Some consider this to be the single most important presupposition in the whole of NLP.
The idea was originally developed by Alfred Korzybski, the founder of General Semantics, and in very simple terms means that human beings are always slightly separated from ‘reality’.
People draw internal maps of the world as they experience all life has to offer, but the map is not actually the place it depicts. Thus, we need to be responsive to what is actually happening around us, rather than complaining that things aren’t as they “ought to be”.
Similarly, we need to understand that words are only a kind of shorthand for the things they describe. To borrow a concept from the Hindu and Buddhist schools of thought, words are but a signpost.
To get an inkling of what this means in practice, just look at the words on much of the worlds banknotes. Just what does “promise to pay the bearer” mean exactly?
What would an actual dollar, euro or pound look like, distinct from a coin or bank note which represents and is symbolic of some financial value? While our money may be real, the intrinsic value it attempts to endow is imagined. Cash is a map, a representation of value, but it has no value in itself.
