NLPhilia Blog

“Crazy All the Time” was the title of a book I read a long time ago. It was about the psych ward at Bellvue State Hospital in New York. It’s been so long that I don’t remember anything about it, but I still love the title.

A couple of days ago* I was on the psych unit at my hospital (I think of it that way, as my hospital) when a long-time schizophrenic came up to the nurse’s station. This woman is as sweet as she can be, and she’s got tardive dyskenesia thanks to a lifetime of drugs to treat her socially-unaccepted behavior. She can be annoying at times.

Anyway, she looked at the nurse and said, “I been eatin’ chicken feathers. You see me eat all them chicken feathers?”

The nurse heard her but didn’t say anything, as she had her conscious mind on another task.

“I been eatin’ chicken feathers,” she said again.

I said, without really looking at her, “What does it mean that you eat chicken feathers?”

“Oh,” she said, “I just been gettin’ tickled at everything. Just laughin’ at everything.” (Note that “gettin’ tickled” is an idiom around here meaning “finding things extremely amusing”.) Then she walked away.

The nurse looked at me and grinned a little. “It was a metaphor,” she said, with that “Now I get it” look in her eye.

*Originally posted in Usenet on March 3, 2001

InfoWorld Magazine, in their TechWatch section, takes humorous issue with the same sort of gobbledygook despised by David Scott (see a recent post of mine). Read author Matt Hines’ article about security analyst Nick Selby’s“BullsIT Awards”, Poking Fun at Tech PR:

Our friends in the PR community can probably say the same thing about some of the stories we in the IT media produce on our side of the business, but, it is intensely fun from time-to-time to examine some of the worst examples of marketing lingo that get hurled at us on a regular basis.

I loved Selby’s reference to Lisa Simpson of The Simpsons: “This reminds me of Lisa Simpson visiting Australia and, on seeing on a cinema a sign reading, ‘Yahoo Serious Festival,’ she said, ‘I know those words, but that sign makes no sense.'”

Some time back, I covered a midnight shift at the hospital and had an interesting and brief conversation with a guy.

As I was walking out of the hospital, this glowing young man was walking back in. In a voice that sounded just this side of celebrant, he grinned and said “I’m a daddy, man!”

I’ve heard this many times, and in that same almost-giddy tone. I don’t know why this one caught me differently.

The first thing I noticed about my own reaction was that it wasn’t cynical. My own internal response is usually “after a few weeks of early-morning feedings and a few years of overtime to buy food and clothing, he won’t be so giddy about daddyhood.”

What really kept rolling over in my head was the words he chose. “I’m a daddy.” I am a daddy.

He didn’t tell me his wife had just had a child, or that his wife and he had just had one. That would represent that he was thinking something had happened in his life, or that he had just accomplished something.

He didn’t mention anything about new capabilities of which he was aware or a new belief system he’d just adopted.

He didn’t even say he’d become a daddy, or he was now a daddy. That would say that he was fully aware that there was a time he wasn’t a daddy, and something happened, and now he was a daddy.

He said “I am a daddy.” A completely new, as-if-from-scratch identity, out of what seems to be nowhere. As if he’d been a daddy all along and just now figured out what that meant. As if he’d never been anything else. I believe that if I’d asked him at that instant where he went to high school or what kind of car he had when he was 16, he would have had to stop and think about it. I doubt he’d remember it in the same way he remembered it last week.

It occurs to me now that when someone says becoming a parent is a life-changing experience, they don’t mean–or don’t realize consciously they mean–the rest of your life has been changed. It seems to me, from this incident, that one’s subjective experience of one’s entire life, from point of gaining sentience, is changed.

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

Scientist and Harvard lecturer Steven Pinker recently gave an exclusive interview for Powell’s Books to promote his new book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature…

…which Wired calls “a fascinating look at how language provides a window into the deepest functioning of the human brain.” One rainy afternoon, Dr. Pinker stopped by to discuss causality, the concept of concepts, how to swear in several languages, and the way irregular verbs can lead to romance.

I haven’t yet read all of Pinker’s books, but I’ve been highly appreciative of the ones I have read. Looking forward to this one.

Powell’s Bookstore Interview with Steven Pinker

Master copywriter Harlan Kilstein made an exciting discovery recently: a videorecording of Doug O’Brien teaching his acclaimed Sleight of Mouth training to a group of salespeople. He’s mastered the video to DVD and has released it for sale.

Check out what Harlan has to say about the conversion process:

I decided on the spot to convert these VHS tapes into DVDs and encountered a glitch. The guy I hired liked the DVDs so much he kept inviting his friends over to watch them. What should have taken a week ended up taking months.

Now check out what he has to say about the content:

Most salespeople are happy if they close at a 20 to 40% rate. Most copywriters are thrilled if their copy converts 1% of the lookers into buyers. Even at these numbers, money can be made.

But what if your sales closed at an 80-90% rate? Or your copy converted 17% or more? You know what that would do for your bottom line?

These DVDs are a must-have for anyone who wants to be more persuasive in any every context.

Order the DVDs here.

By way of this post on the Freakonomics Blog, here’s some interesting research on people’s tendency to prefer things that have the same initial as their own name:

People like their names so much that they unconsciously opt for things that begin with their initials. Tom is more likely to buy a Toyota, move to Totowa and marry Tessa than is Joe, who is more likely to buy a Jeep, move to Jonestown and marry Jill—and Susie sells seashells by the seashore. Even weirder, they gravitate toward things that begin with their initials even when those things are undesirable, like bad grades or a baseball strikeout.

This might be useful if you’re wanting to persuade someone to your way of thinking. Maybe we should be asking Karen to sign the contract and Donna to sign the document and Paul to OK the paperwork. What do you think?

I first learned about congruence from Frank Farrelly.

While I’d learned how to do it from my NLP trainings with John and Kathleen LaValle and Doug O’Brien, Frank was the guy who really taught me what it meant. From his book, Provocative Therapy:

One thing in my mind was very clear: that radical congruence, if held constant, was very helpful to patients in interviews; that I could not only laugh at patients without detriment to them but even with help to them; that laughter towards patients was not inevitably “demeaning their dignity”. I also felt very freed up in interviews. I wasn’t “grinding my gears” and my responses towards clients weren’t going in one direction while my thoughts, reactions and feelings were going in another.

Now, that isn’t to say I laugh at my patients. I certainly laugh if they say something I find funny, but in my line of work that’s rather a rarity. I do, however, respond to them honestly.

• Very recently, a man’s wife died at my hospital, and he was understandably distraught. As he kissed her for the last time and told her that he loved her, I choked. I had to walk away. Some would have said I was “unprofessional” for letting my feelings show like that. I disagree. (Fortunately for me, so does my manager, and so do the ICU nurses.)
• Some time back, a woman on our psychiatric unit was dismantling the furniture in her room. She was upset about something and the staff were afraid to go in and get her. I went to the door and saw her surrounded by drawers. “Move them away from you, please,” I asked. She asked why I wanted her to do that. I said, “To be honest, you’re scaring me a little. I’m afraid you might use one of them to try to hurt me.” She looked at me, maybe a little wide-eyed, and moved them away from her. She then accompanied me to the “Quiet Room” without a problem.
• Typically, if I have to restrain someone, I’m not pleased about it. I understand how frightened they must be and I treat them the way I’d want to be treated if I’d placed myself in their position. I approach such events with the attitude described in stanza 31 of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching (Stephen Mitchell’s translation):
  

  Weapons are the tools of violence;
  all decent men detest them.

  Weapons are the tools of fear;
  a decent man will avoid them
  except in the direst necessity
  and, if compelled, will use them
  only with the utmost restraint.
  Peace is his highest value.
  If the peace has been shattered,
  how can he be content?
  His enemies are not demons,
  but human beings like himself.
  He doesn’t wish them personal harm.
  Nor does he rejoice in victory.
  How could he rejoice in victory
  and delight in the slaughter of men?

  He enters a battle gravely,
  with sorrow and with great compassion,
  as if he were attending a funeral.

One of the things I keep in mind is that, because I intend to remain congruent in that way, I have to decide what response I want to have in such situations. My NLP skills permit me to do that. I can decide what’s important to me in a given situation and resolve to behave consistently with that.

Sometimes, people don’t know how to take me. They assume there’s something else going on. Incongruence seems to be the norm, I guess. My girlfriend told me, early on in our relationship, that she felt like I was looking into her rather than at her. I wasn’t. I was looking at her, and she’d gotten used to everyone else looking at the pretty, perky, sunshiny persona she exudes so well. And I still have to deal with her responding to stuff I didn’t say, simply because she seems to assume I “really meant” something other than what I actually said.

I think my favorite example is the time a supervisor at the hospital tried to bully me. It was the way he got things done, and it tended to work with pretty much everyone. He wanted me to do something for him, and I was willing to do it for him (he wasn’t my supervisor), but he took on the “pushing people around” affect with me. In a completely congruent fashion, I responded to him as if he’d instead asked me for a tremendous favor. He tranced for a split second, and then he responded to me as if I’d just agreed to do him a tremendous favor. And the funny thing is, he never tried to bully me again. If I recall correctly, he didn’t bully anyone when I was around. Not that he thought about it and decided against it or anything… more like it never even occurred to him.

Anyway, congruence is a powerful thing, and I’m exceeding grateful to Frank for having opened it up for me. I enjoyed my Provocative Therapy training and highly recommend it to anyone. I also enjoyed the meal I shared with him and with Doug O’Brien; it was a ball. If you ever get the chance, go see Frank in action.