14 November 2021

Week 2021-45: Joseph O'Connor - Collected Quotes

 "Any single person's viewpoint will have blind spots caused by their habitual ways of perceiving the world, their perceptual filters [...] How can we shift our perceptions to get outside our own limited world view?" (Joseph O'Connor & John Seymour, "Introducing Neuro-Linguistic Programming: Psychological Skills for Understanding and Influencing People", 1990)

"Emotions make excellent servants, but tyrannical masters." (Joseph O'Connor & John Seymour, "Introducing Neuro-Linguistic Programming: Psychological Skills for Understanding and Influencing People", 1990)

"Free your expectation of the future from the grip of past failure." (Joseph O'Connor & John Seymour, "Introducing Neuro-Linguistic Programming: Psychological Skills for Understanding and Influencing People", 1990)

"If you go through the world looking for excellence, you will find excellence. If you go through the world looking for problems you will find problems." (Joseph O'Connor & John Seymour, "Introducing Neuro-Linguistic Programming: Psychological Skills for Understanding and Influencing People", 1990)

"Once a response becomes a habit, you stop learning. Theoretically, you could act differently, but in practice you do not. Habits are extremely useful, they streamline the parts of our lives we do not want to think about. [...] But there is an art to deciding what parts of your life you want to turn over to habit, and what parts of your life you want to continue to learn from and have choice about. This is a key question of balance." (Joseph O'Connor & John Seymour, "Introducing Neuro-Linguistic Programming: Psychological Skills for Understanding and Influencing People", 1990)

"Questions are also interventions. A good question can take a person's mind in a completely new direction and change his life. For example, ask yourself frequently, 'What is the most useful question to ask now?" (Joseph O'Connor & John Seymour, "Introducing Neuro-Linguistic Programming: Psychological Skills for Understanding and Influencing People", 1990)

"The best way to find out what you are capable of is to pretend you can do it. Act 'as if' you can. What you can't do, you won't. If it really is impossible, don't worry, you'll find that out. (And be sure to set up appropriate safety measures if necessary.) As long as you believe it is impossible, you will actually never find out if it is possible or not." (Joseph O'Connor & John Seymour, "Introducing Neuro-Linguistic Programming: Psychological Skills for Understanding and Influencing People", 1990)

"True learning involves learning other ways of doing what you can do already." (Joseph O'Connor & John Seymour, "Introducing Neuro-Linguistic Programming: Psychological Skills for Understanding and Influencing People", 1990)

"We all have beliefs and expectations from our personal experience; it is impossible to live without them. Since we have to make some assumptions, they might as well be ones that allow us freedom, choice and fun in the world, rather than ones that limit us. You often get what you expect to get." (Joseph O'Connor & John Seymour, "Introducing Neuro-Linguistic Programming: Psychological Skills for Understanding and Influencing People", 1990)

"When we believe something, we act as if it is true." (Joseph O'Connor & John Seymour, "Introducing Neuro-Linguistic Programming: Psychological Skills for Understanding and Influencing People", 1990)

"Words are anchors for sense experience, but the experience is not the reality, and the word is not the experience. Language is thus two removes from reality. To argue about the real meaning of a word is rather like arguing that one menu tastes better than another because you prefer the food that is printed on it. [...] To come to believe that the external world is patterned by the way we talk about it is even worse than eating the menu - it is eating the printing ink on the menu. Words can be combined and manipulated in ways that have nothing to do with sensory experience." (Joseph O'Connor & John Seymour, "Introducing Neuro-Linguistic Programming: Psychological Skills for Understanding and Influencing People", 1990)

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