NLPhilia Blog

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.

I attended a Belief Craft training a little while ago and was very impressed with what I learned to do. Combine Jonathan Altfeld’s Knowledge Engineering with Doug O’Brien’s Sleight of Mouth and you get an amazing set of modeling and personal change tools.

If people learn to listen well enough to track the larger belief systems, then, they can then use Sleight of Mouth skills to wire completely around a problem belief, without actually attacking the problem belief. Then you can change someone’s mind without them feeling defensive about it, and sometimes, without them even knowing. That represents the most elegant use of Sleight of Mouth possible.

They’re doing it again in June of 2008 as the first module of a Master Practitioner training. Here’s your chance to grab it up before it’s all gone.

Belief Craft – Elegant and Pervasive Belief Change seminar

My old friend Chad Amberg is an interesting guy. Definitely not the type to march in time with the popular crowd, but not at all “weird” either. I think he’d make a great NLPer. I should mention it to him.

Chad is a computer guru. Mostly Windows, poor guy, but he can do pretty much anything that needs doing on pretty much any system you’re likely to be running. He’s the one who got me turned on to OS/2 back in the mid-1990s. Definitely old-skewl. Especially when it comes to programming.

We NLPers tend to spend a lot of time on the “N” and the “L” but not so much on the finer points of the “P”. Remember that Richard Bandler was learning computer science when he began poking around in subjective human experience, and that one of Jonathan Altfeld’s more popular courses, Knowledge Engineering, is pulled directly from Jonathan’s experience and training in the modeling of human decision structures using the Lisp programming language.

I know that when I learned the basics of programming in Rexx, it helped me to think much more clearly about structure. (I wouldn’t recommend Rexx right now, though, even though it’s excellent; I think Python is much more useful for the majority. If I had it to do over again, I’d have started with Python.) Learning to write a simple structured program, even in a scripting language like Rexx or Python, is a tremendous gift you can give to yourself.

Chad wrote a short article today on what he believes are the Keys to Programming. It’s brief, high-level, good advice with no language-specific ideas… more like “how to think like a programmer” than “how to write a program”. He references an essay by Paul Graham titled, “How to Hold a Program in Your Head”, which is what we’re interested in doing, yes?

Update March 30, 2022: Chad doesn’t maintain that blog any more, so I thought I’d include a link to Paul Graham’s article here: How To Hold A Program In Your Head

I don’t know how I missed this site up until now. Expert Village offers a multitude of free instructional videos on a wide variety of topics, all from credentialed experts in their respective fields.

The Internet is filling up with content. But the challenge in the information age is no longer finding information, but figuring out which information to believe. Our philosophy is to film and interview leading experts who teach you what they know. We go a step further by providing you the credentials of the expert we consulted so that you can judge the credibility of the information you receive.

Let me know how you like Expert Village: Free video clips, how to videos, and video instruction

BoingBoing has a great little story on how a kid saved his sister and himself from a moose attack using skills he picked up from a game:

In the article he describes how he first yelled at the moose, distracting it so his sister got away, then when he got attacked and the animal stood over him he feigned death. “Just like you learn at level 30 in World of Warcraft.”

What a great example of learning through metaphor.

Over at lifehack.org, author Dustin Wax has written an article about the art of improvisation, based on the autobiography of jazz musician Charles Mingus.

If you’ve done any real work with NLP, you know that there comes a time when we have to improvise. One of my trainers calls it “The MSU technique“, a.k.a. “Making Stuff Up”. NLP is about individuals, and individuals are, well, individual, so if all we have is a bunch of canned patterns, we can’t respond adequately.

The high points:

Head on over to Lifehack.org and find out how to Improvise Like a Jazz Musician.

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.”

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.

Jonathan Altfeld is offering his Knowledge Engineering training in Atlanta, Georgia, USA on December 1 through December 3, 2007.

This is our most advanced material on Modeling. For those who want to learn to visually unpack beliefs, belief systems, decision sequences, values, and human reasoning heuristics. Awesome for coaches.

I have the home-study course and have taken “Belief Craft” with Jonathan and Doug O’Brien, and I can say it’s excellent.

Link to Jonathan Altfeld’s Mastery InSight Institute