I am now reasonably confident with a ‘sentence’ like <img src =”http://example.typepad.com/image.jpg” />. I can tolerate a whole ‘paragraph’ of HTML code appearing on my screen without panicking and running off elsewhere. There have even been moments when I’ve started to enjoy it: the search for the missing ” / ” that’s messing up a page; borrowing a bit of code from somewhere else and finding it just works… perfectly.

One small triumph was to add an image link without losing my visitors (a key piece of advice from BlogAngel Claire.) As I was working on it I found myself wondering: what is it that’s driving me on to do this? What’s allowing me to achieve these things that I couldn’t have dreamt of a few weeks ago?

The answer was partly determination. But I also realised I was holding a very powerful belief in my mind. It ran along these lines:

I know that it’s possible.
Therefore it is possible for me.
It is simply a matter of how*

This is almost word for word for one of the presuppositions of NLP. It goes like this.

“Possible in the world and possible for me is only a matter of how. There are no limitations in a person’s ability to learn. If any other human being is capable of performing some behaviour then it possible for me to also perform it, through the process of modelling.”

To be honest it’s one of the presuppositions that I have found less than totally to ‘try on’. I catch myself thinking of all the things I clearly “can’t do”. And yet here was a brilliant example of the presupposition working in practice. Holding that belief in mind was enough to get me to crack the code. Possible in the world = possible for me.

And if I can use this to start talking HTML… where might it take me next?!

* How in this example might include cutting and pasting code; using trial and error; seeking help: searching Google, e-mailing Claire, trawling through the Typepad Knowledge Base.