NLPhilia Blog

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.

Over at lifehack.org, author Dustin Wax has written an article about the art of improvisation, based on the autobiography of jazz musician Charles Mingus.

If you’ve done any real work with NLP, you know that there comes a time when we have to improvise. One of my trainers calls it “The MSU technique“, a.k.a. “Making Stuff Up”. NLP is about individuals, and individuals are, well, individual, so if all we have is a bunch of canned patterns, we can’t respond adequately.

The high points:

• Go with the flow
• You don’t play alone
• Learn the rules so you can break them
• Play by ear
• Embrace limits
• Use common structures in creative ways
• When you make a mistake, keep playing

Head on over to Lifehack.org and find out how to Improvise Like a Jazz Musician.

By way of Seth Godin’s Blog comes the article from Slant Six Creative, Saying More by Saying Less:

Whether we like it or not, we’re in a world where the transparent, open-source nature of online activity has fundamentally changed the way people and businesses have conversations. In thinking about how it works and trying to figure out how best to participate, this is the most difficult yet important lesson I’ve learned:

Always let a fool have the last word.

This is a lesson I took a while to learn, but once I got it I found it immensely useful. And consider the idea that if comedian Michael Richards had taken this idea to heart, he might still have a career.

In a recent BoingBoing post referring to a study of computer-altered celebrity photographs done at the University of Central Lancashire, it was pointed out that we tend to recognize a person from caricature twice as easily as from a photograph.

I wonder how this could be useful in, say, state elicitation, memory recovery, and changework.

Link to article in The Guardian

By way of Lifehacker today comes Darren Barefoot’s interesting article, Everything I Know About Presentations, I Learned in Theatre School

Plenty of excellent high-level pointers on how to make your presentations more compelling and coherent, how to keep people awake and engaged, and how to have your audience leave the room with more than they came in with.

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. From March 27 through March 31, 2008, Jonathan will be holding his Holographic Communication training in Tampa, Florida, USA.

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.

By way of Lifehacker comes this pointer to 250 Public Speaking Tips.

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

Here’s a great rule for sales and marketing, taken from David Meerman Scott’s ChangeThis article, The Gobbledygook Manifesto: “When you write, start with your buyers, not with your product”.

David Scott, the author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR, says it best in introducing his manifesto: “Oh jeez, not another flexible, scalable, groundbreaking, industry-standard, cutting-edge product from a market-leading, well positioned company! Ugh. I think I’m gonna puke!” In every company description, on websites, in press releases, in corporate pamphlets, the same adjectives get used over and over until they are meaningless. Scott analyzed thousands of these offerings and presents a collection of the most over-used and under-meaningful phrases…and strategies for making the most of these communication opportunities.

His ideas don’t just apply to business, of course. Clear and interesting comunication is useful in all areas of one’s life.

Read the Manifesto (272k, PDF) or Visit the ChangeThis page for this Manifesto or Visit David Scott’s blog