Map and territory
Korzybski's principle, central to NLP: a person's mental map of reality is not reality itself.
Borrowed from Alfred Korzybski's general semantics, this presupposition is the single most-cited idea in NLP. Each person constructs a partial, distorted, generalized model of reality and behaves as if that model were reality. Effective coaching works on the map, not the territory: you change the model the person carries, and behavior shifts to match.
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