Today I read an article by blogger Anil Polat at the foXnoMad blog, a blog about travel. Apparently, dealing with difficult airline ticket agents is an art form, and Mr. Polat has used Sun Tzu’s work to increse his own success:

Sun Tzu’s book, The Art of War, written more than 2,000 years ago is one of the world’s most famous books on strategy. While Tzu was writing for generals in the army, the fundamentals of his wisdom can help you overcome even the most stubborn airline representative.

I enjoyed the article tremendously, recognizing my approach with angry customers in it.

Read the full article, Use Sun Tzu’s The Art of War To Win Battles At The Ticket Counter, at the foXnoMad blog.

Here’s Lionel Giles’ translation of The Art of War at the Internet Classics Archive. (Free, but not prettily formatted.)

Here’s Thomas Cleary’s translation at amazon.com. (If you want to buy it, though, I encourage you to get it by way of the link in Mr. Polat’s article, so as to thank him for writing it.)

Negotiation and the Art of War originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2009-08-26 (Wednesday).

I have what may be good news. I just bought a copy from NLP Comprehensive’s online store. In an online chat with a CSR, I learned that they have more copies. $35 plus shipping.

The reason I say it may be good news is that I made the mistake of telling them how difficult it is to get copies of this book. The CSR, “Sharon”, said she’d have to check to make sure their stock was not “on hold for anybody”. So get Advanced Language Patterns Mastery while you can!

A Pointer to a Hard-To-Find Book originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2008-12-12 (Friday).

Holiday sale! originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2008-12-7 (Sunday).

I’m a T2 diabetic and have been for about seven years. A month after diagnosis, the clinic nurse informed me that the doctor wanted to talk to me after surgery closed. It transpired that in 25 years of being a GP, he had not encountered any other patient who had made such a rapid improvement in their blood glucose levels. He wanted to know how I had achieved it. This amazed me since all I had done was apply my scientific training to the situation. Diagnosis encouraged me to adopt a more scientific approach than most people do to avoid what are quaintly known as the ‘complications’ of T2 diabetes. Along the way I began to use my teaching ability and scientific background to make new discoveries more accessible to the public via the internet, by posting on alt.support.diabetes. In the years that followed I discovered a recurring pattern. Other T2 diabetics were being rung up by their doctors in the weekend, expecting the worst, only to be told that they too had achieved remarkable results doctors had not seen before.

Read more at Nutrition for Blokes and order a copy for yourself.

Nutrition for Blokes originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2008-10-6 (Monday).

1. And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell
2. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
3. Olive’s Ocean by Kevin Henkes
4. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
7. TTYL by Lauren Myracle
8. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
9. It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
10. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

It’s Banned Books Week originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2008-09-29 (Monday).

How much time does it take you to find a virtual phone company, a web designer, or another business or service professional to help you with your small business?

No doubt you spend precious hours trying to find just the right person, which are hours that would much better be spent growing your business.

The Ultimate Small Business Owner’s Resource Guide lists over 100 businesses that can help you be more successful in running your web-based small business.

The result is that you will be saving tremendous amounts of both time & money!

You can order the print version from the link above, or download a PDF of the book for free, with many thanks to Lifehacker.com!

Small Business Owner’s Resources originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2008-09-24 (Wednesday).

The book is designed for anyone in business who is interested in becoming better at understanding how to persuade or influence isn’t that just about everyone?. The book may also help you understand why you decide to do the things you do. Even if you are a researcher or teacher or a medical doctor, and so on, and not a business person, it’s still important to understand how people are or can be influenced and persuaded by your words and behaviors. Each chapter focuses on a single question and is no more than 3-5 pages long.

Sounds like another real winner from Dr. Cialdini. It’s on my wish list. Go get 50 scientifically proven ways to be persuasive for yourself! (Note: this is an amazon link with Presentation Zen’s referral code intact. When you buy, you’ll be thanking Garr for the review and the referral.)

Cialdini has a new book! originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2008-09-13 (Saturday).

Dear friends and colleagues,

This September, I’m excited to bring out my first U.S. published book in 10 years, GET THE LIFE YOU WANT: The Secrets to Quick and Lasting Life Change with Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

You have all noticed that the state of the world is a bit tenuous at the moment – to say the least. People are running around like chickens without heads about jobs going away, love lives crumbling, and subsequently watching their health deteriorate.

Now that I have unfortunately painted a bleak picture, don’t you think the time is right for a little NLP?

I’d like you to partner with me in getting the word out there. Let’s help others learn to acquire some valuable tools to turn around their lives. And, at the same time help co-create a NY Times bestseller.

What I’m asking is for you to send a message to your own email list of friends and colleagues (at least 10 people) and encourage them to pick up a copy for themselves and at least one more to share.

What we need, in order to create critical mass, is for this campaign to roll out over a few specified days. So, we want people to order their books from amazon.com on September 2, 3, and 4. The link to order is by clicking here.

I am also running a contest where a few lucky people will win a signed copy of GET THE LIFE YOU WANT. Be one of the first 25 people to email my publicist at hcibooks@yahoo.com will receive an autographed copy. Thank you in advance for helping me to get the word out. Together, we’ll sort out this chaos, one brain at a time.

Yours truly,
Bandler

P.S. Another item that might interest YOU and/or your friends is that I am giving a FREE lecture in Las Vegas on Friday night, September 5 at the Las Vegas Hilton from 7:00 – 9:00 pm which is part of a professional conference on neuroscience. You may want to spend the entire day there.

See more about the conference at: http://usjt.com/neuro08/schedule.aspx#be You can also get a copy of GET THE LIFE YOU WANT there and have it signed. Remember, what happens in Vegas…. hope to see you there.

And, of course, you can check out my Web site at http://www.RichardBandler.com.

For more information about the Las Vegas event and to save your place, call: 800-441-5569 or hcibooks@yahoo.com

P.P.S. Richard Bandler’s Guide to Personal Trance-formation will be out in November. You can also pre-order this book on Amazon.

Richard’s New Book: Get the Life You Want originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2008-08-26 (Tuesday).

Solveig Haugland, author of the OpenOffice.org 2 Guidebook, has been working to convert people from Microsoft Office to the free, open-source OpenOffice.org suite, and she’s discovered the power of metaprograms… specifically, pain versus pleasure. It’s an interesting real-world example of the application of metaprograms in persuasion.

Go see Persuading people that OpenOffice.org is the right choice? Accentuate the negative.

Oh… and switch to OpenOffice!

Push For Pain, Pull For Pleasure originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2008-08-22 (Friday).

(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.

Gotta love a little TA once in a while originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2008-08-7 (Thursday).

This volume pulls together and republishes, with some editing, updating, and additions, articles written during 1978-86 for internal use within the CIA Directorate of Intelligence. Four of the articles also appeared in the Intelligence Community journal Studies in Intelligence during that time frame. The information is relatively timeless and still relevant to the never-ending quest for better analysis.

The articles are based on reviewing cognitive psychology literature concerning how people process information to make judgments on incomplete and ambiguous information. I selected the experiments and findings that seem most relevant to intelligence analysis and most in need of communication to intelligence analysts. I then translated the technical reports into language that intelligence analysts can understand and interpreted the relevance of these findings to the problems intelligence analysts face.

Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, HTML, table of contents

Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, full PDF version, 1.9 MB direct link

(Another hat tip to BoingBoing!)

A gift from the Central Intelligence Agency originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2008-05-11 (Sunday).

I’ve loved everything I’ve read that Dr. Pinker has written, starting with The Language Instinct.
Approachable and intelligent at the same time. Great stuff.

Powells.com Interviews – Steven Pinker

Interview with Steven Pinker originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2008-01-10 (Thursday).

To be either pedantic or precise, whichever you prefer, there aren’t 250 tips here; it’s kind of heavily padded. And some of them contradict others or are otherwise worth ignoring. But there’s plenty of good stuff here, too. Look at the first one:

Audience always comes first; ask yourself, “How can they benefit from listening to me?”

Link to Eric Feng’s Public Speaking blog
Link to a free chapter of the author’s upcoming book

250 Public Speaking Tips originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2007-11-21 (Wednesday).

To reiterate, if you like NLP, you like stories and you value something a little more conversational than yet another description of the swish pattern, do yourself a favour and let Andy tell you the story about the time he told a little girl a story about how there was this secret rainbow machine…

So I’ll simply refer you to Michael Perez’s review of the book. I believe you can read the review without registration, but if you want to read the rest of the high praise from the folks in the community, registration is free.

The Rainbow Machine by Andrew Austin originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2007-11-18 (Sunday).

…which Wired calls “a fascinating look at how language provides a window into the deepest functioning of the human brain.” One rainy afternoon, Dr. Pinker stopped by to discuss causality, the concept of concepts, how to swear in several languages, and the way irregular verbs can lead to romance.

I haven’t yet read all of Pinker’s books, but I’ve been highly appreciative of the ones I have read. Looking forward to this one.

Powell’s Bookstore Interview with Steven Pinker

New Book by Steven Pinker originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2007-11-15 (Thursday).