NLPhilia Blog

The Psych Central Blog brings up recent research which may point the way toward a simple method for unlearning “learned helplessness“.

The researcher began with the hypothesis that rats would learn to be more adaptable in social situations, or in pairs, however, the research results revealed a very different picture. Rats that were exposed to uncontrollable conditions in pairs coped less well when they were no longer in uncontrollable situations than rats that were exposed to these situations alone.

The article goes on to say that all the researchers had to do was pair up one “learned helpless” rat with one that had never learned to be helpless, and the pair of them were able to cope with difficult situations as if the helpless little guy had never had any trouble before.

Read more at Psych Central.

Robert Pino, Barbara Stepp and Stever Robbins will be teaming up in Chicago in April 2008 to offer a one-of-a-kind seminar on What Matters Most:

The WHAMM! (“What Matters Most!) Seminar is a one of a kind 3 days intensive workshop that will teach you the most valuable business and personal concepts, methodologies and practical tools to focus and create breakthroughs. This unique training seminar will be focused on profound and practical applications of advanced strategic and psychological techniques in the most significant areas of business and life. You will learn these quality techniques from three top trainers with focus and fun. Robert Pino, Barbara Stepp and Stever Robbins will enthrall you with their groundbreaking view on the spirit, mind and body of business and life. What you learn during these 3 days you will put into practice the next day in business! You will put the “WHAMM” in your life and will create breakthroughs!

Follow this link to Read more and sign up!

Tom over at the NLP Times Blog has posted a SUPER article (in two parts) on ten of the most common difficulties an NLP Practitioner faces when doing client work:

1. Jumping to Conclusions
2. Projection
3. Lacking Ownership
4. Poor “Brain Juice”
5. Lack of a Well-Formed Outcome
6. Lacking Belief in Their Ability
7. Not Defining the Problem in Solvable Terms
8. Incongruence
9. Not Paying Attention (Helping Clients to Follow Instructions)
10. Not Testing

Tom outlines each issue and offers a simple solution to each. Definitely worth reading.

Here’s the Link to Part One, and here’s the Link to Part Two.

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?

Alvaro Fernandez at the Huffington Post writes about the Ten Habits of Highly Effective Brains:

1. Learn what is the “It” in “Use It or Lose It”
2. Take care of your nutrition
3. Remember that the brain is part of the body
4. Practice positive, future-oriented thoughts
5. Thrive on Learning and Mental Challenges
6. Aim high
7. Explore and travel
8. Don’t Outsource Your Brain
9. Develop and maintain stimulating friendships
10. Laugh. Often.

Also visit SharpBrains for more information.

(In September of 1999, my eldest sister’s husband died. I wrote this story a few days afterward to detail the shifts in frame and values I experienced.)

Last Saturday, at 6:30 PM, in Christiana (Delaware) Hospital’s Intensive Care Unit, my terminally ill brother-in-law drew his last breath. Three weeks of suffering ended just like that. He was only 54 years old. He left a wife, three children, nine grandchildren, and a multitude of friends.

I visited him once in the ICU. He looked every bit the part of the terminally ill man. Christiana’s a good hospital from a technical standpoint, so I figured his odds were even. When he died, I wasn’t sad… partially because I knew he was suffering and needed to go, but mostly because I believed I hadn’t lost anyone.

Donnie and I weren’t close. We each knew who the other was, but that was about it. He worked a lot, and when when I was a kid and we visited it was for musical purposes and they were busy so I stayed out of the way and stayed quiet as I could. When I got older, I went my way and I worked a lot too, and he and I never got to know one another. So he and I weren’t involved in one another’s lives at all.

Yesterday, I went over to my sister’s house to meet up with the rest of the family so we could all go together to the funeral home for the viewing. She (my sister) walked into the kitchen and I looked at her, and I asked her, “when did you start wearing glasses?”

“About four years ago,” she responded.

My sister has been wearing glasses for four years and I just noticed.

Well, we went to the viewing. I knew nearly no one there. Lots of people poured through, lots of people… and almost all of them I didn’t know. Probably a few of them were there out of filial duty, but it was obvious Donnie was well-loved and well-respected by an overwhelming number of people.

In the casket was a picture of Donnie and Linda, my sister, in formal clothing. It looked way too recent to be a wedding photo, but I asked anyway. Linda told me it was when he was being honored for bravery. He and a co-worker rescued a man and his family from a burning house about eight years ago. Went in, woke them up, got them out, hooked up a hose, and by the time the fire company got there Donnie and his co-worker had put out the fire. And I didn’t know this.

When I got home, I figured I’d post something on the rec.music.country.old-time newsgroup about Donnie’s death. Donnie was a part-time radio DJ who played old-time country music, and the musical group he and my sister and my parents formed are fairly well-known among people who appreciate old-time country music. When I got there, though, I found someone had beaten me to it. It hit me then that he was important to more than just the people who attended the viewing; he was important in some way to thousands of people all over the world.

So now I’m wondering what else I didn’t know. I’m thinking of all those people and what they knew about him and the people who were touched by his art. And it’s dawning on me that I was wrong when I thought I hadn’t lost anyone. There was a guy whom I could have spent time with, whose company I could have enjoyed, whose interests I could have shared, and with whom I could have made music.

You bet I lost someone.

I didn’t lose him Saturday, though. I lost him all my life.

In a recent BoingBoing post referring to a study of computer-altered celebrity photographs done at the University of Central Lancashire, it was pointed out that we tend to recognize a person from caricature twice as easily as from a photograph.

I wonder how this could be useful in, say, state elicitation, memory recovery, and changework.

Link to article in The Guardian

Among many of those who understand that they themselves are responsible for their mental states, there seems to be a dogma that pain is bad and pleasure is good. I’ve never subscribed to that idea. Consider the facts that we evolved with pain (you have to be at least a bony fish in order to feel anxious) and that those who are incapable of feeling pain (such as those afflicted with leprosy) tend to live shorter and unhappier lives.

In a Thanksgiving post from Seth Godin’s blog, he talks a bit about the “Black Friday” ritual:

Why? In an always-on internet world, why force people to do something they would ordinarily avoid?

Because they like it. It feels special. They are somehow earning the discount. The store creates discomfort and then profits from it. And the customers save money…

It’s an interesting idea, and I think it might be a useful one when working with clients (or with oneself). Make them work for it, even hurt for it, and it’ll matter more to them.

Thoughts?

(Note: When I was in my first Practitioner training back in 1997-1998, a friend of mine called me with a rather distressing problem. I did some work with her over the phone, and it was so effective I decided to write it down. It ended up in the form of this fairy tale. Many people have read it since then, and most of them report having had it affect them deeply. The images are quite powerful. Enjoy it.)

A long time ago I heard a story of a young woman. She was friendly and fair, and many people took advantage of her nature and mistreated her. This made her very unhappy, as it would, and she somehow came to believe that she deserved this.

One day, after yet another example of mistreatment, she went for a walk and got lost in her own thoughts when she found a large pit in the ground. Carefully she peered over the edge and into the blackness. “It has no bottom,” she thought to herself. “It goes on and on forever.” Deeper and deeper, her thoughts drifted… and the darkness of the pit seemed to call to her, call her name, invite her to lose herself in the pit. And she found that she felt nothing as she allowed her mind to drift into the dark of the pit, and that was better than the hurt. Before she knew it, dusk had fallen, and she wandered home.

She didn’t, at first, visit this pit every day… just now and then, she’d find herself there, staring into it, feeling nothing, numb. Soon enough, she learned to make her way there daily, then twice a day or more… until eventually she’d wake up in the morning and go directly to it, going home at the end of the day. It was much better, she thought, than spending the day hurting, and maybe she was right, I don’t know.

One morning she awoke and she was already standing by the pit. She had fallen asleep there the night before, staring into the dark. And she found that seemed to be all right. Because when she wasn’t there, she was thinking about being there.

Nobody else understood why she didn’t want to talk to them or do anything with them anymore… why, she hardly slept and sometimes didn’t even bathe, because she spent all her time somewhere they didn’t know. People tried to get her to stop… even tried making her stop, and then they went away. They just didn’t understand that the pit kept her from them so they couldn’t hurt her anymore. And the world began to pass her by.

Summer came, and she was walking toward her pit (for she had begun to think of it that way, as her pit), when out of the corner of her eye she saw movement, and heard a funny little noise coming from that movement. A small, joyous noise it was. She looked, and saw a butterfly alternately chasing and being chased by a puppy. What a sight! She stood there and watched the game for a bit, and soon heard an odd noise. Looking around, she saw nothing, and watched the game a bit more. She heard that odd noise again, and so did the puppy, because he looked right at her. She realized that the odd noise was her own laughter. And the puppy, inspired by its own ability to entertain, scampered over to her and licked her ankles. And she laughed at that too.

“I’d love to play with you,” she said, “but I have something to do.” And she walked on. The puppy tilted its head quizzically and then followed her. “No, don’t come. I can’t play with you now. Go on! Go home and play,” she said to the friendly little puppy. And she went on to her pit.

The next day, the little puppy was waiting in her path, with a happy grin on its face. So she played a bit of catch with it and again sent it on its way. Her face felt funny from smiling as she continued to her pit. And as she began to stare down into the darkness, visions of her new little friend flashed into her mind, and the darkness began to call to her louder than before. She could understand what it was saying.

The following day, her puppy (for she had begun to think of it that way, as her puppy) wasn’t waiting for her, and she was surprised to feel disappointment. She hoped something hadn’t happened to the sweet little thing. So she went back to town and wandered through the streets, hoping to catch a glimpse of her friend and muttering, “if I’d just go to my pit all this would go away. Yes, it’s just like before, the pit is my only friend.”

“Pit?!” she heard a creaking voice behind her ask. She turned, surprised and embarrassed, and saw a woman. Dressed in black, bent with age… but her eyes were those of an infant, wide and clear and warm.

“Yes… it’s mine… no one knows of it but me.” Thinking the woman may have seen the puppy, she asked “Have you by any chance…”

“Seen your pit? No. I’ve seen my own. I can tell by looking at you what kind it is. Dark and without a bottom it is, and it knows you by name, and calls to you it does, does it not.”

“You have one?” the girl asked.

“No more. It served me well for a time, yes it did, and I served it too, fed it for a while. You feed your own. I can smell you from here. You don’t bathe. You don’t sleep and you eat poor, because it calls you. You’re here, now, and not there, and it speaks your name still in your mind. Why be you here?”

“I don’t know. I’m looking for something.” The old one had confused her. How did she know these things? “Are you going to tell me to stop going?”

“Hell, no, child, no. Go all you want. Live there if you so choose. Here, take this too.” From a fold of her old black robe, the old woman produced a small ball of perfectly clear crystal. “Pretty it is, and gets warm at times, so take it with you. Try not to look too deeply into it.”

The girl took her gift. She didn’t know how not to. And she went to her pit. She didn’t know how not to. And the closer she got to it, the more clearly it called to her. And the old woman’s words… what did she mean?

(I served it too, fed it for a while. You feed your own)

Closer still, feeling something warm in her pocket… the funny little ball. “Gets warm at times,” she said… and what else? Looking deeply into it? Pulling it out of her pocket, she looked at it. It was warm, a bit, and she could see herself… distorted reflection, she could still see that she looked not like herself. Her feet continued the familiar path, but her curiosity was caught by the reflection moving in the…

(Try not to look too deeply into it)

She saw the little puppy, grinning from inside the ball… then the two of them playing together the day before, and then the day before as it played tag with the butterfly. She saw other scenes, a dance she attended once… her first kiss, so long ago… the ball gave off a gentle, warmly colored glow as it showed scene after happy scene from her life… things she thought she’d forgotten about. The warm glow bathed her in the light, filled her it seemed, and she drew it closer to her eyes.

And it began to grow in her hands. And the feelings the light created inside grew and grew, filling her and swirling inside, seeming to burst out of her and enter elsewhere until she was bathed in a spinning, swirling, sparkling, brightly colored sphere, filled with joy, happiness, the light, scenes of happiness in her life on every side, inside. The more she felt it, the more powerful it got, and the more she could feel it, until she knew she’d burst with joy.

Throw it in, the old woman’s voice called from somewhere deep inside. Trust. Throw it in.

“Oh, no, I don’t want to! It’s so wonderful! I’ve never felt so wonderful!”

Trust.

Closing her eyes, she tossed the huge, glowing ball into the pit. For an instant, she saw the darkness engulf the beauty… but before she even had a chance to think, a bright and soundless flash of colored light from the pit caused her to breathe a deep breath… and she looked deep into…

The darkness was gone, swept away. The pit now seemed illuminated from within. She saw it wasn’t bottomless after all; it wasn’t even deep. She saw that climbing out of it would be an easy task. And the quiet… the quiet that one only notices after a sound one has gotten used to suddenly stops… like when the church bell in the center of town finishes ringing.

She felt different, very different. How easy it is, she thought, to walk away from what once held her captive. Now she knew what the old woman meant

(I served it too, fed it for a while. You feed your own)

when she said what she did. She’d fed it long after it deserved feeding. Fed it with her life force. But no more. She still felt the light.

As she ran back home, her puppy was waiting for her in its usual place. “Come home with me, little friend. Come home.” Her little friend scampered after her.

Over the following years, she occasionally wondered where the old woman came from and whatever became of that wound in the ground she used to pay so much attention to. She was far too busy with her life… with her dog who got big but never seemed to grow up, with her new friends, with the handsome men whose eye her smile caught in the marketplace… to concern herself with it too much.

And as she grew old, she could look back on her life, remembering delight in her children and grandchildren, her love, her friends and family. One day she wandered, curious, to where she had spent so much time so long ago. She was interested to notice how small it was. It had all but closed over long ago. And something in the center of the small scar in the earth caught the sunlight. She walked over… recognized… smiled to herself… gingerly bent over as much as her old bones would allow, picked up the shiny crystal, and placed it in her pocket.

She resolved that she’d go to town tomorrow. And she smiled again to herself.

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.