NLPhilia Blog

I’m trying out the Journalist Theme for WordPress by Lucian Marin. What do you think?

This post from Dumb Little Man pointed me to this beautiful toy: Visuwords™ online graphical dictionary and thesaurus

Look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. Produce diagrams reminiscent of a neural net. Learn how words associate.

Enter words into the search box to look them up or double-click a node to expand the tree. Click and drag the background to pan around and use the mouse wheel to zoom. Hover over nodes to see the definition and click and drag individual nodes to move them around to help clarify connections.

Go play!

While reading this NLP Connections thread I was reminded of my early reading of Transactional Analysis. Books like I’m OK, You’re OK, Games People Play, and Beyond Games and Scripts really piqued my interest in psychology and therapeutic interaction.

(I know Richard likes to poke fun at TA, but what I really think he pokes fun of is how people can’t tell metaphor or model from reality.)

Anyway, in the above-linked thread, one of the participants mentioned something I hadn’t seen before: The Karpman Drama Triangle. I thought you might like it too. Here’s the link to an article on the topic: The Three Faces of Victim.

Over at the Art of Manliness blog (yes, I read it, and it’s very good!) there’s an article about how your life’s soundtrack influences your life, and how making targeted changes to it can make targeted life changes. (Richard has been touting that for ages.)

OK, it’s not that general. That wouldn’t be suitably manly, I think. It’s specific to exercise. We’re good at extrapolating from a good idea, though.

Go give 52 Workout Songs To Help You Get Bigger, Stronger, and Faster a serious read.

This time, though, it’s a Web-based discussion forum. I’ve browsed it a bit and will join after I’ve “lurked” for a time. (That’s one of my rules for myself.) It looks like a lot of fun.

Go check out Andrew T. Austin’s NLP Forum.

Stever Robbins has recently finished a great new project:

You open your inbox first thing in the morning and are cheerily greeted by 400 new emails, all demanding your time and attention. Janice needs the numbers, now Frank wants your opinion And your mom has sent you a picture of a kitten wearing a hat. Adorable. But, Mom? I’m busy over here. You had grand plans to work on that report, but now its lunchtime and you’ve been dealing with things your inbox has thrown at you all morning. Wasn’t email supposed to make us more productive?

No matter what Stever does, you can believe it’ll be first class. Go get his new audio program, You Are Not Your Inbox, now!

It’s been a while since anything at Lifehack.org caught the attention of the NLPer in me. Don’t get me wrong — it’s always good — but this one is truly excellent:

Success, however it’s defined, takes action, and taking good and appropriate action takes skills. Some of these skills (not enough, though) are taught in school (not well enough, either), others are taught on the job, and still others we learn from general life experience.

Dustin goes on to elaborate on the following ten skills:

1. Public Speaking
2. Writing
3. Self-Management
4. Networking
5. Critical Thinking
6. Decision-Making
7. Math
8. Research
9. Relaxation
10. Basic Accounting

Now, those are all modelable and learnable skills. And each of us probably knows someone who can do each of them well!

Go read the full article at 10 Skills You Need to Succeed at Almost Anything.

On my old friend Chad’s blog I find a funny story from his wife, Tina, about some of the “home buyer” shows she’s seen on HGTV:

The wishes kill me…

• I want to live in the city, but I do not want the noise, I want to be away from the traffic.
• I want to live in the country, but do not want a big yard.
• I want to live in the suburbs, but I do not want to live close to other people

It cracks me up, too, Tina. I used to do something similar with the Personals ads in newspapers. (It isn’t as much fun on Web-based Personals sites because people have a lot of “room” to write. They get pretty elaborate about their conflicting desires. Newspaper ads were fun because they were terse.)

I guess people are taught to think in terms of black-and-white, on-and-off, digital and not analog. This is important to me, they think, so I have to have it. Weird.

Maybe we should have some sort of adulthood ritual, like “primitive” cultures do.

Andy Smith at Practical EQ says there’s something to the “rule of three” we so often use with the Convincer Strategy:

It’s a commonplace saying in NLP that “most people have a ‘three-time convincer'” – in other words, people need to experience three examples of something to be convinced.

Now there’s some research evidence to back this up…

Read the rest at Practical EQ: The “three time convincer” – some research support