NLPhilia Blog

It was a Sunday, if I recall correctly. All the offices were closed, so the building should have been empty. It wasn’t.

I was walking through the hall, rattling doorknobs. It’s one of the “trained monkey” duties a Security Officer does… one of the mindless things a well-trained monkey might be able to do, but humans have to do it because of what might be on the other side of a door that should be locked, but isn’t. Like today.

I twisted the knob and pulled, and the door came open easily. “More paperwork for me to do,” I thought, and walked in to check the suite. As the door closed behind me, around the corner ahead of me came a large, black dog. And he was most definitely not happy that I was in his house. He bared his teeth, growled deep and loud, and began running at me, eyes on my throat. He was less than a second from me. I mean it: less than one second.

I still don’t know what came over me. I adopted a happy expression, squatted down, slapped my thigh, and said in a happy tone, “Hi, fella! Come here, boy!”

It was as if the dog briefly defied gravity. He almost paused in mid-air as he ran. He stumbled ever so slightly as his feet regained the floor, and by the time he made it to me, he was barking happily, wagging his tail, dancing in circles around me, and licking my hand. Remember: less than one second.

The dog’s owner, a tall and attractive woman whom I knew worked there, came around the corner out of one of the offices. Apparently she was catching up on some work. She was looking at the two of us, the dog and me, like we were playing checkers and he was winning.

“Is this your dog?” I asked.

“Uh… yeah…” she answered. When he heard her voice, he began running rapidly back and forth between her and me, as if to say to her, “Look! Look who’s here! He finally came! Do you see?!”

“One hell of a watchdog,” I said, patting him as he ran by.

“Uh… usually…” she said. She was clearly nonplussed. Then she called the dog and went back to work.

The first paragraph is kinda language-geeky. Stay with me, though.

In modern English, there are three main parts to a sentence: subject, verb, and object. The subject denoted who or what is doing something; the verb is the word denoting what the subject is doing; and the object is the word denoting the thing the subject is using to perform the action or on which he is performing the action. So when someone says, “Maria whistled a happy tune”, Maria is the subject, whistled is the verb, and a happy tune is the object.

An odd thing happens when we use the distortion known as “passive voice”. We pretend that the object is a subject. We give the happy tune all the credit for the whistling, and we usually leave Maria out of it altogether. (“A happy tune was whistled.”) The University of North Carolina has an in-depth but not language-geeky article on passive voice, so I won’t dwell on how to recognize it or why it’s not always bad. We already know there are times to follow a “rule” and times to break it.

My focus as a NLPer is the fact that we decide, on some level, which construction (passive or active) to use, and what it might mean when we choose to use passive voice. I’ve found that it very frequently indicates a passive attitude toward whatever is being discussed, and that that may be detrimental. Example:

A friend of mine was feeling really sad — way too sad, in my opinion — about a recent interaction with one of her co-workers. She told me about who had said and done what and at the end, she said, “…and then I was discounted.” (“To discount” in this instance means “to minimize the significance or meaning”. Quite a mean-spirited thing to do to someone. I knew the guy, and he was a jerk.)

The passive construction caught my attention. It sounded so out-of-place. Especially considering the rest of her story, which was constructed actively; I said this, he said that, then I said the other. I learned from Gavin de Becker‘s books that if something stands out that way, it’s worth poking at. So I poked at it. “What do you mean, you were discounted?”

All she did was summarize what she’d said and append “I was discounted” again. As if that explained to me what she meant. I hate when people do that… I ask them what they mean and they just repeat what they said that I didn’t understand the first time. So I tried again. “Well, who’s doing all this discounting? I mean, the way you just said it, it sounds like you did it, but that doesn’t make sense.”

(Of course I knew who did it. I wanted her to say it.)

She told me he did it. So I said, “OK. Say it that way, then.”

“OK”, she said. “He discounted me.”

Then there was a pause.

Then the air heated up around her. She wasn’t sad any more. She was angry. I considered that to be a far more appropriate response to what he had done, and I found out later that she had used her newfound energy to correct the guy’s treatment of her. It’s funny how a simple change in case can make such a difference.

I have no idea what she thought she was doing when she constructed that sentence passively. Maybe she was protecting herself from getting angry. Knowing her as I did, I’d guess that was probably the situation. But I hear it a lot in situations wherein someone does something and doesn’t want to take responsibility for it. Have you ever seen a kid knock over a glass of milk and then he’ll say, “It spilled”, as if the milk knocked itself over? Or someone cheats on his or her spouse and claims that “one thing led to another”?

Sure, there are times when passive voice makes sense. A police report might say “the subject was handcuffed”; a nursing note might say “medication was administered via injection”; or a newspaper reporter might say “the bill passed the House and the Senate and will now go to the White House”. In situations like this, what matters is what was done, not who did it, and construction in passive voice lets the reader or hearer focus on the activity.

So I’m not suggesting that we should challenge every instance of passive voice. Just like with any Meta-model violation, we have to learn whether or not to challenge it based on how likely it is to be significant. Is the speaker/writer avoiding the limelight, are they avoiding responsibility, or are they taking responsibility for something they shouldn’t? Where’s that happy tune coming from, after all?

My old friend Chad Amberg is an interesting guy. Definitely not the type to march in time with the popular crowd, but not at all “weird” either. I think he’d make a great NLPer. I should mention it to him.

Chad is a computer guru. Mostly Windows, poor guy, but he can do pretty much anything that needs doing on pretty much any system you’re likely to be running. He’s the one who got me turned on to OS/2 back in the mid-1990s. Definitely old-skewl. Especially when it comes to programming.

We NLPers tend to spend a lot of time on the “N” and the “L” but not so much on the finer points of the “P”. Remember that Richard Bandler was learning computer science when he began poking around in subjective human experience, and that one of Jonathan Altfeld’s more popular courses, Knowledge Engineering, is pulled directly from Jonathan’s experience and training in the modeling of human decision structures using the Lisp programming language.

I know that when I learned the basics of programming in Rexx, it helped me to think much more clearly about structure. (I wouldn’t recommend Rexx right now, though, even though it’s excellent; I think Python is much more useful for the majority. If I had it to do over again, I’d have started with Python.) Learning to write a simple structured program, even in a scripting language like Rexx or Python, is a tremendous gift you can give to yourself.

Chad wrote a short article today on what he believes are the Keys to Programming. It’s brief, high-level, good advice with no language-specific ideas… more like “how to think like a programmer” than “how to write a program”. He references an essay by Paul Graham titled, “How to Hold a Program in Your Head”, which is what we’re interested in doing, yes?

Update March 30, 2022: Chad doesn’t maintain that blog any more, so I thought I’d include a link to Paul Graham’s article here: How To Hold A Program In Your Head

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.

(A gentleman named Mark Margulies wrote the following story. It really hit home with me because I was, and still am, the kind of guy from whose perspective the story is written. I tracked him down and asked him if I could post the story, and he agreed. I post it here because I think it’s a great fable on the subject of values. Mark, if you’re reading this, send me your URL!)

There have been times when I’ve met you and we’ve gotten to know each other a little, when you ask a question I assume is supposed to flatter. You ask, “Where have you been all my life?” It’s a question that’s easy to answer.

I’ve been the guy you didn’t want to see again because I never used the word “love” as a weapon. Instead you went out with the guy who immediately swore how much he loved you and how much he cared. Then one morning he left because there was another girl he “loved” more.

I’ve been the guy who never lied to you, who never cheated on you because I have too much respect for you and myself. But you decided on the guy who did, because if other women wanted him that badly, he had to be quite the catch. You were only concerned with winning; of course, you cried on MY shoulder when you lost.

I’ve been the guy who listened to your problems and tried to be a partner. Thus, I became your “best friend”, and you went to great lengths to remind me of that fact, lest I forget and maybe think you cared for me romantically as well.

I’ve been the guy who always told you how nice you looked and how proud I was to be with you. But you decided to stick with the guy who you were never pretty enough for, who didn’t care about your life or your dreams, who never asked for your opinion and told you how dumb you were to think what you did. You spent every waking moment trying to please him because, without his acceptance, you felt like nothing.

I’ve been the guy with the “great personality” and sense of humor who was always fun to be with. Yet, you decided to choose the more sullen, brooding type because, after all, he had a cuter smile and looked better in tight jeans.

I’ve been the guy who loved to suprise you with gifts and cards, even when there was no reason to. But you decided you really cared more for that guy who didn’t even remember your birthday.

I’ve been the guy who was available. But you decided you wanted the guys who were married or who had girlfriends. They were more of a challenge.

I’ve been the guy who never flirted with anyone else, especially when we were together. But you went for the guy who was always on the make, because after all, he was more of a battle to keep.

I was the guy who believed you when you said you and he were “just friends.” That meant I was the jerk who heard the excuse that always began, “I didn’t mean to hurt you, but…”

Where have I been all your life? I’ve been right here. In fact, I may be in your life right now. It’s you who’s always been looking somewhere else.

(In September of 1999, my eldest sister’s husband died. I wrote this story a few days afterward to detail the shifts in frame and values I experienced.)

Last Saturday, at 6:30 PM, in Christiana (Delaware) Hospital’s Intensive Care Unit, my terminally ill brother-in-law drew his last breath. Three weeks of suffering ended just like that. He was only 54 years old. He left a wife, three children, nine grandchildren, and a multitude of friends.

I visited him once in the ICU. He looked every bit the part of the terminally ill man. Christiana’s a good hospital from a technical standpoint, so I figured his odds were even. When he died, I wasn’t sad… partially because I knew he was suffering and needed to go, but mostly because I believed I hadn’t lost anyone.

Donnie and I weren’t close. We each knew who the other was, but that was about it. He worked a lot, and when when I was a kid and we visited it was for musical purposes and they were busy so I stayed out of the way and stayed quiet as I could. When I got older, I went my way and I worked a lot too, and he and I never got to know one another. So he and I weren’t involved in one another’s lives at all.

Yesterday, I went over to my sister’s house to meet up with the rest of the family so we could all go together to the funeral home for the viewing. She (my sister) walked into the kitchen and I looked at her, and I asked her, “when did you start wearing glasses?”

“About four years ago,” she responded.

My sister has been wearing glasses for four years and I just noticed.

Well, we went to the viewing. I knew nearly no one there. Lots of people poured through, lots of people… and almost all of them I didn’t know. Probably a few of them were there out of filial duty, but it was obvious Donnie was well-loved and well-respected by an overwhelming number of people.

In the casket was a picture of Donnie and Linda, my sister, in formal clothing. It looked way too recent to be a wedding photo, but I asked anyway. Linda told me it was when he was being honored for bravery. He and a co-worker rescued a man and his family from a burning house about eight years ago. Went in, woke them up, got them out, hooked up a hose, and by the time the fire company got there Donnie and his co-worker had put out the fire. And I didn’t know this.

When I got home, I figured I’d post something on the rec.music.country.old-time newsgroup about Donnie’s death. Donnie was a part-time radio DJ who played old-time country music, and the musical group he and my sister and my parents formed are fairly well-known among people who appreciate old-time country music. When I got there, though, I found someone had beaten me to it. It hit me then that he was important to more than just the people who attended the viewing; he was important in some way to thousands of people all over the world.

So now I’m wondering what else I didn’t know. I’m thinking of all those people and what they knew about him and the people who were touched by his art. And it’s dawning on me that I was wrong when I thought I hadn’t lost anyone. There was a guy whom I could have spent time with, whose company I could have enjoyed, whose interests I could have shared, and with whom I could have made music.

You bet I lost someone.

I didn’t lose him Saturday, though. I lost him all my life.

(One of today’s posts on Lifehack.org got me thinking about offering sympathy to those who have lost someone to death. I was going to leave a comment, but it turned into an article, so I decided to post it here. I’d track back to Lifehack.org but they seem to have neglected the trackback URL.)

Many years ago, a nurse on the psych unit of the hospital where I work seemed to be in some mental pain. I asked her what was going on, and she told me that a patient had kicked her in the belly, causing her to miscarry. I knew she wanted a child and I knew how difficult it was for her to get pregnant. My heart went out to her and I said, “I’m so sorry for your loss”. She started to cry and hugged me, saying I was the only one who had acknowledged she was hurting. Everyone else kept trying to tell her to stop feeling bad about it.

My advice to those in front of a grieving person: never try to cheer them up. “It could be worse!”, “You’re still young, you can have another child/find another husband”, “They’re in a better place”, or some variation on how God did it for a reason are all total garbage at best and a slap in the face at worst. Consider this: if you were to lose to death someone you loved, is there anything that anyone could say that would make your pain go away? I doubt it. So don’t even try.

And for those who are angry at God for their loss, I offer them a simple idea: any deity worth worship and devotion is probably hurting over this as badly as you are.

(If you haven’t read Rabbi Harold Kushner’s book, “When Bad Things Happen to Good People”, I strongly recommend it.)

Read at Lifehack.org: How to Offer your Sympathies Following a Bereavement

A little surfing around led me to the Web page of researcher Sanjay Srivastava on what he calls “The Big Five Personality Factors”. I haven’t finished reading the docs available, but at first blush it seems that he’s found five Meta-Programs that tend to go together somehow in most people:

• Extraversion (sometimes called Surgency). The broad dimension of Extraversion encompasses such more specific traits as talkative, energetic, and assertive.
• Agreeableness. This dimension includes traits like sympathetic, kind, and affectionate.
• Conscientiousness. People high in Conscientiousness tend to be organized, thorough, and planful.
• Neuroticism (sometimes reversed and called Emotional Stability). Neuroticism is characterized by traits like tense, moody, and anxious.
• Openness to Experience (sometimes called Intellect or Intellect/Imagination). This dimension includes having wide interests, and being imaginative and insightful.

I’m going to want to spend some time examining this, as I’m not certain how useful it might be to NLPers.

Link to Measuring the Big Five Personality Factors

(Oh… the word “OCEAN” in the title refers to an acronym of the names of the “Big Five”.)

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:

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