NLPhilia Blog

Marketing master Seth Godin seems to be thinking about Metaprograms lately.

In an article on marketing in a recession, he writes about how metaprograms change with the context and how to respond to them:

Starbucks was the indulgence of a confident person happy to blow $4 on a cup of coffee. Starbucks can become the small indulgence for the person who just traded down to a small rented apartment.

And in a more recent one about persuasion in general, he clearly outlines the importance of them:

Here’s the thing: unlike every other species, human beings make decisions differently from one another. And the thing that persuades you is unlikely to be the thing that persuades the next guy. Our personal outlook is a lousy indicator of what works for anyone else.

I love reading Seth’s work. He’s amazing.

The Emergency Department called me because there was an aggressive and intoxicated psychiatric patient causing some problems. When I got there, I heard him yelling at the staff. He was demanding to be allowed to leave so he could go somewhere and kill himself. His wife was leaving him for someone else, he said, so he had nothing to live for. Of course, the staff was shouting at him too, but only so they could be heard above his shouting.

Before I got to the room, I met his wife, with whom I happened to be acquainted. (No, I wasn’t the guy for whom she was leaving her husband.) She was concerned for him and embarrassed. I asked her if what he was saying was true, and she said it was. I don’t think she foresaw how he would react when she dropped that bomb on him. I’d never met the guy, but I could have told her what he’d do.

The more I heard of the shouting — both from him and from the staff — the more it sounded like an argument. He refused to listen to anyone, and the staff refused to let him leave. “Let me out of here!” he’d say, and they’d respond with “Mister Johnson, we can’t do that, we’re here to help you!” (His name wasn’t Johnson, but let’s call him Robert Johnson for the sake of this article.)

I turned to his wife and asked, “What did his mother used to call him?”

“Huh?” she said. “Why do you need to know that?”

“I want to try something,” I told her.

“She called him ‘Bobby'”.

I walked into the room and adopted the demeanor of someone who was surprised to see an old friend in a hospital. “Bobby!” I said. “What’s going on?”

The transformation actually shocked me. He changed instantly from a drunk guy spoiling for a fight to a ten-year-old kid leveling with his best buddy. He started telling me all about what was going on, and I said, “Hey, while we’re talking, let these good folks do their jobs. Now, go on. You were at home, minding your own business, and then what?”

He sat there and told me the whole story, and the staff got what they needed (blood samples, IV line started, and so on) without a problem. Anything I wanted him to do, he did it. Anyone else tried to get him to do something, he’d look at me and ask me if he should do it. And when it came time for me to leave the room, he was calm and grateful that someone heard him out.

This was several years ago. I still don’t know him, and wouldn’t recognize him today. He probably wouldn’t recognize me, either, because he was pretty drunk at the time. But we were childhood buddies for a little while.

Scott Adams, over in The Dilbert Blog, recently asked his readers for nonsense. He considered the idea that most song lyrics today are nonsense, and he wanted his readers to write a hit song.

Looks like it worked.

Next time you’re creating an induction, remember this.

One of the most important economic lessons I learned in college was that of the law of supply and demand. The professor used porn as a great example. During a lecture on business ethics, she posed questions to the class: Should it be legal? Is it ethical to produce it? Opinions varied widely, but she closed the discussion with, “If there were no demand, there would be no supply.”

That law (among others) figures in to the world’s oldest profession, too. Why does she sell her body? Well, because people buy it, that’s why.

Now there’s a brothel in Prague that’s combined the two and leveraged modern technology to meat the kneads (sorry, I had to do it) of both markets at the same time:

…Big Sister, a Prague brothel where customers peruse a touch-screen menu of blondes, brunettes and redheads available for free. The catch is clients have to let their exploits be filmed and posted on the Internet.

OK, OK… free sex in Prague. Are you wondering what this has to do with us in the context of NLP? Not a whole lot, but one thing caught my attention:

Visitors to Big Sister start at the electronic menu, which provides each woman’s age, height, working name and the languages she speaks.

The cops in my area tell me that most of the Johns around here only want to know how much she costs and if she still has most of her teeth. The guys in Prague actually sort hookers based on the languages they speak.

Someone at work found this fun graphic, which is a demonstration of a phenomenon discovered by Ridley Stroop several decades ago:

The University of Washington has an interactive demo of the Stroop Effect which will show you your difference in mental processing time. I didn’t find it that difficult, but there was almost eight seconds’ difference between the first and second sets.

Powells.com has an interview with Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker, author of several excellent books on language and the mind.

I’ve loved everything I’ve read that Dr. Pinker has written, starting with The Language Instinct.
Approachable and intelligent at the same time. Great stuff.

Powells.com Interviews – Steven Pinker

I just read on NLP Connections that David Grove died on January 8th. Judy Rees has more at the preceding link.

If you’re unfamiliar with David Grove’s work, you might go over to the Clean Language FAQ and learn more.

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.

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?

Michael Quinion’s newsletter, World Wide Words, has a section called “sic!” wherein he shares what are usually funny examples of phonological ambiguity. Today’s is especially good. I won’t quote it here
because it’s short and because the author prefers that it not be reproduced “in whole or in part”, but will simply refer you to:

World Wide Words: Michael Quinlon writes on international English from a British viewpoint: “sic!”