NLPhilia Blog

Nick Kemp tells me he’s Jamie Smart has set up a new NLP resources site:

“You’re About To Discover Secrets That Most People including most NLP Practitioners Don’t Know About NLP” – www.myNLPresources.com

Looks to me like tons of free stuff and some purchasable stuff as well.

I’m a major fan of The Teaching Company. They’re an amazing business which takes the cream of the crop of University professors and records their best lectures on audio and/or video:

The Teaching Company brings engaging professors into your home or car through courses on DVD, audio CD, and other formats. Since 1990, great teachers from the Ivy League, Stanford, Georgetown, and other leading colleges and universities have crafted over 200 courses for lifelong learners. We provide the adventure of learning, without the homework or exams.

I’ve bought several courses from them and have listened to a few more from my local public library. I’ve been consistently impressed.

On occasion, they give away a lecture or two, usually to celebrate a holiday. I just received an e-mail from them with links to two free lectures on the history of Christmas:

Season’s greetings! To thank you for being our customer, we have specially commissioned two holiday lectures by Professor Patrick N. Allitt. Our free gifts to you, “Christmas in Victorian Britain” and “Christmas in 19th-century America” are available for download or streaming right now.

Included in the e-mail was an invitation to forward it to friends. I figured this was the best way to get the word out. 🙂

In “Christmas in Victorian Britain,” Professor Allitt explores the celebration of Christmas as we know it today, with decorations, music, and lavish gift exchanges, and where it began–Victorian Britain. While the holiday had older traditions such as those that celebrated the winter solstice, the Victorians enhanced and clarified the religious elements of Christmas and at the same time commercialized it.

After familiarizing yourself with the origins of modern-day Christmas, explore “Christmas in 19th-century America.” How did different ethnic groups in America celebrate Christmas in the early 19th century? Why did New Englanders often want to avoid all forms of celebration while Pennsylvania Germans dressed up, visited each other, and drank heavily? After the Civil War, Christmas celebrations began to be standardized throughout the nation under the influence of the new department stores, which ran the Christmas-oriented marketing campaigns we are familiar with today.

About the professor:

Professor Patrick N. Allitt is Professor of History at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. He was born and raised in central England and received his B.A. in British and European History from Oxford University. He earned his Ph.D. in American History from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Allitt has served as a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard Divinity School and at the Princeton University Center for the Study of American Religion.

Please download and enjoy these sample lectures. I’m sure you’ll be sending a hunk of your income to The Teaching Company as soon as you get hooked. 🙂

Incidentally, the links on this page are lifted directly from the e-mail, complete with what appears to be referral information specific to the e-mail campaign. I do not get referral fees from The Teaching Company.

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

NLP Master Trainer Elite Stever Robbins has joined the “Quick and Dirty Tips” crew to produce a podcast on productivity. He’s the official Get-It-Done Guy!

Most people think of productivity as doing stuff faster. It isn’t. In this podcast, we find ways to do things better, and really dig into what’s even worth doing in the first place. You can act on the tips immediately, whether they’re about details such as labeling your files, or about the big picture of your life, such as finding ways to collaborate with colleagues, friends, and family so you work together helping everyone reach their goals.

Get it on iTunes (Stever’s Preference) or directly from the Get-It-Done Guy’s page.

Previously: Stever Robbins on Logical Levels

When we’re interacting with someone, we may often think we’re just trying to let them know some important piece of information. I recently learned something, though: facts are not interesting. People only pay attention to facts if they’re attached to values. Dean Brenner wrote a pertinent manifesto for ChangeThis back in October:

Brenner believes there is a critical flaw in how we communicate. We naturally divide our communications in two approaches: to inform or to persuade. When, according to Brenner, every communication is an opportunity to persuade. Next time you hear someone say, “I just wanted to give you an update…” you’ll know an opportunity to shape opinion was missed.

Link to Dean Brenner’s “To Inform or Persuade?” ChangeThis Manifesto

John Johnson of Persuasion 101 introduced me to Dr. Clotaire Rapaille’s work:

What is your earliest memory of coffee? What image comes to mind when you hear about a Jeep? Why are wedding traditions different in the United States from France? Rapaille reveals the unconscious motivators behind how we act and what we buy by unearthing the unique culture codes found within each of us and derived from our earliest or most enduring memories.

Thanks to Dr. Rapaille, we can drive a Jeep, we can buy coffee in Japan, and we can do countless other things that NDAs probably prohibit us from knowing about. If you’re a marketer, you want Dr. Clotaire Rapaille’ ChangeThis Manifesto.

From the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health comes a document for trainers: Tell Me a Story: Why Stories are Essential to Effective Safety Training. From the referenced page:

Although the mining industry has historically relied on an experiential master-apprentice model for training new employees, the formal safety training provided to miners is generally done in a classroom, with mixed results. In a series of stakeholder meetings held by NIOSH across the West in 1997-2000, trainers identified significant gaps in materials that were available to teach new and experienced miners. They asked whether NIOSH could develop effective materials to fill these perceived gaps, as well as make training more effective for those who were required to attend, but who often refused to be attentive.

This e-book is well-written and practical. Geared toward safety trainers in mining companies, it’s intended to make training count where lives are on the line. It seems to be framing good presentation-type training as a modern form of the old master-apprentice relationship. Good reading for anyone who trains to inform.

Link to NIOSH Publication No. 2005-152 (2.3 megabyte, PDF)

Nick Kemp just let me know he has uploaded to his site a new interview with Steve Andreas. According to Nick, in this interview, Steve:

discusses modelling, how he first came across NLP in the 1970s and a message he would most like to pass on to the creators of NLP!

Link to Nick’s Web site (NLPMP3.com)