NLP is acting as if you have...

the best way to act as if something will work is to model, process-map a winning strategy. There's another school of thought that says choosing to feel something allows you to experience the energies you have stored in your body, and that there's value in trying on pleasurable states.

NLP allows you to entrain the energies and perspectives of a winning subject, that's part of the process-mapping of the strategy. What we study becomes a part of us. Simply by studying a behavior we internalize their characteristics, like a matrix gobbling machine ingesting code in the form of vibrations, we entrain each other's rhythms.

What I found is that much of NLP I was doing naturally, and that the formal study has helped me grow. I recommend newcomers to NLP read this book: The Rainbow Machine: Tales From A NeuroLinguist's Journal.