I went to a very enjoyable Reunion on Friday night for people who went to Northgate Grammar School, Ipswich and who celebrated their fiftieth birthdays this School year. I left the School in the long hot summer of 1976 having taken my \u2018O\u2019 levels, due to my parents moving north, and completed the remainder of my education in Yorkshire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That was 34 years ago. And I had not had any contact with any of my ex-classmates since 1976, other than communication with 3 or 4 people via Friends Reunited and a few emails during the organisation of the event. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It felt very strange prior to the event. I could remember so little about my time there or the people I was with, I felt like I was researching another person\u2019s history rather than retracing my own steps. I didn\u2019t recognise anyone at the event, although I did recognise names. The only person I was sure I knew \u2013 and was very enthusiastic in explaining to him how I remembered him \u2013 I didn\u2019t actually know. I had got the wrong person!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It all fitted with aspects of some training I had been delivering within the NHS on the previous day. We were discussing motivating staff and dealing with people who may appear difficult. Specifically we were looking at the NLP work of Shelle Rose Charvet<\/a>, and my experiences at the Reunion fitted very well with a foundation stone of NLP and Shelle Rose Charvet\u2019s work \u2013 how we use our own personal filters to create our own reality of the world, unlike anyone else\u2019s reality, through the Deletion, Distortion and Generalisation <\/a>of information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We delete things as we can only remember a certain number of pieces of information at any one time \u2013 best estimates suggest that it is around 7 pieces if information from an interaction or discussion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We distort things \u2013 possibly why we have a Lock Ness Monster and large black panthers roaming the country. Closer to home, it explains how we suddenly see something possibly scary, and then realise it\u2019s not quite what we thought it was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And we generalise. People create a view of groups of people, or a personal norm (such as all car sales people are this, or all politicians are that), based on a few interactions or what they have heard from others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And the whole of the Reunion evening \u2013 certainly for me \u2013 was based on Deletions, Distortions and Generalisations. When I left the Reunion, I think my one regret was that I didn\u2019t have any notes or recollections that might have given me a fighting chance of having a personal reality reasonably close to someone else\u2019s personal reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n