Behaviour and its Positive Intention

Behavior and its Positive Intention

Presupposition 3: Underlying every behavior there is a positive intention.

          There is a driving force behind every work. Science says without force no work or action is possible. Work = Force x Displacement is a very familiar formula among students. Here displacement means a change from one position to another. Keep this in mind let us think about the statement ‘underlying every behaviour there is a positive intention’.

         

          It may be little difficult to understand this statement at once because there is a word ‘positive’. If we remove ‘positive’ the statement may be acceptable to more people. Everybody agree that there must be an intention behind behaviour and the intention is the driving force.

          Then, what is a positive intention? When we talk about positive, definitely negative also comes into picture. Positive doesn’t mean ‘good’, it’s a common mistake. Most students make similar mistakes in addressing their teachers they use ‘teacher’ for females and ‘sir’ for males!

          Anything supports or gives advantage to a particular goal is considered to be positive for that goal and the other therefore is negative.

          Read the above sentence once again carefully. What does it mean? Positive is a relative term with respect to a goal. You are well aware of the positive and negative terminals of a magnet. Both attract metals and you can’t say one is more powerful than the other. And the important thing is that both are part of the same physical body!

          Let us come to the point. Underlying every behavior, there is a positive intention. Positive and negative intentions are relative terms to be considered based on the context and not the content. The positive intention in a particular context may be negative in another context. Say for example a teacher punishes a student. What is the positive intention underlying it? Intention is ‘changing the bahaviour of the student’. For some students and their parents the ‘act’ of that teacher is the ‘behaviour with negative intention’.  So the ‘act punishment’ is positive for some body and negative for some others.

          Why do babies cry? To draw attention of parents to achieve their needs! So the positive intention is ‘drawing attention’. A child kisses his mother to show his love. What is the intention behind drinking alcohol? If we ask we get the answers to get rid of tension, to enjoy the kick, for the company sake, to forget the sorrows etc! Smokers also give a similar response. These are the positive intension to the person who drink or smoke. And its consequences may create negative impacts for the person itself or family or the society.

          Why Jean Valjean stole the bread in the novel ‘Les Miserables’, written by Victor Hugo? - To feed his sister’s children during an economic depression. But the court sentenced him to jail! The positive intention was feeding the children.

           

          Positive intention behind capital punishment is to give a message to the society as well as to protect the society from the criminals. But the court in fact commits a criminal activity! Since the intention is positive the society agrees it. In every case we have seen that there is a positive intention behind the behaviour. Without that positive intention person will not produce that particular behaviour. And that intention may not be good for the person himself, for the family or the society.

          Since behaviour is a result of intention we can change the behaviour without changing the intention or in other words if we know the positive intention we can change the behaviour, if it produces negative impacts. How? Let the person achieve the result of the intention through some other bahaviour which produces positive impacts.

          Say for example the child cries and the intention is to get milk. If you give milk it stops crying. However you don’t have milk at that time or due to some reasons you are unable to feed milk at that time. What will you do? The child keeps on crying. You have to give him something to stop his hunger and the feed should be tasty and may be a similar liquid. When the intention achieves the child stops crying.

          Friends, in NLP the child is your unconscious mind. Your unconscious produces most of your unwanted habits and behaviours as a result of your stalked internal representations. There is a positive intention underlying that action. No actions without intention. So to change your bad habits and behaviour find the positive intention behind it first.

          Children who get no care, no love, no enjoyment and no support may try to get rid of the distress and frustration by drinking or smoking. The solution is to provide them care, love, enjoyment and support somehow. Most of the headaches are the results of physical or mental problems which try to draw your attention producing the headache. Unless you attend and solve the problems permanently you will never get rid of the headache permanently.

 

          You have to provide more choices and resources so that the unconscious will go for the better choice which will support the positive intention. Everybody perform the best they can with the available resources based on their internal map and the ecology (context) they are functioning.

         

          So the major constraint is the inaccessibility of choices and resources. The role of NLP is not only in finding positive intention but also in providing accessibility to choices and resources. There are effective NLP therapies and techniques to help people this regard. So the presupposition is underlying every behavior there is a positive intention.