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 ...
Blogger: Keith Fail
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.
... the Situation is Complex but Not Necessarily Difficult
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
-- George Bernard Shaw
The story is told that Henry Ford refused to believe that a V-8 internal combustion engine-block could not be forged as one piece. He insisted that his engineers go back and find a way to do what they said was impossible to do. On March 9th 1932 they succeeded.
Necessity really is the mother of invention.
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.
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.
NLP is about loving. NLP is about the structure of loving. Loving yourself, loving others.
How much are you willing to do for yourself or others? Is anything really worth dying for? What is really worth living for?
So many people don’t ever take time to love themselves, to nurture their greatest longings, to acknowledge their greatest fears. How much ecstasy will you let yourself have? How much joy? Try this experiment now:
Last time I told you about my friend Jim and how we helped him get back on track with his project and find the motivation to do what he needed to do. You can read that article here if you missed it.
The "This & That" technique I used with him is a very cool linguistic pattern originally modeled by John McWhirter from the UK. I learned it several years ago from Steve Andreas and it works like magic to help a person change from a negative state to a positive one strictly using conversation.
When I started this little piece with Jim, I recognized that he was very stuck. When we feel intense negative emotions it is difficult to get ourselves unstuck. This is because negative emotions cause cerebral cortex to focus narrowly only on those things that will help prepare us to fight or flee. Our flexibility and creativity go out the window which handicaps our ability to think straight or solve problems.
Jim is a colleague and occasional coaching client. He gave me permission to tell this story.
When I started the following piece with Jim, I realized that he was in a seriously stuck mental state.
Often times when people are feeling intense negative emotions we get stuck and find it hard to get ourselves out of them. This is because when negative emotions come up, the cerebral cortex begins to shut down. Most of the mental processing moves to older parts of the brain in preparation for the fight and flight response. We literally loose access to much of our creative and problem solving abilities.
Jim was feeling depressed about how often his organization’s management above him has kept changing directions recently. He sounded depressed on the phone so I invited him to go to lunch.
Jim was in this situation whenever he was at work, or even thought about work. But he wasn’t in a place to quit, or slack off, or even look for another job. He needed to get to a place where he could feel good enough again to at least take care of some immediate business.
On the way back to his office he confessed that he had a lot to do but was so overwhelmed with it all that he hadn’t really been able to get himself to do what he needed to do for the past few days. He couldn’t take a vacation, but he also couldn’t keep sitting at work doing nothing. Deadlines were creeping up on him quickly. His project was seriously behind schedule.
Hey it’s Valentines Day! How do I love you? Let me count the ways, let’s see: philia, storge, eros, agape, logos.
“Hey now wait one minute, buster!,” I hear you say. "Logos isn’t one of the Greek types of love; it is the root to logic, and logic ain’t love."
“My head is pounding, I can’t hardly think straight it’s throbbing so bad.” Glenn was trying to finish his day’s work but had been hurting since lunchtime. He had already taken three aspirin to no avail. Under pressure of the deadlines for his project, he had taken a short break for lunch, thinking that getting some food might make his headache go away. No such luck. Now it was 4:30 and it was hurting him more than ever.
I asked him if he wanted it to go away?
Mindfulness Meditation used to primarily be a “Spiritual” thing. Hindus did it. Sufis did it. Buddhists do it. Even the Catholics have there version in Brother Thomas Keating’s Centering Prayer.
Last week (Jan 20, 2011) a friend of mine (and hilarious fellow blogger), Melanie, and I were talking about the reasons for being “mindfully focused” during “Savasana,” the last pose of our yoga workout. We used to be way too stressed out by our yoga to be able to talk during it, but recently I guess we are feeling more alive from it all. Which brings me to corpse pose and what exactly goes through your mind when you are lying there dead just enjoying the fact that you are no longer stretching your self like saltwater taffy.
– Joy changed her life with NLP. Now she is changing the lives of her family, loved ones, and community.
When we first met Joy Zahlen, she was a successful businesswoman. But her family life was a mess. Her abusive husband was having an affair. Her teenage kids were yelling all the time and being violent. Joy was not living up to her name – she was anything but joyful.
In fact she was confused and what NLPers call incongruent. On the outside she was clearly trying to hold it together and present a professional image. But the turmoil on the inside was leaking out in her behaviors and in the way she spoke.
If I could give you a pill to make you healthy would you take it? Sure you would, wouldn’t you?
What if I told you it had no active ingredients and it was just a placebo? Most people today probably wouldn’t take an inactive sugar pill.
But new research suggests that even when people know that they are taking a placebo they still get positive effects from it.
I know that this sounds incredible, but NLP has recognized for about 25 years that there is a certain powerful effect that occurs when people set an intention and take responsibility for the results that they are producing. Just doing something, almost anything different than what you have been doing is often enough to effect the
Embedded Commands are a way of using your non-verbal communication to influence people's thoughts, feelings and behaviors. This tool delivers a second message at a different level simultaneously to whatever you are literally saying with your words. In NLP we often do this to communicate directly with a person’s unconscious mind. By marking out a simple message within the structure of another message it is possible to communicate subliminally and get responses without the other person being consciously aware of what you are doing.
Google’s special search page for Jan 20, 2011 celebrating the 50th anniversary of John F Kennedy’s inaugural address uses words from his speech to draw the Google logo. In that collection of words some are larger and
I wrote this article several years ago (1996) for Austin NLP, the Neuro-Linguistic social and learning club for Central Texas. It is simple, but it is still a very useful NLP tool to learn. So with the NLP Practitioner Course coming up, I wanted to share it with the new people who might be interested in learning NLP tools, techniques, and skills. It works like a charm and people will think you are a wizard when you help them painlessly and fearlessly get rid of their hiccups. Enjoy!
~ Keith
Kelsey, a 19 year old, UT Student had been hiccupping all morning. It was ruining her Saturday outing with her friends to Austin’s new Blanton Museum. Not that the hiccups were so painful, they were relatively mild so she was putting up with them. But they were beginning to be chronic and several hours of continuous convulsing was beginning to make her muscles ache.
She had tried all the regular remedies, holding her breath, swallowing a glass of water with her head between her knees. Her friends had tried to frighten her when she wasn’t expecting it. She had even tried eating a spoon each of sugar and peanut butter, but nothing seemed to work. She just kept hiccupping. And it was getting rather annoying and she seemed to be out of options and resigned to live with it until it went away.
I noticed her hiccuping plight. As a stranger (there are few people stranger than an NLPer on a mission) … as a stranger, I would have to be quick with rapport and in defining her outcome. I jokingly asked if she had been suffering long? “Do you want them to go away?”
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.
