In NLP we have a range of ‘Linguistic presuppositions’, these are words that many of us use and they give an insight into the assumptions that we all make about the world around us.

Very often those assumptions can be very disabling and unhelpful to us.

Whilst there are a range of these linguistic presuppositions, the one I want to focus on today is ‘makes’.

When someone uses the word ‘makes’ in a sentence like “You make me feel undervalued” then what we are actually saying is that we have no agency over our ability to feel valued… And that the other person MAKES us feel valued. The problem then arises, what if this other person isn’t around and we need to feel valued? Where do we look at then?

Taking back agency over our thoughts and behaviours can be incredibly empowering, and this very often starts with us understanding the small linguistic assumptions we make, usually without thinking!

In this podcast I talk about the different ways that ‘makes’ gets used, and how we might think differently if we catch ourselves using this incredibly unhelpful word!