Beliefism - Community Café Reflections Our latest Community Café dug into another fascinating question, exploring Beliefism, NLP tools for navigating disagreement, and how critical thinking is evolving—especially for Gen Z. Back to blog posts March 10th 2026 Personal Reflections Share Tweet LinkedIn Pin Is there a propensity for us (humans) to have a negative bias towards people who disagree with us? It may sound obvious... someone disagrees with us and we might begin to feel mistrustful of them... defensive because we feel attacked... Does it matter how they frame their disagreement? Do subsequent views that they hold, beliefs or even their values, become tainted just because they disagreed with us on one particular point? This was the starting point of our journey for the February ANLP Community Café... “Beliefism: How to Stop Hating the People We Disagree With” (Paul Dolan, 2025) was introduced early this month with the reflection on how NLP can give us the strategies to reduce this possibility. We discussed the Dilts model of Logical Levels, the Communication model, the map is not the territory... Can we also use perceptual positions to put us in a place to appreciate the new perspective? Can we model the opinion... try it on to see how it feels? And does that make us better placed to listen (as objectively as possible) to that person when they offer another opinion, feedback or observation? What do you think? The discussion went deeper and more insightful and moved on to how this plays out in critical thinking and the particular impact within the Education sector... Do Gen Z think critically? Are we spoon fed information and take it at face value because of external pressures (peer pressure, time pressure, financial pressure, etc.). Are the external pressures real or are they “excuses” to allow ourselves the permission to accept “face value”? That’s really the point of the community cafes! The vibrant and challenging questions, the insight each participant gains and the learning we take away is extraordinary. We, the ANLP team, have always received something new from these discussions and we are grateful for the mental stimulation that everyone who comes along gives. Everyone gets to speak and everyone has an observation, view or belief that is aired and reflected on... it’s a wonderful safe space to explore concepts and find where NLP fits in... and how we can celebrate our NLP learnings even more! Join us for the next Café in March... you can find dates and links exclusively on your Member dashboard.
