NLPhilia Blog

Science tells us that we can read a person’s behavior and use that information to predict what they’ll do. Who’d have thought it?

How Cell Phone Movements Can Assess Your Personality

The researchers who wrote the referenced article correlated cell phone call logs and accelerometer movement logs with Big Five personality assessments of their subjects and found some interesting things. For example, “sensitive or neurotic females often checked their phones or moved with their phones regularly well past midnight. Sensitive or neurotic males did the opposite.”

If you haven’t looked into the Big Five Personality Traits as an addition to the meta-programs you already work with, I’ll suggest looking into them. They are:

• Openness to new experiences;
• Conscientiousness;
• Extraversion;
• Agreeableness; and
• Neuroticism.

(See how the first letters spell “OCEAN” to help you remember?)

My intro to them was the book, Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You, by Sam Gosling, Ph.D. It’s worth the read.

I’ve long loved Sun Tzu’s book, The Art of War. It’s a book on conflict resolution, not specific to war, and I’ve learned and used a great deal of its wisdom in my work.

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.)

Regarding the book, Advanced Language Patterns Mastery, by Larry McLauchlin: I tried to buy a copy of this book a few months ago and learned that the author had died and that his family had sold the rights to someone. They had no stock, and used copies are very difficult to find (and very expensive when one is for sale).

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!

If you will read this post on Steve Andreas’ blog, you’ll find that NLP Comprehensive’s store is offering 20%-50% off select items for the holidays.

Uber-NLPer, teacher, and chemist Quentin Grady has written, and privately published, a book on nutrition:

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.

The last week in September is Banned Books Week. Celebrate your freedom by reading one of the top ten most challenged books of last year:

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

If you own a small business, as many NLPers do, you might find The Ultimate Small Business Owner’s Resource Guide to be quite a useful tool.

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!

Over at Presentation Zen is a review of Robert Cialdini’s new book, 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive:

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.)

Via John LaValle, an e-mail from Richard Bandler landed in my inbox today. Here it is for your enjoyment, edited only to “linkify” the included URLs and obfuscate the e-mail address of the publicist.

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.

I’m a big fan of Free and open source software. I’m running Ubuntu Linux at home, haven’t booted Windows in ages, and really enjoy the freedom and choice that gives me. But that isn’t what this post is about. I just wanted to mention how I happened upon the article I’m suggesting you read.

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!