t represent the ‘real person’. The real person is beyond his present pleasing persona. Here, the question is how the ‘real person’ gets formed or what is the process of building the ‘personality’? Elizabeth B. Hurlock in her famous book “Developmental Psychology - a lifespan approach” written for the medical students explains how the personality is developed throughout the life from babyhood to old age stage. According to her a person acquires every attributes and almost all talents through perceptual experience from the ecology where he has born and brought up. Family, relatives, peer groups, educational institutes, social organizations and the society are part of the ecology.

          The mind (central nervous system) filters the sensory input (visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory and gustatory) that we have received from our ecology as mentioned above and allows only a limited amount of information into the conscious mind. What are these filters? There are no physical filters. We are talking about the unconscious mental filters. Actually the Filters are perceptions processed and stored in the unconscious mind till the present moment. When we perceive new realities the filters influence it during the cognitive process. Hence the reality is not being recorded in the brain as it is.

         

          What are the filters? Our memories, experiences, values, believes, thinking pattern, attitude developed, knowledge of language,  common sense, time awareness, space concerns etc are unconscious filters. They are unconscious filters because they are not part of our conscious awareness. They will either come out along with the new sensory inputs or during the thinking process.

As we have already discussed the filters are mostly created by the ecology and hence the personality of a person is the result of a continuous process starting from babyhood stage to the old age stage. However most of the personal attributes are developed by the end of adolescence or during the beginning of adulthood.

          How the filters affect our perception or what is happening during filtration? Say for example Sally is a village girl. Sally’s perception is in such a way that she believes all mother-in-laws does not treat daughter-in-laws well. She marries a village boy. During one of her honeymoon days unusually Sally’s mother-in-law asks her to wash her cloth because she is not well? But Sally thinks that her mother in law is lying, ‘all mother-in-laws are devils, and how dare she asked me to wash her dirty cloth.’ Whereas if Sally has a different perception that most of the mother in laws are cool and may be some of them are not good, her approach will be entirely different. Figure 2 below shows how the internal representation or internal map formed after the filtration process.

This kind of filtration process is called generalization. Sally generalizes that all mother-in-laws are devils! The child bitten by a dog generalizes that all dogs are dangerous. Generalization happens when a person categorizes his experiences to a group based on the meanings he has given to it and afterwards he includes a new experience that would have a different meaning into the same group.

Doctors sometime consider only the external symptoms and prescribe medicines thus ignore the root causes. Destructive criticizers always see negatives in a person and they never appreciate the positives. This type of filtration is termed as deletion. Deletion is a process by which we selectively pay attention to certain aspects of our experience and exclude others.

Some managers without any proper enquiry arrive at an opinion about subordinates based on negative comments from others. Some people never accept criticism and are never ready to change and think that they are perfect. This type of filtration is called distortion. Distortion is the process which allows us to make shifts in the way we experience the sensory data.

We can conclude that no event has meaning on its own, we give meaning to it during the process of thinking using our internal cognitive input that we already have. This kind of generalization, deletion and distortion will take place when a person receives sensory inputs. The end result of perception after filtration is termed as Internal Representation or Internal Map.