NLPhilia Blog

It was a Sunday, if I recall correctly. All the offices were closed, so the building should have been empty. It wasn’t.

I was walking through the hall, rattling doorknobs. It’s one of the “trained monkey” duties a Security Officer does… one of the mindless things a well-trained monkey might be able to do, but humans have to do it because of what might be on the other side of a door that should be locked, but isn’t. Like today.

I twisted the knob and pulled, and the door came open easily. “More paperwork for me to do,” I thought, and walked in to check the suite. As the door closed behind me, around the corner ahead of me came a large, black dog. And he was most definitely not happy that I was in his house. He bared his teeth, growled deep and loud, and began running at me, eyes on my throat. He was less than a second from me. I mean it: less than one second.

I still don’t know what came over me. I adopted a happy expression, squatted down, slapped my thigh, and said in a happy tone, “Hi, fella! Come here, boy!”

It was as if the dog briefly defied gravity. He almost paused in mid-air as he ran. He stumbled ever so slightly as his feet regained the floor, and by the time he made it to me, he was barking happily, wagging his tail, dancing in circles around me, and licking my hand. Remember: less than one second.

The dog’s owner, a tall and attractive woman whom I knew worked there, came around the corner out of one of the offices. Apparently she was catching up on some work. She was looking at the two of us, the dog and me, like we were playing checkers and he was winning.

“Is this your dog?” I asked.

“Uh… yeah…” she answered. When he heard her voice, he began running rapidly back and forth between her and me, as if to say to her, “Look! Look who’s here! He finally came! Do you see?!”

“One hell of a watchdog,” I said, patting him as he ran by.

“Uh… usually…” she said. She was clearly nonplussed. Then she called the dog and went back to work.

Dave Munger over at Cognitive Daily points to some interesting research:

There’s another factor that has been demonstrated to have a significant effect on whether a face is remembered: the facial expression. In 2004, Arnaud D’Argembeau and Martial Van der Linden found that people who viewed a series of photos of faces were more likely to remember smiling faces compared to angry faces — even when the faces they were later asked to recall had neutral expressions.

Want someone to remember your face? Smile.

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.

Jonathan Altfeld’s presentation skills are beyond compare, and one of the best things about them is that he’s willing to teach them to you. In April 2008, Jonathan will be holding his Holographic Communication training in both Copenhagen, Denmark and London, UK.

If Your Livelihood Depends on Giving Compelling Presentations… or Even if You Just WANT People Hanging on your Every Word, in Business, in Public, or in Platform Sales… We’ve got a Pain-Free, Risk-Free, Fun-to-Learn Process… that can turn ANY Ugly Duckling into a Swan… & we’ve published video case-studies [on the Web site] to prove it.

We all know that there are times to use a cliché and times to avoid using one. Most people think of clichés as purely verbal, though; something like “money talks” or “pull yourself up by the bootstraps”. (Here’s the Internet Cliché Finder, if you’re interested.) But they can be visual, as well.

For example, here’s an article for Webmasters: Eleven images you might want to avoid in your designs. Looking through the list, I find it makes a lot of sense. (But where do we draw the line between “classic” and “cliché”?)

While you’re at it, browse around on snap2objects.com if you’re interested in Web design at all.

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

A little surfing around led me to the Web page of researcher Sanjay Srivastava on what he calls “The Big Five Personality Factors”. I haven’t finished reading the docs available, but at first blush it seems that he’s found five Meta-Programs that tend to go together somehow in most people:

• Extraversion (sometimes called Surgency). The broad dimension of Extraversion encompasses such more specific traits as talkative, energetic, and assertive.
• Agreeableness. This dimension includes traits like sympathetic, kind, and affectionate.
• Conscientiousness. People high in Conscientiousness tend to be organized, thorough, and planful.
• Neuroticism (sometimes reversed and called Emotional Stability). Neuroticism is characterized by traits like tense, moody, and anxious.
• Openness to Experience (sometimes called Intellect or Intellect/Imagination). This dimension includes having wide interests, and being imaginative and insightful.

I’m going to want to spend some time examining this, as I’m not certain how useful it might be to NLPers.

Link to Measuring the Big Five Personality Factors

(Oh… the word “OCEAN” in the title refers to an acronym of the names of the “Big Five”.)

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.”