Dilts Pyramid: Why You Have What You Have

Admit it, you sometimes wonder, “Why do I live the way I live?” or "Why do I have what I have?"

If yes, today I want to share with you the answer to this question and tell you about the Dilts pyramid. At least about how I understand it and how I use it for myself and my clients.

Robert Dilts, one of the most famous developer experts in Neuro-Linguistic Programming (I personally love him dearly for his developments for writers and journalists), proposed a pyramid model that is convenient for describing your life.

The peculiarity of the model is that for each of the levels of the pyramid, the answer to the question "Why is this so?" is one level higher.

1. The lower level of the pyramid, the level of your life, your everyday life, answers the question "What do I have?" This applies to your finances, and your work or business, and your home, your family, your social circle, and so on.
2. If you ask yourself the question “Why do I have what I have?”, For an answer you will have to turn to the second level, where your actions are located. This level answers the question "What am I doing?" - and it is obvious that what you end up with depends very much on what you do every day.
3. If you ask the question “Why do I do what I do?”, The answer will lie at the third level, the level of strategy. This level answers the question "How do I choose?" - and it depends on how you make decisions, how you make your choice, what strategy you are guided by ("strive for more" or "not strain", "live for today" or "plan for years", etc.), depends how you will act in each specific situation. For example, will you, after returning home from work, read special literature, play sports - or drink beer in front of the TV. Or will you propose new projects at work and take responsibility for them - or will you try your best to do only familiar and understandable work.
4. If you ask yourself, “Why do I choose what I choose?”, then you have to climb one more level of the Dilts pyramid to get the answer. On the fourth floor are your beliefs, it answers the question "What do I believe in?" And here it is already clear that if you believe that you can only find a good job through connections, you will not be too zealous with your studies. And if you are convinced that perseverance overcomes any obstacles, it is obvious that if something does not work out, it will be natural for you to try again, and again, and again ...
5. Well, if you ask yourself the question “Why do I believe in what I believe in?”, The fifth level of the pyramid, which is responsible for self-awareness and self-identification, will help to figure it out. It answers the question "Who am I?" - and your beliefs largely depend on the answer to this question. It is obvious that a person who says “I am mediocre and useless loser” and a person who says “I am a genius and born to succeed” will have completely different pictures of the world.
6. Finally, the last level of the pyramid is the level of mission, the level of the meaning of life. He answers, as you might guess, the question “Why do I live?” In my opinion, this level is available only to religious people, since it assumes that the meaning of your life lies outside of life itself and is assigned by someone from the outside, and not by you.

Why do you need to know about the Dilts pyramid? Firstly, it allows you to better understand why you live the way you live, and why you have what you have - it allows you to conduct an express analysis of your own life. And secondly, it allows you to understand what exactly needs to be changed in your life in order to get a different result, more pleasing to you - and for this you need to climb a level (or more) up the pyramid.

• As one of the principles of systems analysis says, “the problem usually cannot be solved at the level at which it was posed”

If you are not satisfied with what you have, whether it is the environment or finances, the Dilts model will show that you need to change your actions. If seemingly correct actions do not lead to the desired result, you need to change the strategy as a whole. If it is not clear where to change the strategy, then you need to delve into your beliefs, something is wrong with them. And so on.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, now that you have applied the Dilts model to yourself, have you seen where your life has been slipping, and what needs to be done to stop it slipping?