NLPhilia Blog

Alax Shalman over at Lifehack.Org has written another great article on controlling the conversation, this time using questions:

Questions are an amazing way to control communication. A properly placed question can showcase your intelligence, interest in the person, as well as direct the conversation towards your intended outcome. You could use this opportunity to gain rapport by appealing to the person’s ego.

See also a similar, earlier article about compliments, written by the same author.

From The Waiter Rant blog we have this great post on influencing the behavior of others using a seasoned waiter’s amazing skills. Note the ambiguity in his question to the little boy:

Arriving at the table I don’t say anything to the parents – I focus all my towering attention on the little boy. As I stare into his big watery eyes he instantly falls silent. The parents are amazed.

“Who is this man?” I ask the little boy, pointing to the bearded caricature painted on my tacky Christmas tie.

Since beginning to read his blog, I haven’t been able to look at waitstaff the same way I used to. I have always been polite and respectful, and most people would say I tip too much, but now I pay attention to how they handle people. Impressive.

Bateson would be proud of Dilbert. Check out last Sunday’s strip. I bet he gets that raise.

(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

I was listening to an audiobook today, as I try to do every day, and heard a neat phonological ambiguity. The book was “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, a 600-year-old tale from England which has been translated by Simon Armitage from Middle English into Modern English. Armitage does a wonderful job of using alliteration (which is to Middle English poetry what rhyme is to modern poetry) to recapture the “flavor” of the old language, and the reader (British actor Bill Wallis) is brilliant as well. (Wallis even reads the entire book in Middle English after he finishes with the Modern English translation.)

Anyway… I heard something like “…threw him into the copse” and immediately had a funny mental image of throwing a guy into a bunch of police officers. If you don’t know what a “copse” is, don’t be surprised; we rarely use the word anymore. I was surprised that I did know what it was.

So we have:

• cops, simple present tense of “to cop”, as in “to illicitly obtain”: “He cops a feel whenever he goes out with a girl.”
• cops, simple present tense of “to cop”, as in “to arrest”: “Officer O’Reilly cops at least one drug dealer every shift he works.”
• cops, plural of “cop” as in “police officer”: “If you fart like that one more time, I’m going to call the cops and have you arrested for attempted murder.”
• copse, a “bunch of bushes”: “Your kitten is hiding in that copse over there.”

Looking for more possibilities, Google led me to this wonderful resource: Suber & Thorpe, “An English Homophone Dictionary”. It’s no longer maintained, but wow… it’s loaded with goodies.

Incidentally, the audiobook seems to be unavailable from amazon.com. I got my copy from my public library. It’s published by BBC Audiobooks America and can be ordered by way of this link. The printed book is available from your favorite bookseller.

A young couple moves into a condominium and they immediately decide to wallpaper the dining room. Realizing that their neighbor’s condo is a mirror image of their own, they thought they’d call him so as to save themselves a lot of trouble with a measuring tape.

“Hi! We’re your new next-door neighbors! By any chance have you wallpapered your dining room?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I did, about a year and a half ago. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, we’d like to do the same for ours. How much wallpaper did you buy?”

“Fifteen rolls.”

“Thank you! You’ve saved us some trouble.”

“You’re welcome.”

So the couple goes to a high-end store and buys fifteen rolls of very expensive wallpaper. When they’re done working, they have four rolls left over. Irritated at having wasted their money that way, they called their neighbor back.

“Excuse me, but we bought fifteen rolls of wallpaper for our dining room, and we have four rolls left over!” they said, a little too testily.

Their neighbor responded, “Yeah, same thing happened to me.”

I used to sell cars. I didn’t do it for very long, and I didn’t do very well. One of the reasons I did poorly, my sales manager told me, is that I didn’t “control the conversation”. When I asked him how to do it, he couldn’t really tell me. He “just knew”.

Now, though, I’ve spent some time learning and applying NLP, and I know how it’s done. But author Alex Shalman over at Lifehack.org taught me something new:

Let’s take a look at some of the benefits that manipulating or controlling a conversation can provide for us by tapping into the power of compliments.

I never considered leading someone in that way, but it seems brilliant to me. We just have to keep in mind the major point: “The key to being successful with compliment techniques is to be sincere.”

Follow this link to read the article!

I like to find instances wherein the NLP Presuppositions come in to play in Real Life.

Recently, there was a patient in the Emergency Department who was there for psychiatric issues. I’d seen him there a lot; he is what we often call a “frequent flyer”. I noticed a raw spot on his skin and asked him what had happened. “A dog bit me”, he said.

I wondered if the dog was rabid or otherwise sick… could the bite do him harm? So I asked, “Is the dog all right?”

The patient and the rest of the staff in the room started chuckling, and he looked at me kind of sideways, like I’d made a joke. “I don’t care about the fucking dog!”

I realized what they thought I’d done, and I had to laugh too.

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.

Walking past the ER Registration desk one day, I heard the clerk ask a mom if the little girl (the patient) had any allergies.

“She’s allergic to time,” the mother said.

“Time?!” the clerk asked.

“T-H-Y-M-E. The herb. Thyme,” mom replied.

I thought to myself, “Damn”.