Which is more important, nurture or nature? Some people with advanced degrees can effectively argue one way or the other.
Bottom line is people come with two things most animals don’t:
Tons of Instincts
Tons of Learning Abilities
Animals respond without thinking. They put rats in a cage, and set up a lever that will give them a sexual thrill. The rats pressed the lever so much that they stopped eating and drinking and eventually died.
Slave to their passions.
Humans are different, right? Well, next time you’re out and about, how many overweight people do you see? Just for the sake of argument, let’s assume that fully half of those people that would have a BMI of greater than 30 are just fine with that, have huge levels of self esteem, and don’t care what other people think.
That leaves the other half, who are overweight, and would like to change, but for the life of them can’t figure out how.
We can look at human history and see why. For the longest time, humans were hard wired to eat as much as possible whenever they saw food.
Nowadays, when there’s a fast food joint ever five feet, this doesn’t work out so much.
Sure, we can learn what foods to eat, reverse engineer our caloric needs and only eat the foods that are consciously chosen to give us maximum energy with minimum calories.
But we all know how well THAT works out!
Suffice it to say that there are plenty of cases where our human instincts can easily trump even the best laid plans.
It doesn’t help when advertisers know this, and prey on our weaknesses. Nor does it help when politicians, religious organizations and other “authority” figures seduce us against our conscious best interests by appealing to our “animal natures.”
One powerful skill you can learn when studying NLP is to “dissociate” from any given situation, and figure out the best course of action, regardless of what your emotions are screaming.
Freeze time for a moment, and step outside your body. Look out into your future, and see what it looks like based on what you’re choosing to do. Which decisions now would give you the best future.
Now, this may not sound like a lot of fun, but what if foregoing a little bit of emotional pleasure now can give you loads of it out in the future? What if putting off doing something now will give you the freedom to enjoy it much more in the future?
Sure, it feels good to enjoy a couple greasy slices of pizza, but it feels much better when YOU plan to enjoy them, and YOU can look forward to enjoying them, and YOU create the environment in which you’ll enjoy them.
After all, it’s much better to have a bunch of cool stuff out in the future that YOU created, and are waiting for you now, rather than letter your animal nature be pulled around every which way by advertisers and other con artists.
Instead of seeing all those things as temptations to be avoided, try them on as suggestions to create a compelling future.