Instead, we focus on what people are doing, on what we are doing. It’s less threatening and more empowering; we can always change, alter or transform our behaviour if we are not getting the results we are looking for.

The challenge is that it’s all too easy to treat people as nouns, because that way we can put people into neatly defined categories and put labels on them. Yet people’s behaviour is way too complex to be labelled in such a simplistic way. what’s more, labels don’t allow for change, for pesonal growth and development.

We need to learn to look at people in terms of their behaviour and the context for that behaviour, rather than trying to build a model of their personality or using psychological typing to put people into boxes.

It’s a challenge, but Cognitive Behavioural Therapy in general, and NLP in particular provide tools for doing this. I’ll post more info on this over time but for now remember – you are not a noun, a thing. You are a verb, a doing, and if you don’t like what you are doing, you can always change it!