Have you ever had a belief or paradigm that has held you back?  For example, a belief or paradigm that exercise is hard, or eating healthy means food is tasteless, or that participants hate training that is mandatory?  

These beliefs or paradigms often lead us to having presuppositions about things.  A presupposition is something that is tacitly assumed beforehand at the beginning of a line of argument or course of action.  For example, in the statement "all vegetarians must be healthy", there are presuppositions about what vegetarians eat, or that vegetarians only eat healthy food, or that eating vegetarian food must be healthy.   

It's interesting to explore what your existing presuppositions might be with regard to training and learning.  

They often show up as beliefs that we have, that we didn't know we had, and sometimes they can be supportive... and sometimes, they may not be.  

The following are a bunch of what I believe to be useful presuppositions to hold, and they are a mix of things from NLP and from my own experience of training.

You don't have to believe them, however  I recommend trying them on FIRST as perceptual filters.  Find out if they are useful when training and if you like them, use them as if they were true.

• Your model of the world is not THE model of the world.  Everyone has his or her own unique model of the world.
• Everyone does the best they can with the resources they have available to them.
• Everyone already has the internal resources they need to solve their own problems.
• There is a distinction between a person and the behaviour they exhibit.  The behaviour a person exhibits is separate from the intention of that behaviour. Always assume the intention is positive.
• The meaning of a communication is the response it elicits.
• In interactions between people, those with the most flexibility and variation of behaviour will be the most successful. This known as the “law of requisite variety”.
• If what you are doing isn’t working, try something (anything) different.

And my personal favourites:

• There is no such thing as a difficult participant -  just an inflexible trainer.
• There is no such thing as a boring topic – just a boring trainer.

Three things:

1. Try on the presuppositions and see how they feel
2. Check in on what existing presuppositions you have about yourself and your participants.  Are they supportive….or not?
3. Look for new and different presuppositions that support you and your audience.