NLPhilia Blog

I don’t ordinarily pay much attention to Psychology Today magazine, but their RSS feed pointed me to a couple of articles on the basics of persuasion.:

Persuasion: Battle on the Car Lot:

How does a car salesman get you behind the wheel? By being a keen observer of human behavior—and not letting you say “no.”

Data Mine: From Persuasion to Impotence:

Bargaining techniques and making bad decisions: why smart women don’t want sugar daddies and how to avoid erectile dysfunction.

The second article is only partially about persuasion, but it has some good stuff about paraverbal and nonverbal framing. The rest of the article has to do with other good stuff. I especially appreciated the idea of group therapy for impotence (woohoo!) helping a man “hold his head up” <adolescent snicker> .

No matter what your response to Barack Obama, you’ve got to admire his amazing skill with language. His ability to stay both engaging and content-free is astounding.

Here’s a transcript of his convention address. I was just working through it. It’s got everything a hypnotist could want in a trance induction. I wish now that I’d watched it so I could experience his paraverbal and nonverbal stuff too.

(Edited to add: Bert Decker over at Create Your Communication has posted his critique of Obama’s presentation, and it’s worth a look.)

And pretty much everywhere else, too. If you’re looking for a room for a training or conference, not just any old four walls and tables will do. Seth Godin suggests that you think about your audience’s existing anchors:

“What does this remind me of?”

That’s the subliminal question that people ask themselves as soon as they walk into a room. If it reminds us of a high school cafeteria, we know how to act. If it’s a bunch of round tables set for a chicken dinner, we know how to act. And if there are row upon row of hotel-type chairs in straight lines, we know how to sit and act glazed.

He goes on to suggest the size and shape of your ideal room (which may be smaller and narrower than you think it is!) and how to make it work well.

Read the rest at Seth’s Blog: How to organize the room.

As I read Randy Cassingham’s fantastic e-mail newsletter, This Is True, I was pleased to find that his “Bonzer Site of the Week” for this week is One Sentence: True stories, told in one sentence.

We learned in our Practitioner and Master Practitioner training that metaphor is a powerful way to teach stuff. Did we get, though, that it’s a powerful tool for learning? It should go without saying, I suppose, but I didn’t really think about it until I read an article by Scott Young at Lifehack.org:

The storyteller’s art of metaphor is crucial in holistic learning. Remembering mathematical concepts is easier when you have metaphors that relate them to real life events, not just symbols and equations. Becoming a storyteller with your subjects and using powerful metaphors can make even the driest subject stick.

It’s a simple and straightforward idea: if you want to learn something, structure the lesson as if you’re teaching it to yourself using metaphor. While I’m slapping myself on the forehead, you can go over to Lifehack.org and read What Storytellers Can Teach You About How to Learn Faster. The tips on how to create a compelling metaphor are alone worth the time and effort.

Dave Munger over at Cognitive Daily points to some interesting research:

There’s another factor that has been demonstrated to have a significant effect on whether a face is remembered: the facial expression. In 2004, Arnaud D’Argembeau and Martial Van der Linden found that people who viewed a series of photos of faces were more likely to remember smiling faces compared to angry faces — even when the faces they were later asked to recall had neutral expressions.

Want someone to remember your face? Smile.

From The Waiter Rant blog we have this great post on influencing the behavior of others using a seasoned waiter’s amazing skills. Note the ambiguity in his question to the little boy:

Arriving at the table I don’t say anything to the parents - I focus all my towering attention on the little boy. As I stare into his big watery eyes he instantly falls silent. The parents are amazed.

“Who is this man?” I ask the little boy, pointing to the bearded caricature painted on my tacky Christmas tie.

Since beginning to read his blog, I haven’t been able to look at waitstaff the same way I used to. I have always been polite and respectful, and most people would say I tip too much, but now I pay attention to how they handle people. Impressive.

Jonathan Altfeld’s presentation skills are beyond compare, and one of the best things about them is that he’s willing to teach them to you. In April 2008, Jonathan will be holding his Holographic Communication training in both Copenhagen, Denmark and London, UK.

If Your Livelihood Depends on Giving Compelling Presentations… or Even if You Just WANT People Hanging on your Every Word, in Business, in Public, or in Platform Sales… We’ve got a Pain-Free, Risk-Free, Fun-to-Learn Process… that can turn ANY Ugly Duckling into a Swan… & we’ve published video case-studies [on the Web site] to prove it.

We all know that there are times to use a cliché and times to avoid using one. Most people think of clichés as purely verbal, though; something like “money talks” or “pull yourself up by the bootstraps”. (Here’s the Internet Cliché Finder, if you’re interested.) But they can be visual, as well.

For example, here’s an article for Webmasters: Eleven images you might want to avoid in your designs. Looking through the list, I find it makes a lot of sense. (But where do we draw the line between “classic” and “cliché”?)

While you’re at it, browse around on snap2objects.com if you’re interested in Web design at all.

BoingBoing has a great little story on how a kid saved his sister and himself from a moose attack using skills he picked up from a game:

In the article he describes how he first yelled at the moose, distracting it so his sister got away, then when he got attacked and the animal stood over him he feigned death. “Just like you learn at level 30 in World of Warcraft.”

What a great example of learning through metaphor.