For many people the idea of divorce calls to mind painful thoughts (In NLP we call these “negative anchors”). And certainly this often may be the case because, when people get married they both agree to be partners together. Their hopes and dreams usually become bound up with one another. They share duties; they share responsibilities; and they share expectations. But when people decide to divorce these shared expectations can’t help but change.
Still, it seems to me that all processes come to an end. Whether something as transient as a thought or something slower like a passing emotion,
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Category : Blog |
Upon seeing someone you work with do something inexplicable have you ever had the thought, “I think that person must be broken somehow. Otherwise, how could they be like they are?”
My friend likes to remind her husband, “I know you don’t agree but really, I mean really, I am not a broken you that needs to be fixed.”
A real conversation I overheard between two business associates reminding me of this...
We have all met people with charisma. A warm smile, that intense look, feelings like there is something extraordinary when you are around them.
Real charisma is a way of "being," not a way of acting. We are each more than the sum of our behaviors. The charismatic phenomena comes from being genuinely who you are at a deeper level while in a connected relationship with another individual. The deep significance of that understanding is what we help people realize in our Authentic Public Speaking class.
Read on to learn more about charisma, why you might want to learn it, charisma basics, and an introduction about how to be charismatic.
This past weekend 12 people met for two days of intense and emotional self-study that we call Authentic Public Speaking. The program is different from a lot of other public speaking classes in that we don't teach much about platform skills. You can get those at Toastmasters. 
What we teach is how to connect with your own highest values, how to connect with your mind to your own heart, how to connect with your audience at a very deep level, and how to speak authentically from what is really important to you, even when you are sharing the most mundane information.
In doing this, people get over their fears of being in front of an audience. I have had a professional manager and former...
As many of you know, I love to study language and meaning. My interest in how people come to believe strange things has led me to study linguistics and semiotics. One of the principles that I've learned from this study is that statements don't mean anything inherently if you don't ...
Why did this YouTube Video become so popular?
Double Rainbow All the Way
When Mr. Paul 'Bear' Vasquez, shot this video of the double rainbow from his front yard just outside the Yosemite National Park, his excitement and enthusiasm became an Internet sensation. But why? In talking to people about this video I’ve ...
No it's not something I overheard Saturday night in a bar. It is a mnemonic that helps you remember the different classes of values that may be driving a person's behavior -- a useful list to remember if you want to help motivate them appropriately.
Whether you are a salesperson, or a manager, or parent, or a spouse, we are always influencing the people around us. But most of the time we try to motivate others with whatever carrot or stick we think would best motivate us. And that is why we get ourselves into trouble and can seem manipulative. People love to be motivated, but they want you to motivate them respectfully using their criteria, not yours.
NLP is one of the most pragmatic models I know of for learning to understand and be effective with people’s minds. Both your own and when working with others. But the fun thing about humans is that they are all different. In many ways of course they are similar but when it comes to how their thoughts are organized we diverge infinitely. That is why if you study humans you can never be bored.
Recently I was watching a good NLP Trainer do his shtick and admiring how many great tools he was using to help his students gain understanding in this crazy set of distinctions we call Neuro-Linguistic Programming. He was great at using negative examples and wonderful at evoking learning states in his students. He got them motivated and kept them on the edge of their seats. And he reminded me of a lesson I learned many years ago from David Gordon.
Here was my spectacularly great plan: I'd find ten or fifteen people who lived in Central Texas, had lost over 100 pounds, and kept it off 10+ years. Warning! Contains personal experience, failures, blinds spots, and even a little hope for the future.
Some changes are easier to make when we simply change our environment.
Why won't illogical thinking and superstitious thinking won't go away? -- it serves us better than scientists realize. People get value from it. More personal value perhaps than they get from science and logical thinking.
The logical positivist idea that cause and effect are primary does not align very well in the human domain of every day experience. This is due to the complex (at the edge of chaos) nature of the dynamic systems that are our body-minds and our cultures.
According to traditional science, variables should be isolated so that you can tell what is causing what effects. But this is impractical in the complex domains. There is rarely a single cause for anything. Most causes are multiple and circular rather than linear. That is, independent agents with many many potential variables are acting from separate locations and contexts with different independent goals such that cause and effect never happens the same way twice.
Rather certain patterns (what chaos theory calls "strange attractors") emerge out of massive collections of behaviors at a lower logical level where the agents are all acting to preserve their requisite homeostasis and attain the resources they need to fulfill their own wants and satisfy their own needs. So similar patterns arise in an apparently stable configuration, but this stability is dependent upon complex feedback loops in the logical level keeping the whole higher level structure in homeostasis.
Therefore it is not possible to point to a particular cause but only a collective tendency.
Nevertheless, if this arising homeostasis is sufficiently stable, new logical levels can be built upon its dependable stability.
The social sciences have missed this structural understanding and thus base their theories upon an epistemology of linear cause and effect that is only possible in the extremely stable domains of chemistry and physics.
We need a different epistemological basis to understand the domains of biology and psychology. One based in circular cybernetic cause and effect, homeostasis - balancing feedback, accelerating feedback, strange attractors, power curves, f curves, etc.
Then we can realize that people live in a homeostatic map of their experience not in experience itself. Their psychology is based upon continual cycles of predicting what causes will create what effects and updating their maps based upon sensory based interactions with the results of their actions in the world driven by needs and desires.
Because we live in our maps not in a logical positivist reality and because those maps are dynamic, we intuitively recognize that scientific logical thinking is not good enough. We must self reflect in order to learn. We are instinctually driven to learn because it provides survival value. We can accomplish more the more skills we have and the more knowledge we understand.
When people use tarot or the i-ching or go to a psychic or palm reader for advice or turn to religion for solace and understanding, scientist are dismayed because they are putting their faith in "superstitious" thinking. In reality, people are intuitively recognizing that linear cause-effect does not actually work in the domain of the mind. They have a need for news of difference in order to self-reflect and grow themselves. Oracles and religion provide a practical way to meet this need and allow the person to explore and uncover new "truths" about themselves and their experience.
Logical positivist scientists need to update their understanding of the world to recognize the truth that we can never really know "The Truth," because we all operate in maps of reality rather than reality itself and these maps are generated from non-linear processes that don't allow for linear cause and effect explanations.
Hawaii-born World Champion surfer Andy Irons started surfing because he rode his first wave and experienced a moment he called one of the purest moments of his life.
He kept surfing for the competition, for the chicks, for the party, for the cool cars. All those reasons became "just stuff." Surfing kept him on an "even keel." At times, surfing was just a job for him. Life isn't always poetic or glorious.
When you allow yourself to be drawn into those "pure" moments in life that are filled with beauty and passion, beauty and passion are awakened and amplified in you. Other people can recognize beauty and passion in your story, amongst the mundane humdrum, and they have the opportunity to recognize their own beautiful, passionate moments, too.
What's one of the "pure" moments in your life that continues to inspire or intrigue you?
To learn more about Andy Irons' perspective on surfing, watch this 4-minute video, including some beautiful surfing footage.
NLP Calibration skills are the ability to see, hear, and feel more than others do and to be able to use this extra information to good advantage as you communicate, learn, direct, and guide other people.
Imagine what you can do if you have Milton Erickson’s ability to notice how a person’s heartbeat and breathing are changing. You could tell when they are getting excited, even if they are trying to remain calm, cool, and collected on the outside. This sort of information can be valuable for managers, salespersons, or parents to know.
These skills have been taught since the early 1970’s as part of the standard NLP trainings. And people are often concerned that they provide an unfair advantage to people who know how to use them.
The ethical question is a real one. The great science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke said that, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And this is true. A simple bic lighter, a taser, and a cell phone would have made you God-like to Stone Age man.
But like most ethical concerns, the question comes down to how people use them. People generally like to be manipulated as long as it is toward their own benefit and with their permission. Your intention behind how you use a tool is important. And so are the results you leave in your wake. You can use a hammer to build a cathedral, or to hit someone over the head. But if you drop a nail from 5 stories up and accidentally kill someone, no one is going to agree that your good intentions were enough.
Use your super-powers for good, not evil.
For more considerations about the ethics of knowing more than other people, check out this article from the Jan 1, 2011 New York Times on how machines are learning to calibrate: Computers That See You and Keep Watch Over You and ask yourself whose best interests our free-enterprise, capitalism-based, mega-corporations have at heart? Will they manipulate you toward what you want? Or are they more likely to change the “meaning” of what is normal until it reflects what they want you to buy like they have done to women with the “fashion” industry?
What are the Ethics when it is Machine Ethics vs Human ethics? What are the Ethics when it is Individual Ethics vs Corporate Oligarchy Ethics?
The more power is concentrated, the more inhumane and unjust the unintended consequences.
~ Keith
It’s the New Year!
Don’t you think this time of year naturally brings a certain nostalgia and self-reflection?
We’ve chipped away another calendar year and 2011 affords the new opportunity to create something new and worthwhile. You are more experienced and perhaps wiser. Optimism abounds because everywhere people are recreating themselves and planning new opportunities.
Was it a good year or bad? Easy or tough? Did you have goals? What meaning do you make of it all? What were your accomplishments in 2010? What new friends did you make? How did you connect with family, friends, and lovers? Have you taken time to reflect on what you did this year?
This time each year, Katie and I take a few minutes to review the past calendar and gather together the pictures from the previous year. Gratitude, meaning and beauty all result from taking a second look.
Consider this simple question: When were you at your best in 2010?
To help, here is a memento you can use to tickle your memory as you review 2010. I’ll bet you find the process enjoyable and revealing whether you decide to share it or not. Drop us a line on Facebook if you’re willing to share your discoveries. We like to celebrate our friend’s accomplishments!
~Keith Fail
In NLP we know that your ability to get yourself to do the things you want and need to do is often affected by your emotions -- your feelings about other people, your feelings about your situation, your feelings about yourself. If you feel empowered then it is easier to get going at making things happen.
We teach ways to set up “Anchors” that you can use to change your or another person’s feelings instantaneously. Often these anchors are through a gentle and intentional touch. But they can also be a particular visual cue like a facial expression or a particular gesture.
You’ve experience the power of anchors before if you have ever heard an old song and suddenly remembered how you used to feel when you heard it originally. The “They are playing our song” phenomenon. Or if you have walked into someone’s house who was cooking a particular food and suddenly been transported on the smell back to your grandmother’s house. Anchors are any trigger that cause us to respond. And mostly, as beginner NLPers, we want to use them to access positive emotional responses – we call these positive resource anchors.
Well recently, one of Katie and my friends, Jacque Weiss came up with an amazing set of musical anchors that I want you to know about. She began dreaming and receiving through her own creative channels a set of short affirmations in the form of musical jingles. They worked so well to help her change here own life that her friends started asking her to teach them the jingles. One thing led to another and now she has released a CD with a bunch of them. It is fantastic!
Check it out here. You can download a free example here to get an idea of what I am talking about.
Each one evokes a positive resource state in a short and memorable phrase or two. And because she sings them and they are catchy, you will find yourself singing along and learning them for yourself. That is where the real magic kicks in.
In NLP we often say that “If what you are doing isn’t working, try something different.” You have to change the way you think to change the way you behave. And that changes your life. Well Jacque’s Joyas (Jingles Of Your Affirmations) will change the way you think forever.
For advanced NLPers, you will notice that she is using several clever NLP language patterns in the design of these. First, she uses her language to access POSITIVE resource states. Then she uses a second phrase to meta-state the first resource state, al la Michael Hall’s Meta-States work. This helps to stabilize the positive resource and drive it deeper into the listener’s neurology. A truly beautiful example of unconscious competence with language.
Exercise: Download the free sample and commit to learning it and using it for a week. If you don’t find yourself singing it to yourself as a positive resource anchor for your own life within the first 7 days, I’ll give you your money back.
Seriously, I think you will really enjoy it and want to purchase the whole CD. It comes with a set of the Joyas cards for $20 so that you can also place reminders around your space in key places to help you drive them deeper into your subconscious minds. You can pick it up at: http://www.thejoyas.com/joyas.html
Katie and I have been using them and enjoying them for several months and may even bring Jacque to town to do a workshop in the near future. Check it out.
Keith Fail is an NLP Trainer and Coach in Austin, Texas, and Director of NLP Resources Austin. He writes and speaks about tools and techniques that help people live their dreams. He works with teams and individuals to create environments and communities that support a better world. He can be reached at +1-512-507-5464.
Hey NLPers! Steve Andreas posted a really neat video in his blog last week (2010.12.14) that advanced NLPers will want to watch. He calls it Using Reframing Patterns Recursively and it shows what happens when you combine an insight similar to one of David Grove’s insights from Clean Language / Clean Space with the traditional NLP Sleight of Mouth Patterns.
Grove discovered what he calls the “Rule of Six” Iterations. When you ask the same question, such as “Who else are you?” or "What do you know from there?" over and over again, at first the person answers from their current map of reality. But somewhere about the fifth or sixth time you ask the same question the client tends to run out beyond the edges of their own map. Penny Tomkins and James Lawley, who wrote Metaphors in Mind about David Grove’s work, label that experience the “wobble.” They say that you can calibrate the moment when a person is expanding their map because they become hesitant and there is a sort of stutter effect while they explore something completely new. David Grove calls the newly expanded information “emergent knowledge.”
Steve Adreas explored iterative questioning during the 2010 Advanced Master Training in Colorado this Summer. In his blog article he says,
“The first training segment begins with an example of using the “prior cause” reframing pattern recursively with a client: “And that’s because. . . ?” This simple intervention can lead to a powerful shift in a client’s perspective. Even more exciting is that there are many similar interventions possible using the same simple principle of using the standard NLP reframing patterns in this recursive way.”
“…this video, uses a content-free sentence stem, along with supporting nonverbal analog gestures. These little distinctions can make a big difference in getting results with clients, and Steve is careful to point out many subtle points to aid you in becoming a more effective communicator. This is followed by a review of how all the different reframing patterns can be understood as ways to change the scope, category, or logical level of someone’s internal representations. (For more background on scope and category, please refer to Steve’s excellent 2-volume work Six Blind Elephants.) A demonstration of using the “smaller frame” pattern recursively is followed by an exercise.”
Steve is an incredible teacher and demonstrates the power of conversational reframing. Check out the Video.
Those of you in the NLP Master Practitioner Training with Tom Best are about to learn about the Sleight of Mouth patterns. Also, I am hoping to do an advanced study group on the topic later this year so that we can all get more practice using them. So let me know if you are interested.
Keith Fail is an NLP Trainer and Coach in Austin, Texas, and Director of NLP Resources Austin. He writes and speaks about tools and techniques that help people live their dreams. He works with teams and individuals to create environments and communities that support a better world. He can be reached at +1-512-507-5464.
The journal Science last week (2010.12.10) published an article relating to the mind and dieting that is getting a lot of attention. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh finally discovered that the way we think about food makes a difference in how much we eat.
The worst way to think about food is to “flash” on semi-unconscious images of things that you are craving. If you visualize food and then try to put it out of your mind it is like trying not to think of a Stephen King monster. Once you’ve tried NOT to, it is too late; your body-mind has already responded to the stimulus. Your salivary glands have already kicked off, and your stomach is already growling.
Doctor Carey Morewedge’s research was based on a variety of experiments where subjects were presented with various images of food (in this case, M&Ms and cheese cubes) and coins. They were asked to respond by imagining themselves eating the M&Ms that they saw. The results showed that participants who imagined eating a bunch of M&Ms actually ate almost half as much as those who imagined eating only a few or who imagined other behaviors like eating cheese cubes or putting coins in a laundry machine. Conclusion: If you visualize eating your food in advance, you won't feel compelled to eat as much later.
But many of the articles I’ve seen in the press are mis-reporting that if you "visualize yourself eating" the food you are craving, you are less likely to pig-out on it when you actually get it on your plate. Not to nit-pick too much, but in NLP we know that the language we use can make a big difference -- and this description is worse than inadequate, it may lead dieters in exactly the wrong direction.
Imagining what you are going to eat before you eat it is a handy trick that NLPers have been using for over 20 years. The Naturally Slender Eating Strategy, modeled by Connie Rae Andreas from naturally slim and healthy people, starts by imagining what it would be like to select and eat a food, and then feel the effects of eating that food choice. If you do this, you can feel how you will feel an hour after eating that food. This allows you to make better selections for your long-term health and choose appropriate portion sizes. It also tends to habituate you to those foods so that you are not so voracious when you actually start eating them. The Carnegie Mellon research validates this understanding, but unfortunately, many psychology articles have been reporting it with imprecise descriptions.
The Naturally Healthy Eating Strategy is different from the psychology articles in one important way: there's a difference between experiencing eating the food from your own perspective, seeing the food out of your own eyes and feeling your body responding to and processing the food on the one hand, and on the other, visualizing yourself over there eating the food.
NLP has termed the first perspective "associated" to describe the perspective you use when you experience a memory or possible future from your own experience, seeing what you would see out of your own eyes, feeling the feelings in your body as if you were eating the food and it was being digested. NLP uses the word "dissociated" to describe picturing oneself over there, as if seen from another person's vantage point. It's useful to use a dissociated point of view when reviewing highly emotional memories that you want to experience with less emotional voltage.
Contrary to the way many of the articles described it, it is important to actually imagine eating the food that you would like to avoid. Just do it from an associated point of view. Imagine eating it over and over, gorging yourself for as many iterations as you can stand, and you will discover that you actually begin to feel satiated or overindulged. And if you find yourself flashing on some yearned-for food, then make that image more conscious, and actually step into the image and live the process of eating it again and again in your imagination.
Of course you can’t do this forever, you actually do have to eat something real sometime. But when you do, you will find that a little bit goes a long way. Small portions are one of the secrets to healthy eating, and this cognitive strategy can help you feel great with those small servings.
References:
- http://news.discovery.com/human/imagine-food-diet-101209.html
- Morewedge CK, et al "Thought for Food: Imagined consumption reduces actual consumption" Science 2010; DOI: 10.1126/science.1195701
- Heart of the Mind: Engaging Your Inner Power to Change With Neuro-Linguistic Programming, by Connirae Andreas, c1989, Real People Press
Keith Fail is an NLP Trainer and Coach in Austin, Texas, and Director of NLP Resources Austin. He writes and speaks about tools and techniques that help people live their dreams. He works with teams and individuals to create environments and communities that support a better world. He can be reached at +1-512-507-5464.
