Category Archives: NLP Tips

Beware Of Ancient Fears Infecting Modern Language

Pistols At Dawn

I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday, and I noticed something interesting about her speech. She had always spoken like that, but I hadn’t talked to her in quite a while. Last time we spoke was before I had become interested in language, having read several books on linguistics and other interesting tricks of language, most notably books by Pinker, Lakoff, and Grinder/Bandler.

The thing I noticed now, that I didn’t notice before was her heavy use of indirect speech. For example, I would say “A,” and she would then think “Because of A, then B,” with “B” being something that didn’t sound like such a good thing. But because she didn’t want to (either consciously or unconsciously) blurt right out “B!” She would always hide it behind layers of presuppositions and vague references.

For example, she would mention wanting more money at work, and I would suggest asking her boss for a raise. Instead of saying the obvious “If I ask for a raise, he’ll say no, and think less of me for asking.”

Which is a common enough fear, and generally the immediate reaction of most people when thinking about asking for a raise. But instead of blurting that right out, she’d say something like:

“I’m not sure if I have the presence of mind right now to think of what would happen if I were to do that.”

Which sounds innocent enough, until you unpack that seemingly simple statement and see what she’s really saying:

She is assuming that “presence of mind,” (whatever that is) is something that is difficult to identify, as she’s not sure if she has it or not.

Something called “presence of mind,” is required to understand the result of a request for more money.

“If I were to do that,” is stated as a second conditional. A first conditional is an “if..then” statement using the present tense, which presumes it is something that is likely to occur.

If it rains, I will get wet.
If I spend my money, I won’t have any.
If I drive too fast, I may get a ticket.

While the second conditional, with the past tense, is used for things that we don’t expect will happen, or are impossible.

If I asked my boss for a raise, he would say no.
If I saw a UFO, I would run.

So in response to a suggestion to ask for more money, she hides her “no, I’m too afraid” behind about three layers of linguistic protection.

If you’ve ever listened to a politician speak, you can tell right away that there speech is usually filled with layers and layers of vague ambiguity, so nobody can ever pin them down on what they said, if things go wrong, and if things go right, they can claim they had something to do with it.

It’s no wonder the joke, “how do you tell a politician is lying – when his lips are moving,” is so funny.

In one of the aforementioned books, Pinker was talking about how in societies where they have a history of class distinction, where upper class people could legally kill lower class people, (or other upper class people if they situation warranted it) they have developed a very polite level of speech, which can exist hundreds of years after the threat of violence.

If you were talking to some guy that was carrying weapons, and by offending him you risked getting your head slice off, you’d quickly learn to speak politely. It doesn’t take long for such a society to develop polite language. The American South is one such example. If you said the wrong thing to the wrong person, he would demand “Satisfaction,” and you’d have a gunfight at twenty paces on your hands.

Those that study linguistics on a much deeper evolutionary level suggest that all indirect speech has its roots in ancient fears of immediate reprisals. It doesn’t sound dangerous in the least to ask your boss for a raise, at least not from the standpoint of physical violence, but nevertheless, those feelings of fear cause us to hide our real feelings beneath several layers of “politeness” and vague ambiguity.

There is a fascinating book called “Mean Genes,” which illustrates all the ways that our automatic impulses that helped us immensely in our evolutionary past can be a real pain in the you-know-what in modern society. Stuffing our face until we can’t move when we are in the presence of food is one example that you can see everywhere you look in modern western society.

In the past, the several thousand year ago past, that impulse was beneficial. People would go several days without food, and when they finally got some, all other concerns were put on the back burner, and it was time to eat until the food was gone.

Not so helpful when you pass by three McDonalds, two Dunkin Donuts and a Bakery on the way to work every morning.

Of course, the great hope of modern humankind is to rise above our evolutionary based fears, and the ability to use our rational, conscious minds to think our ways around those pesky impulses to plan our future, instead of letting our impulses plan it for us.

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Interrupting Patterns Can Lead To Expanding Opportunities

I Shot An Elephant In My Pajamas

I used to have this friend that had a particular skill. It wasn’t anything that was going to make him rich, or famous, but it was really fun to watch. The interesting thing was that whenever he tried to purposely do it, like think about it beforehand, it never was quite as amusing.

It even was less funny to watch, and more obviously forced, when there was a group of people, and somebody mentioned this particular skill, and then everybody turned and expected him to turn it on right on the spot. He wasn’t a shy guy, so he never melted under pressure or anything, but it seemed to be much more spontaneous whenever he just launched into this particular behavior without any prompting, and kind of riffed off of himself. Especially when it happened at a party or something when there were plenty of people around, and they were completely taken by surprise.

I was reading this article the other day about something called a pattern interrupt. This is something from NLP that goes way back. What is likely the most taught, or talked about, or referenced example is the handshake interrupt.

Milton Erickson, the famous hypnotherapist invented this, mostly by trial and error. He would walk up to somebody, stick out his hand, and right in the middle of the handshake, he would suddenly shift into hypnotist mode, and pretty soon the person would be standing there staring at his or her hand.

The way it works is like this. The brain is a very lazy organ. Perhaps lazy is the wrong word. The brain is a very efficient organ. It doesn’t want to waste a bunch of energy figuring out the same things over and over. The brain likes to find patterns, so that it doesn’t have to expend a lot of energy. Most people are surprised when they find out that the brain burns over twenty percent of your daily energy. So it makes sense it wants to make things as efficient as possible.

So the way it does this is it looks for patterns whenever possible. Like when you first learned how to open a door, you pretty much knew how to open all doors. And when you first learned the alphabet, you could read any font, regardless of how esoteric or flowery it was.

If your brain had to stop everything, and spend all its energy trying to relearn how to open a door every time, then you wouldn’t get much accomplished.

One of the reasons, according to many evolutionary biologists, for the reason of our powerful brain was because we had to develop all kinds of complex social skills as we evolved on the African plains. So a large part of our brain goes into reading body language, and trying to decide who to trust and who we can take advantage of.

So it makes sense that patterns involving other people are very important to the brain. Once we figure out certain behaviors that we do over and over again, it can potentially save a lot of energy.

Meeting somebody for the first time is one of those patterns. If you can imagine what it would be like if we had to invent ways to get to know somebody every single time we met somebody new, it would be an extraordinary burden on our brain. Meeting somebody for the first time is extremely important, because how accurately we judge them can have a profound effect on our future safety, especially when you consider what it was like back in the caveman days.

If you made the wrong impression about somebody, perhaps thinking if they were harmless when they were really a wolf in sheep’s clothing, it could be devastating later on. So when you meet somebody for the first time, you need as much brainpower as possible to “feel them out,” so to speak. Which makes the handshake interrupt very powerful.

The automatic portion of the handshake, where you respond by sticking out your hand when somebody sticks out there, grab it and pump it a few times, and say the automatic “My names Jack, nice to meet you, nice to meet you too…” is rarely given any conscious thought.

So when Erickson would stop right in the middle of the handshake, people were completely thrown off balance. The mind is do entrenched in the automatic behavior that there is a complete and total shutdown of all thought for a few moments as the “targets” tried to figure out what was going on. And during this brief window, Erickson would see how much he could get away with.

A typical interaction would go like this:

Erickson (sticking his hand out) “Hi!”
Mark (Responding with his hand) “Hi.”
Erickson (freezing the handshake in the middle) “Nice to meet you my name is….”

And then he’d quickly grab the other guys hand with his non shaking hand, gently turn it and lift it so the other guy was staring at his palm. He would do this in less than a second.

“..as you look at your hand you can start to wonder about all those things you’ve forgotten, and you’ll be surprised how easy it is to stand here and think of all those wonderful things…” or something similar, that would take up as much of the guys brain CPU as possible.

Then he would walk away and leave the guy staring at his hand.

I think the reason my friend was so funny when he was so spontaneous, was that everybody was busy caught up in their pre-programmed “behavior” and they would be shaken when he started to act out his bizarre behavior. If you take any popular joke, a key element is something that is completely unexpected, especially if the joke is a play on words or something, and delivers a punch line that completely shakes up the imagine that you were led to automatically think.

The old Groucho Marx joke comes to mind:

“Last night I shop an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know.”

Or the famous linguistic example of ambiguity:

“Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.”

I’m sure you can think of many others.

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How To Learn Anything

Teach An Old Dog New Tricks?

The other night, I decided to go out for a walk. I recently moved to new part of town, and decided to go and check things out. The sun has been setting later and later recently, and I had gotten off a little earlier than normal from work, so I figured I’d just go wandering about and see if anything interesting happened.

The first thing I noticed was this big park on the other side of my apartment building. Bunch of kids playing, lots of toys based on animals. Big gorillas, zebras, elephants that were made into slides and other playground equipment. I stopped to watch, as there were a few benches, and there was this huge grass area adjacent to the playground, so it was a pretty good spot to chill for a bit.

One thing about kids is when they play, they really play. They don’t play, but at the same time worry about their homework or whether or not their shoes really match the rest of their outfit, and if not will anybody notice. They seem to be pre set for a couple things, which seem to be completely opposite, at first glance.

On the one hand, they are pre wired to be automatic learning machines. The amount of things a kid learns between the age of two and ten is simply staggering. If you tried to learn the same amount of information in the same amount of time, you’d be a nervous wreck. They learn an entire language, complete with tens of thousands of new vocabulary words, in about five years. Any that has attempted to learn a foreign language as an adult would be lucky to retain five new words a week.

But on the other hand, they completely forget everything they are “supposed” to learn when it’s time to play. When they see a cool slide or a gorilla swing set, proper subject-verb agreement is the furthest thing from their minds. You’d think that as adults, the extra stress and worry we put into learning new things would help. But it doesn’t seem to. It seems to have the opposite effect.

They say that a kids learning capacity is different simply because they are a kid. That learning a language is easy for kids, but hard for adults, due to some pre wired brain structure due to millions of years of evolution. Some window of opportunity that once is closed, is closed for good. While that’s interesting from an objective biological point of view, it doesn’t sound too promising from a human potential point of view.

This is observable in other animals. Birds will “imprint” to their “mother” within a certain time frame, and they can be tricked into “imprinting” on an imposter if done at the right time. Certain birds learn to sing, but only between two weeks and two months old, and only if they hear another one of their kind singing. If they aren’t exposed to another one of their kind singing during that critical time period, they’ll never learn to sing properly. (Of course when I say, “sing properly” I mean sing well enough to attract a mate.) As for myself, I can only sing properly after sufficient alcohol, and a high-end voice synthesizer, but I digress.

The Jesuits used to say, (and probably still do) that if you give them a child when he is born, he will be a soldier for Christ for life by the time he’s seven. What this really means is that kids can be taught any number of beliefs when they are young, and can take a lifetime of effort to “unlearn” them. It takes a significantly life altering event, to cause an appreciable change in religious beliefs in most people. Not too many people who grow up in strong fundamentalist Christian households decide later in life to worship Zeus.

If I had my druthers, I’d like to conduct a language learning experiment. They say kids can learn languages much better than adults. Two, three, even four languages are a snap for kids so long as they are exposed to them early enough. It is assumed there is some kind of genetic “switch” that makes it harder to learn as adults, but I’m not so sure. Enter my experiment.

Take a bunch of adults, and separate them in three different groups. The first group has to learn the new language the regular way. After they finish their day job, they go to their once or twice a week at some local junior college, and then study the language whenever they have free time. Weekends, during commercials, whenever. These people are only exposed to the target language when they are in class, or they are listening to language tapes, or when (if) they bravely seek out native speakers of their target language.

The second group gets a free pass from work for a year. They are told they still have the obligations as an adult, they have to cook for themselves and maintain their household, but they get a stipend that will allow them to study on their own, along with the use of whatever material they think will help them. They of course, are only exposed to their target language when they organize their environment accordingly. Language tapes, private tutors, whatever they can afford. But when they go shopping, or watch TV, everything is in English.

The third group, I think, would be the most interesting. They are surrounded only by their target language. They never hear English (which in this case is assumed to be their native tongue.) They are surrounded by helpful speakers of the target language who buy and cook all their food (and whatever they want provided they know how to say it), drive them everywhere they want to go (provided they know how to say it), and give them massive amounts of happy praise, including generous physical, non-sexual touching and caressing (like quick back massages and what-not) whenever they speak the target language correctly. They never criticize for mistakes; only give continued encouragement to keep you going. Their only job is to learn the target language, and follow their “keepers” around whenever they go out to buy food and take care of normal, everyday housekeeping matters. And plenty of time for playing, so long as it’s in the target language (video games and what-not).

I think these “experiments” would show that there is a lot more to the change in environment, from child to adult, which makes learning harder rather than some genetic switch that makes it mentally impossible.

Obviously, as adults, unless you are super rich, you can’t really afford to learn things as described in group number three. But you’ll notice some similar advice given by various gurus who teach learning to be successful in any endeavor as an adult.

Surround yourself with people that are already proficient in what you want to learn. Give yourself rewards for every little success, no matter how small. Don’t put too much pressure on yourself, and go easy on yourself when you make the “mistakes” that are absolutely necessary for growth and improvement. And give yourself time to play. The only real difference in being an adult rather than a kid is you’ve got to nurture yourself. Try it and what happens.

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How To Apply The Powerful Integration Of Parts Technique

Union Talks

I was mindlessly reading various articles on the net the other day and came across a description of an NLP procedure I learned a few years ago in a seminar. It is pretty useful procedure, but many people don’t realize in how many different ways it can be applied, and in how many different situations for various results, both for yourself and for others.

The procedure is called “Integration of Parts,” and has been written about in quite a few NLP books. The interesting thing about NLP is people tend to think that it is set of tools that were “invented” and didn’t exist until Bandler and Grinders started their work. The actual truth is that all of NLP existed before, in various forms, they just weren’t called “NLP,” or they weren’t used in the specific way the “NLPers” are taught to use them.

One of the presuppositions of NLP is that the more flexible you are, the better equipped you are to handle different situations. You’d think that being taught this from the get go, NLPers would be able to see how the same procedures have been used for quite a while, some since the beginning of recorded history. In one particular book (I believe it was persuasion by Kevin Hogan, but I may be mistaken) he goes over a passage from the New Testament, where in one of St. Paul’s letters, he is clearly using the sales technique of “pacing and leading.” Only back then he didn’t call it “pacing and leading,” he was likely a natural salesperson.

The thing that many people tend to overlook is that NLP only collects the techniques and strategies that people that are “naturals” are doing anyway. They study excellence, elicit people’s strategies, and then write them down in an easy to follow recipe. Sometimes you’ll hear a particularly gifted and eloquent speaker, and people will whisper and argue whether or not he’s “using” NLP. A better question might be is he a natural, or did he learn those skills, or is it a combination of both?

A lot of people claimed that President Obama was “using” NLP while he was campaigning, but I think he is merely a naturally gifted speaker. If you study the tonality and gestures that he uses when he speaks, they aren’t anywhere near as proficient and congruent as in somebody who has studied embedded commands and anchoring.

But back to the particular procedure. Integration of parts. Lets say part of you wants to pick up the phone to make a cold call, so you can make some money. But another part of you is afraid of getting rejected. It would seem that you have two parts that have two completely different intentions. These warring parts create anxiety, stress, and a high turnover rate in any sales job.

So what do you do?

Integration of parts.

You ask the part that wants to make the call to come out and play. Put that part in your right hand. You then talk to that part, respectfully of course. Parts don’t usually get a lot of focus, and are used to operating in the background, so you need to be gentle. First chat him or her up a bit, and develop some rapport. Describe them as much as you can, in as many sensory modes as possible. Then ask the part what’s important about his top level intention (wanting to pick up the phone to make a call). Then do some basic conversational criteria eliciting skills and find out the intentions under that. You’ll probably need to go three or four deep to get to the big one. For example, he wants to pick up the phone, to make some money, to pay the bills, to not worry, to feel safe. Safety is important. Make sure at every step of the way to validate you part, and make sure they know you respect their intention.

Then you do the same with the other part. Make sure that before you do that, you ask the first part if they’ll sit tight for a bit. They usually will, as it’s nice to sit out side in the open. Once you chat up your other part for a bit, start digging down for their deeper level criteria. It doesn’t take long to get the “Aha!” when you realize that both parts are really after the same thing, only at different levels. The first part took a while to get to wanting “safety,” while the second part might be fighting for that right off the bat.

Once you find that both parts are really after the same thing, ask them if they’d like to join forces, like the superfriends. Most of they time they’ll agree, then slowly bring them together, and give them time to get used to each other. Once you combine your hands, you’ll be holding a new part that has all the strategies and resources of both parts, but not evolved into more powerful more resourceful part. Slowly bring this into your chest, take a couple of breaths, and do whatever hallucination is useful to let this new part sink down into your soul or wherever the parts live inside you. It’s different for most people. I knew this one guy that had all his parts living in an energy ball that floated behind him, and was tethered to the back of his neck. Not really his neck, the tether went right into his spinal column.

(Keep in mind this is only a hallucination, there really are no parts or anything called NLP or any of that other new age nonsense. It’s just pretty useful, that’s all.)

Can you see how this simple communication strategy between two entities with seemingly different intentions can work? You can use this for:

Union Negotiations
Sales Meetings
Asking for A Raise
Nuclear Arms Reduction Talks (if you’re into that sort of thing)
Deciding where to go on a date

And much, much more. You are only limited by your imagination, and you willingness to play with this and see what happens.

If you’re interested in a really cool guided meditation/dual induction CD (about twenty minutes long) that helps you through this process, check out the New Option Generator, from Learning Strategies Corporation.

Have fun.

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Everything Is Temporary

Endless Horizons

I have a friend that lives in Korea. He’s never been to any other countries, and he told me the country he’d like to visit most is the United States. Not move there to live or anything, just to visit. I asked him why, and he gave me a rather peculiar answer, but it made sense after I thought about it for a while. And after he told me of his answer, I never looked at the world the same.

I remember when I was in third grade, when we first learned about plate tectonics. How all the continents are like giant pieces of an ancient jigsaw puzzle that used to fit together snugly, as one large mass of land. And of course, due to the structure of the Earth, the land can float around, albeit extremely slowly, at least according to human standards.

I remember asking my teacher how that was possible. She said that even though the Earth appeared to be a solid object, we can walk on the surface without falling through, it’s really liquid underneath. Really hot liquid, and the surface is really sort of floating around. She described it as a giant pie that’s cooking in the oven. The top is solid, or becomes solid while it cooks, but the inside is always liquid, especially if it’s an apple pie. And if you look at one of those time elapsed movies of an apple pie cooking, the surface will seem to expand a little bit, and move around.

There are many metaphors that are based on the “solidness” of the earth. Solid as a rock, immovable as a mountain etc. But these metaphors only hold true when compared to the attention span of your average human society, which isn’t nearly as long enough to appreciate the fluidity of a mountain range. The English language has only been around, in various forms, for a few thousand years at most. A mere blink compared to plate tectonics.

I remember once I was taking a sales course in handling objections. We learned many different ways to overcome a client’s reason for not buying our product or service. These are pretty handy techniques, and can be used in a variety of situations. One of the presuppositions of being able to out frame somebody’s objection is nobodies objection is ever set in stone.

They might not be able to buy today; right this second, but they will someday, or at least they think they will someday, otherwise they wouldn’t be talking to you. (Unless you happen to be a really aggressive door-to-door salesperson).

Whenever they give an objection, or a reason, or an excuse or whatever, you just say:

“Yes, but for how long?”

That usually throws them for a loop, and gets them thinking outside of their small “now” frame of not being able to buy. Once they start thinking in terms of some time in the future, when they will be able to buy (and their objection is no longer valid), you simply bring that feeling into the present.

“I can’t afford it.”
“Yes, but for how long?”

“I’m not sure I like the color.”
“Yes, but for how long.”

“I’m just shopping for now, kind of looking around.”
“Yes, but for now long.”

Unless you’ve done something wrong and they’re ready to kill you, they won’t usually answer with “Forever!” before stomping off.

A flip side to this is to say a variation of “No yet?”

“I don’t really like the color.”
“Hmm. Not yet, huh?”

“I’m not sure if I can afford it.”
“Yea, not yet?”
(Note: for you conversational hypnotists, they won’t be sure if the “not yet” applies to them not being sure, or them not having any money)

If you have good rapport with your client/target/mark, these simple questions will get them out of right now, where all their problems are, and get them thinking in the future, when their problems have already been solved. Then they can take that feeling of already having solved their problems back to now, and the current situation will look a lot more doable.

Obviously, you can use this in any kind of conversation, for any kind of intention, so long as you have a win/win outcome in mind. Sales, therapy, seduction, getting your kids to clean their rooms, whatever.

So when I asked my friend why wanted to visit the states, it was for the simple reason to be able to look out toward the horizon, and see nothing but flat earth. Korea, being a pretty cramped peninsula, has many mountains, and no matter were you are in Korea, no matter which direction you look, (unless you are looking out over the sea) you don’t have to look for to see mountains.

But in the United States, there are plenty of areas with nothing but flat ground, and open sky. He wanted to be able to look out his window, or whatever, and see nothing but uninhibited views of the ground stretching flat seemingly forever until finally meeting up with the sky. And look to the right, and to the left, and see a perfectly flat horizon, endlessly expanding in both directions.

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Always Have The Wind At Your Back

Make It Easy

I used to go on these long bike rides a couple days a week after work, and even some longer ones on the weekend. After work I didn’t have much time, so I’d to either go on a loop, or go on a long up and back trip to some particular destination that was interesting enough to go to. Usually the beach. What was cool about riding to the beach was that by the time I got there, the winds were just starting to pick up, giving me a pretty good push on the way back. I had one of those digital speedometers which measure average, max and all that. Not only was my average speed on the way back much faster, but also I exerted much less effort, as I had a strong wind at my back.

Of course there was an occasional weather pattern that would really mess things up. Coming back was really difficult, which made it hard to plan my energy exertion. Usually on the way down, I’d go all out, knowing coming back would be pretty easy. But to go out all the way down (about twenty miles) and then turn around only to find I’d messed up, and going back was going to be much more difficult that going down, that wasn’t too much fun.

I remember I took this really cool NLP seminar once. The last day we spent a large portion working on setting up our timelines. If you have never done any first hand time line stuff, it can be pretty powerful. To get a rough approximation of how your own personal time line is set up, imagine some things from your recent past, your medium past, and your far back past, and figure out where you keep them around you. For example, if you think of something you did yesterday, how do you represent that picture? Where is it? In front of you? In back of you? Above you? Below you? Likewise with something that happened a couple weeks or a couple years ago.

If you take the time to figure out where you keep things, it can have an impact on how well you do on projects you take on, and how well you get over things you wish you’d done differently.

For example, say you have this big goal of cleaning your garage. If you picture a clean garage as some big huge picture that is ahead of you, but far off in the distance, and way up high, then you might respond with stress or anxiety when you think of cleaning the garage. Not only is it far away, but it’s a long hill as well.

On the other hand, if you picture your clean garage as up close, and slightly down, then it might be easy. Anything that is close and downhill is easy to get to. Also, you may picture your clean garage kind of off to the side, almost behind you, so when you visualize it you have to strain your neck to even be able to see it. In this case you’d likely not even ever start. You’d only have this vague idea of wanting (or needing) to clean your garage.

One metaphor we tried at that seminar was going out into our future, using various hallucinations. Time machines, magic hot air balloons, floating lawn chairs. And as we went into our own futures, we placed presents for ourselves so that we could find them as we went through time toward our choices and goals. Both as encouragement to find along the way, and as proof that we were along the right path.

One trick you can do is to imagine your future goal, way out there. Maybe six months or a year. Then come up with five or ten things you’ll find along the way that will let you know that you are absolutely on track. The cool thing about this is they can be vague. You only need to give them certain colors and feelings. Your unconscious will work the details out later. You can also think of things that will help you along the way. Maybe chance encounters with strangers, or random occurrences with people you don’t know. Come up with five or ten of these as well.

Then imagine that you have these ten or twenty pictures, and fling them into your metaphorical future, and watch them sail out ahead of you. Some will go out only a little ways; some will go out almost to the end.

Then days or weeks later, when you are out cruising along, you’ll find one of these instances that you gave yourself from your past, and it will remind you how important your choice is, or give you proof that you’re already well on your way.

Of course, this is all a hallucination, but a useful one. If you come across a strange looking cat, you can interpret it to mean nothing more than everyday randomness. Or you can interpret it as aliens spying on your from planet Xexok, or you can interpret it as proof, given to present self, from your past self, that you are well on your way to achieving whatever it is you want to achieve.

Another way to use timelines is to go into your past and change your history. You can grab some resources from the present, hop onto your magic lawn chair, and float back into your past when you had some particular troubles before. Then you can float down just before the trouble happened, give your past self some of the resources from the present, and then step back and watch your past self go through the scenario again, but this time with more resources. And when I say resources, I don’t mean some magic sword to stab that third grade bully in the throat, I’m talking about a broader perspective, to give your past self much more understand of what was going on, so your past self can have more choice in giving meaning to whatever situation it was that used to give you trouble.

Then after you give your past self the resources, you can go back and relive the experience, only this time remember your present self (back then your future self) coming from the future to give you resources. Then go into the situation with those resources so you can get a better handle on things. Maybe your second grade teacher yelled at you, and at the time your only conclusion was that you were an idiot. Only when you go back to give yourself some resources, you might let your past self know that people are generally goofballs, and don’t always have a handle on how they talk to people. That way when you go back and relive the experience, instead of judging yourself an idiot, you can just write off the incident as your second grade teacher having an episode of less than appropriate behavior, for whatever reason. Maybe she backed over her cat on her way out of the driveway that morning. Whatever works. Your brain is pretty cool, and when you start to play around with it, you’ll find that you can do much more than you think you can.

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Success with NLP

Success with NLP

How Does She Know You’re Lying?

Congruence

I was reading this book a few weeks ago. It was an old, out of print book that I picked up in some old bookshop, by an author that wrote another, more popular book that I’d read. So naturally, I picked it up, since it was only a quarter. The first book “Dress For Success” by John Molloy was a bestseller, and although written back during the seventies had all kinds of useful advice for what kinds of clothes to wear in what kinds of situations.

The interesting thing about Dress For Success was that it wasn’t written as an opinion piece, it wasn’t just another collection of self-proclaimed fashion guru’s advice based on his own personal tastes and experience. The materials in the book were the results of scientific research. The author owned some kind of social research organization, and they would frequently conduct “experiments” by sending people out in public, and have them perform certain tasks. And the only variable they would vary was the clothes that the people wore.

Of course, many of the results were the results of surveys, e.g. asking people’s opinions after “experimenters” would pass by wearing certain clothes. One example is that they had a bunch of guys go out wearing black raincoats. Then they would follow them, and ask people what they thought of them. They would say they were doing an experiment, and have them fill out a questionnaire. Invariably, the people that were wearing beige raincoats were judged to be more professional, and more upper class than those wearing black raincoats.

Another interesting experiment was they sent several men out in public, and had them eat in a restaurant. After they’d finished eating, they’d explain to the waiter/waitress that they’d forgotten their wallet, that contained their ID’s, but they had their checkbook. (This was before debit cards were invented, and many people still paid by personal check). About 80% of the guys swearing button down shirts with ties had their checks accepted, while almost none of the guys without ties had their checks accepted.

The entire book was filled with useful information on how to dress if you are interested in how others perceive you.

But this other book, called “Live for Success,” was more about general lifestyle habits rather than what kinds of clothes you should wear.

For example, they had several guys that were wearing clothes and had bodies and faces as close together as they could get. The randomized them, and then had them walk into social environments, like bars or clubs, for a long enough period of time so that people would remember them when asked a few minutes later.

Half of the group walked with their shoulders slumped forward, and their head hanging down. The other group walked with erect posture, shoulders rolled back, and head straight up. Keep in mind that everything else between each group was as consistent as they could make it. Clothing, hairstyle, facial makeup, facial hair, etc. What the found, although not really surprising, was interesting nonetheless. The group with erect posture was rated an 8 out of 10, on average, while the guys with poor posture were rated at a 6.5 out of ten. The obvious take away from this is that simply by walking with correct posture, holding your shoulders back, and your head up will increase your “attractiveness” score by a full point and a half out of ten.

What I found to be the most interesting chapter was on congruence. They did a case study on a guy that, on paper, should have been a fairly likeable guy. Decent job, decent family, good income, decent education. But when they interviewed his friends and coworkers, they all described him in completely distasteful terms. The company that employed him had consulted with Malloy’s company (the author of the book) to try and determine what it was about this guy that turned people off so much. Many times people just couldn’t stand to even be in the same room him. The guy didn’t swear, didn’t have excessive body odor, didn’t leer at females inappropriately, nothing obvious that you would think of when you would hear somebody described with such obvious distaste. Nevertheless, whenever his coworkers would see this poor guy coming, they would make a beeline in the other direction.

After a few weeks of study, Malloy and his associates found out what it was. The guy was completely incongruent. His facial expression was incongruent with his message, his body language was incongruent with his speech, and even when he was agreeing verbally with what somebody was saying, his body language and facial expression was screaming the complete opposite. His body language, facial expressions and gestures were always completely opposite of his speech and his language.

Now this may have had some deep psychological reasons based on childhood or something, but Malloy and his associates weren’t there to fix that. All they were hired to do was to find out what it was about his guy that turned people off so much. Once they put their finger on it, they gave him some exercises and pointers to get his non-verbal communication more in line with his verbal communication. They had him do practice exercises in the mirror, hold his head and body still while he was talking, and other things that slowly brought his body language in line with what his verbal message was.

The interesting thing was that although everybody knew that didn’t want to be in the same room as this guy, nobody could quite put their finger on why. And it took a professional social research firm a few weeks to figure it out as well. After several week of practice, most people accepted him as “normal” and didn’t despise him as much. And he found it much easier to make friends, and be productive in his work when it involved interacting with others outside the company.

The clear take away from this is to always make sure you’re body language is in congruence with your verbal message. Any guy who has come home late at night, and tried to lie to his wife or girlfriend, knows how quickly significant others can pick up on incongruent communication, especially females. Females seem to be much better at picking up incongruencies in communication than males.

If you’re in sales, being incongruent can kill a sale before it even starts. Even if you believe in the product you are selling, your body language can shoot you in the foot. I used to work with this guy that would shake his head back and forth (the universal sign for “no”) whenever he talked about his product. This would turn of clients, as it appeared this guy had a distaste for his own product.

But the truth was, when he was speaking of his product, his thought was “nobody can do it better than us” which led to his head shaking. This was often misinterpreted by potential clients as a disbelief in his product’s quality. So even if you have a strong belief in something, you can project a conflicted message if you’re not careful.

The simple way around this is to simply get out of your head, focus on who you are speaking with, and focus on your message. Just like the guys in the bar, hold your head up, keep your back straight, and look them in the eye. You’ll have much more success this way.

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Success with NLP

The Power Of Congruence

Fake It Till You Make It

The other night I was watching this movie called “The Sphere.” It was an OK movie that was taken from an OK book; it had some decent actors in there. I think they were trying to somehow tap into the idea that “our thoughts create our reality,” or something along those lines. This, of course, has been written about since time immemorial, but in the movie they had to introduce the idea through some alien spacecraft found at the bottom of the ocean.

What was interesting was that they had this huge laboratory way down deep underwater, all the way down deep, and the conditions on the bottom were completely calm, no matter how bad the conditions were on top. At some point in the movie, there was a need to communicate with the surface, but there was this huge storm brewing, and it was a question whether or not their communication ship would be able to get to the specific point or not. But deep down underneath the surface, it was just as calm and smooth as ever. No matter how rough and disastrous it seemed on the surface, down deep was always calm and stable.

Of course, when the so-called alien sphere started with messing with people’s heads, it became not so calm, until they figured out it was there own fears that was messing with them. Every character happened to see something that represented their worst fears. They figured that the alien sphere was somehow tapping into their fears and projecting them out around them. A nifty metaphor for the idea of creating our reality, good or bad. Whatever is internal will create the external, and whatever you see on the external is a reflection of whatever is going on internally.

I remember reading a discussion on an Internet form regarding seduction. They were discussing the efficacy of one “guru’s” method of acting a certain way around women. One particular camp seemed to be arguing that if you acted a certain way, you’d get a certain result. Like obviously if you smile at people, you’d much likelier get a smile in return than if you didn’t smile. But the other camp was arguing that exhibiting behavior that isn’t natural is “fake” and won’t work.

I guess an analogy would be to walk around forcing yourself to smile at people when you aren’t in a good mood, and see what would happen. It would be an interesting experiment. Start off with four groups, two happy, two unhappy. Then half of each group would smile at everybody for a day, and the other half wouldn’t. So you’d have half of the happy people smiling, and the other half forcing themselves to not smile. And the half the unhappy group would not smile, and the other half would force themselves to smile.

Here’s how I think the results would pan out:

The unhappy group that didn’t smile would remain unhappy, as only a small percentage of people would smile at them. And those that did, the unhappy group probably wouldn’t notice, since they’d be too busy being unhappy.

The unhappy group that forced themselves to smile would likely have a higher percentage of moving from unhappy to happy, as they’d probably get some return smiles, which in turn might make them happier.

The happy group that didn’t smile would probably have a tendency to become unhappy, as even though they were happy, they wouldn’t get any smiles from people, and that might cause them to feel sad.

Then of course the happy group that smiled, would likely increase in happiness, as their smiles would elicit return smiles, thereby increasing their happiness.

I believe that the two groups that acted in congruence with their true feelings would amplify their true feelings the most. The unhappy group that didn’t smile would become even unhappier, and the happy group that smiled would become happier.

But I also think that both groups that acted incongruent with their feelings might actually shift their feelings to be in congruence with their actions, to a certain extent. After a while, the happy people that didn’t smile may become unhappy, matching their feeling with their outward behavior. While the unhappy group that forced themselves to smile might become happy, matching their feeling with their outward behavior, despite it being forced.

The bottom line, then, is that congruent behavior that matches your internal state will amplify your internal state. But a consistent behavior that is incongruent with your internal state may be enough to change your internal state, until it becomes congruent with your internal state. Form follows function, and function follows form.

Of course, this is only one kind of congruence, and it’s assuming quite a bit that is probably impossible in real life. In real life, you can have some parts of your outward behavior that is congruent with your internal state, and some parts of your outward behavior that is completely incongruent with your internal state.

And of course your internal states maybe congruent themselves, leading to a mismatch of external behavior. You may be happy to see an old friend, on the one hand, but on the other hand a little nervous since the last time you met you got into a big fight. Or you may run into a girl or guy that you just started dating, but happen to be on a date with somebody else.

One thing that most success gurus preach over and over again is that the best way to reach your goals is to act and communicate as congruently as possible. If you have a goal to lose weight, but you eat ice cream every night, that’s not very congruent. If you want to become financially independent, but work over your credit cards, that’s not very congruent.

Incongruent behavior can be the result of subconscious conflict as well, and can often times be misinterpreted. If you are a guy, and you really like a certain girl, but are terrified of rejection, you may exhibit some less than useful interpersonal skills whenever you’re around her, making you come across as socially inept and unattractive. She may interpret this as you not valuing her very much. You may want to ask your boss for a raise, but are afraid of getting rejected, so you don’t put too much congruent effort into your proposal. Your boss will think that you may not believe you don’t really deserve the raise, and subsequently reject you, giving you the fear you feared most.

The old adage, “fake it until you make it,” can be helpful in situations like this. Just like in the above thought experiment with the smiles, you can lead your inward state by your outward behavior, providing you keep it up enough.

Just like a kid on swing, by moving your body in the right motions, you can some pretty big amplitude after a while.

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Success with NLP

Success with NLP

How To Model Others To Easily Achieve Excellence

Doin Some Cookin?

I was watching this cooking show on TV the other night. I don’t usually watch cooking shows, but this guy was pretty entertaining. One thing I liked in particular was he didn’t seem to measure any of the ingredients. It was a handful of this, a pinch of that, a little bit more of this. Even when he cooked some of the dishes, he never said what level to set the heat to or for how long to cook them. Just throw some stuff together, stick it in the oven until it’s done, and next thing you know you’ve got a gourmet meal on your hands.

I took a cooking class, two cooking classes a few years ago. Asian cooking. We learned to cook Chinese, Thai, and Japanese food. Two different course, and two different instructors. But they had two completely different approaches to cooking.

The first class I took (the classes were each four weeks, one night per week) she was extremely specific. Cut this exactly this way, measure this, make sure to shake the measuring spoon exactly three times to let the ingredients settle, but don’t shake too much, otherwise they’ll settle too much. Make sure to wash your hands and the instruments (cutting board, knives, measuring spoons, etc.) after each and every step. I was even lectured about placing the washed utensils in the drying rack at the proper angle so they would dry properly. Extremely detailed. The food, however, was magnificent. I don’t remember what we cooked exactly, but it was better than anything I had in a restaurant.

The other lady, who was from the course I took a few months later, because I had enjoyed the first course so much, was completely different. She was more like the guy on the cooking show. Put some of this in; add a bit of this spice, and a dash of that spice. Cook until it looks done. The food came out just as tasty, but not as “perfect” as the first class. This lady seemed to have the philosophy of showing us the general idea of how to make stuff, which we could later add to our own tastes. Whereas the method taught by the first lady didn’t seem to lend itself too much to improvisation. Being somebody who likes to cook, but rarely from a recipe, I rely heavily on improvisation. I have cooked some doozy experimental meals in the past, some good, some outrageously horrible. Once I tried making peanut butter popcorn, and it didn’t come out so good. One of the many tragedies of theory meeting reality.

One thing I noticed about the temperament of the two ladies is that the first lady seemed to be what I would describe as a type “A” personality. Detail oriented, always has a shopping list when they go to the store, lives and dies by their personal planner.

The second instructor seemed much more relaxed and a “make it up as you go along” type of person. While neither is better or worse, both characteristics have their strong points and weak points, there is evidence of type “A” people suffering more from stress related diseases. There’s also evidence of type “A” people making more money than the slackers among us.

One interesting idea I read in a book on personal development is that you can train yourself to be either type “A” or type “B” depending on the situation. If you need to perform some consistent behavior to get a specific result, you can train yourself to follow a specific set of instructions to maximize your success. Likewise, when it’s the weekend, you can easily switch into type “B” mode, and sit on a park bench and stare off into space when it’s time to unwind.

The trick is to develop a “switch” that sends you into automatic behavior mode when the situation calls for it, and being able to turn the “switch” off when the job is done.

One way to do that is through modeling. When you model somebody, you unconsciously soak up as much as their behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes as you can to achieve the same result they want. For example, if you are a student, and you have a difficult test coming up, it may help to model the most diligent person in your class. For the time being, simply pretend that you are them, as much as you can.

Where do they study, how long do they study, how many breaks do they take, how long, and how often. How do they motivated themselves, whey they are feeling lazy, what do they say to themselves to keep them focused, what do they visualize when they see themselves achieving their goals. Are there any authority figures from their past telling them supporting messages (in their imagination) while they are studying.

These some things that can collectively turn you into a studying machine. If you need to “switch” on this behavior, develop a kind of external anchor that you can use to put you in study mode. I had a friend once that was studying for a chemistry exam, and one of his “heroes” (as much as you can have a hero if you are a chemistry geek) was the guy that came up with the chemical structure for benzene from a dream he had of a snake eating it’s tale. This guy (the hero) had a relentless desire to figure out how stuff worked, so much that it permeated his dreams.

So when this guy (the student) wanted to get into “the zone,” he would sit at a table, place both palms on the table, close his eyes, and take a few deep breaths. Then he would imagine the ghost, or the spirit of the benzene guy slowly slinking into his body from behind, and giving him all his motivation and desire to figure out how stuff worked. He (the student) said this really helped to study, and he always did well on his chemistry tests.

So if you can figure out what you want to achieve, figure out somebody that has already done it, and come up some kind of physical “switch” along with a useful hallucination to help you take on their behavior. You may find that this can help you more than you realize.

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Success with NLP

See The Ball… Be The Ball…

Cinderella Story

Once there were these two guys playing golf. They had been friends for a long time, and always got together at least twice a month to play around. Neither of them were any good, they both never shot under a hundred, but that didn’t bother them. They just enjoyed hitting the balls around and enjoying the open space and the fresh air. Both of them lived in a particularly densely crowded area of a big city, so it felt good to get away from time to time, if only for a few hours, to forget about the troubles of everyday life.

Because there were only two of them, they were always put with another couple. Usually a couple of friends, but more often than not an older married couple. Both of their jobs were flexible, not your normal nine to five, so they usually played midweek. Which put them with retired people most of the time. And as such, retired people tended to have the same stories to tell. Old teachers, businessmen, a doctor here and there. Once in a while they’d get stuck with a couple of chatty housewives that did nothing but complain about their husbands and their horrible kids.

But not today. Today they were paired with a couple of very strange businessmen. At first they had them pegged as foreigners, but they couldn’t quite place their accent. Middle Eastern, European, they wondered for the first couple of holes. And neither of these players were very forthcoming with what they actually did for a living. They only introduced themselves by their first names, and that they were business partners. They didn’t seem shifty of suspicious, so it was difficult to press the matter. They figured they’d just engage in normal, everyday pleasant conversation, and the two mysterious businessmen would share whatever information they felt comfortable sharing.

But by the time they got to the back nine, their curiosity got the better of them, so they figured they’d try and obliquely, or not so obliquely get as much information as they could. Otherwise they’d go mad trying to figure out who what these two increasingly interesting characters were.

“So how long you too been in business together?”
“Oh, long time. From the start.”

Hmm. That wasn’t any help.

“Are you around here on vacation, or….” He let it trail off. Sometimes that worked.
“Yea, that’s kind of hard to describe. We’re here for a little bit of both I guess.”

Great.

“So, what, uh, line of business are you in? If, uh, you don’t mind me asking.”
“Oh, no, not at all. It’s just that it’s a very new business, and we are starting to feel things out.”
“But you two have been together, since…”
“Since the start. We’ve had many businesses together. Some successful, some not. This one is big. This one may change everything.”
“Oh, you don’t say?”
“Yea, that’s why this is so important.”

This?

The group ahead had jus finished, and had returned the pin.
The stranger teed up. He looked at his partner.

“Should we tell them?” he asked.
His partner paused, smiled, and nodded his head.

He turned to the two friends.

“Watch this.” He commanded, and turned to address his ball. He had a nine iron. They were on a par three, 189 yards from the regular tees.

Just before swinging, he turned to the two friends one more time.

“If you mention this to anyone, of course we’ll deny it. But nobody will believe you.” He smiled, his mysterious friend was laughing.

“It’s gonna hit top left, bounce twice, and then roll back in a left arc, picking up speed as it does. When it begins to slow, it will hit the pin, and fall into the hole.”

The way he said it was like he was describing a videotape that he’d seen hundreds of times. He turned back, addressed the ball, and took a very awkward looking swing.

The ball hit top left, bounced twice, and then rolled back in a left arc. It picked up speed, and then began to slow. Just as it began to slow, it hit the pin dead center, and fell into the hole. A hole in one.

The two friends were stunned. Speechless. The mysterious partner was laughing uncontrollably.

“Sorry, sorry,” he said. It was the first time he’d spoken after the introductions.

“But the look on you’re faces are priceless.” He composed himself.
“Really, I apologize, I didn’t mean to laugh like that.”

The two friends were dumbfounded.

The mysterious and recently apologetic friend approached the green, and repeated the exact same shot.

“So, how did you…” he trailed off.

“So you’re in the golf business? You’re gonna corner the market in golf, is that it? But if everybody can do that, won’t it ruin the competition.”

“That’s the secret.” Said the mysterious friend.
“Even if we give you the exact details on how to do what we just did, very few people will be able to repeat this, despite how simple it is.”

“But, how did you do that?” asked one of the friends. The two strangers exchanged looks, and check to see that nobody was waiting. The group behind them were just teeing off on the previous hole. Then they explained everything, in detail, to the two friends.

“You see?” they asked, when they had finished.

“You don’t need any special equipment, all you need is up here, and that simple procedure we just explained. ”

“But it’s so simple, why doesn’t everybody just…” then it hit him. He smiled, and nodded his head slowly.

“Oh, ok. I got it. Here, let me try.”

He approached the tee, hit with a wedge, and his ball hit just the front lip of the green, and dribbled about halfway toward the cup, stopping within a few feet.

“Not bad for a first try.”

The friend nodded. Smiling, his mind spinning with the possibilities of what he’d just learned.

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