Once upon a time, I had a plumbing incident. I did not at that stage, link it with NLP. When it got to the weekend, I was looking forward to having a nice relaxing time, but my washing machine decided that I needed to learn to plumb instead. I’d put the washing machine on the night before when I went to bed. But I programmed it to come on the early hours of the morning. (Good tip for saving yourself a bit of money, your electricity is more expensive during peak hours)
I got up in the morning and the washing cycle had completed but the kitchen floor had a puddle on it. All the floors are a little sloped, so I didn’t realise the water had come from the washing machine as it was nowhere near the washing machine. So I put on another wash cycle.
Then it became very, very clear that the water was coming from the washing machine because there was lots of it. I didn’t want to call it an emergency plumber on the weekend and there is a little bit of me that thinks I can do DIY pretty well. I like to think I’m the man of this house, mainly because I’m the only one who lives here. But the point was that I wanted to at least give it a shot. So I did some Googling and looked on YouTube. I think, “I’ve got this.”
I tightened up the screw bits, and I ran the washing machine again, and it leaked. Even worse. I did a bit more googling.
Google said maybe the issue is that your waste pipe is blocked. Now here is where my presupposition finally comes into the mix, the pipe set up was that there was a pipe that came down, the washing machine hose goes into this open pipe, so the pipe comes down. And then there is a u-bend, and then it goes across, and it goes down into the ground.
I figured that if I poured the drain Unblocker, down this long pipe, there was a chance that maybe the blockage was in the horizontal pipe. And unless there was something flushing that drains Unblocker through, it was just going to sit there in the U bend.
So I thought “I’m going to remove the U bend and check that the blockage isn’t in there.” It was not. But this then left me with a further problem, – it could be in the horizontal part but the problem with that is how do I get the drain Unblocker to pour horizontally?
I was telling myself “there’s gonna be something in this house. To help you solve this problem!” I’m like looking around for tubes and pipes, that can I use and here’s what happened: I found a piece of old pipe and I was going to use that to kind of thread it through the pipe and pour the drain Unblocker through the end of it. The problem was the pipe was so stiff, and the drain Unblocker was so thick, that it was never going to pour through.
The only solution that I could come up with was to sit on the kitchen floor and have a little cry. And then I realised, ‘you are an educated, resourceful human being!’ And the presupposition came to me everything you need to succeed is already inside of you, you have all of the resources that you need.
I was quite certain with myself. Or at least, I pretended to be very, very certain with myself. And I told myself, the answer you need to solve this problem is already here. I started to think ‘plumbers probably have this problem all the time. So they must use what they’ve already got.’ And I realised that I could screw the U bend on the other way up!
I screwed it on so that it was above the horizontal pipe and poured the drain unblocker through. Half an hour later, my drain made a burp belch like a fat man in a pub who’d had six pints of beer, and chilli peanuts at which point I knew that my drain was unblocked
I fixed the whole thing back together again and reminded myself that you do have everything you need to succeed, to be able to achieve your desired outcomes in your life. The trick is to tell yourself with absolute certainty that that is the case and to get your brain looking for those particular solutions. Now, I’ve said this before, and I shall say it again. You need to ask yourself the right questions in these situations that you come up against. We want to be avoiding ‘Why can’t I do it?’ Those questions will just direct your brain to look for all of the reasons why you can’t do it can’t solve it and can’t find the answer. This is not helpful for us. The best question to ask yourself, is a how question a good question always will start with how ‘how can I solve this? How can I find what I need? How can I come up with a creative idea here?’
When you ask yourself a question, it gets your brain looking into the outside world to find ideas, experiences, resources that you perhaps hadn’t tuned into yet. Those solutions, ideas and resources, were already out there, they already existed. But what you have to do is to programme your brain to go find them and bring them into your awareness. And you do that by asking yourself good quality questions from the field of NLP.
By Gemma Bailey
www.peoplebuilding.co.uk
