NLPhilia Blog

I thought it was cute, anyway.

Rapport is a fundamental NLP skill, and if you can’t get rapport with the person you’re helping — or who is helping you — everything is much, much more difficult.

I doubt you’ve been in a more difficult situation that Dr. Jack Schafer, though. He is a former Supervisory Special Agent with the FBI, and part of his job was turning foreign spies into double-agents. His life depended on his ability to establish and maintain rapport with people who could be quite hostile if things went wrong.

He wrote a book, The Like Switch, on the topic, and I highly recommend it. (I highly recommend everything he’s written, for that matter.)

Podcaster Jordan Harbinger (an excellent interviewer, by the way) pulled Dr. Schafer in for a two-part interview on the skills taught in The Like Switch. Go have a listen:

1. Flipping The Like Switch, Part One
2. FLipping The Like Switch, Part Two

Dr. Jordan Peterson on propulsion systems.

NLPers have been saying for decades that you can change your internal experience by way of interruption. Science is catching up.

A new study shows that distractions might change our perception of what’s real, making us believe we saw something different from what we actually saw.

Distractions Can Change Perceptions of What is Real

It’s not failure. It’s feedback. And that matters more than you may realize.

Kendra Cherry gives a very nice overview of nine distinct communication channels apart from the words we choose:

Nonverbal communication plays an important role in how we convey meaning and information to others, as well as how we interpret the actions of those around us. The important thing to remember when looking at such nonverbal behaviors is to consider the actions in groups. What a person actually says along with his or her expressions, appearance, and tone of voice might tell you a great deal about what that person is really trying to say.

I love the fine distinctions. Master these and send ten different messages at once.

Types of Nonverbal Communication

Yet another “NLP was here first” example. I saw this on a trivia buff’s blog, “Futility Closet:”

In 2008, researchers at Oxford University found that subjects could reduce pain and swelling in an injured hand by viewing it through reversed binoculars.

Conversely, a magnified injury was more painful. “If it looks bigger, it looks sorer,” said physiologist G. Lorimer Moseley. “Therefore the brain acts to protect it.”

A judicious Googling led me to the pertinent issue of Current Biology online. On the right-hand side of that page, there are links to PDF and HTML versions of the article.

A little while back, I made pancakes for someone, and she liked them a lot. She said, “My pancakes never turn out right. What’s your recipe?”

I had to admit that I took a shortcut and made them from Bisquick. She was a bit annoyed. See, she made them from Bisquick, too, but, she said, hers were always flat and tough and tasteless. Mine were light and fluffy and delicious.

She and I used the same recipe — followed the same prescribed steps in the same order — but my results were good, and hers weren’t. What’s the deal?

It turns out that there are a great many things they don’t write into a recipe. Things that a cookbook author, who is adept at cooking, assumes one knows. So people buy cookbooks, or trade recipes online or with friends, and complain that theirs doesn’t “turn out” and they don’t know why.

I taught myself to cook. I love to eat, and I enjoy good food, and I absolutely enjoy trying new things, so learning to cook was a must. I can read a recipe and hallucinate how it’ll taste, at least most of the time. It took me a long time to get where I am, and if I’d gone to culinary school I’d have cut that time way down. I’d be a lot better at cooking, too. But I’m still pretty good. I can follow a recipe and it’ll “turn out”.

Anyway, here’s what pancake recipes don’t tell you:

• Don’t beat the batter. Stir it. It’s OK if there are some lumps. If the lumps bother you, break them up with a whisk. Just don’t beat the batter. It develops the gluten in the wheat flour, which will make your pancakes flat and tough and bland.
• Let the batter sit for a while. Ten or fifteen minutes at the very least. Overnight in the refrigerator is great. This lets the milk and eggs soak into every bit of the flour, which helps the flavor a lot.
• The griddle or skillet has to be hot. Toss a drop of water on it, and it doesn’t sit there and sizzle; it jumps around and tries to get away. Pancakes cook quickly to trap air bubbles in the batter. Cook them too slowly and the bubbles can all break up and get away, making things flatten out.
• Flip the pancakes once and only once. Flipping is another thing that can develop gluten.
• Most important: use real maple syrup, not that godawful fake maple flavored stuff. It matters. Try it once and you’ll see. Just don’t use too much, because real maple syrup has a rich flavor you won’t find in those chemical compounds that pretend to by syrup.

Enjoy your breakfast.

(Jeez… why is he writing about pancakes on an NLP blog?)

Jonathan Altfeld has two new courses — one for Practitioners, one for Master Practitioners — coming up soon. He calls them “Mental Renovation”:

To get NLP to help you achieve the changes you desire, you have to make a choice. There’s no avoiding it. You have a choice of 3 optimal or primary options:

1. Take a lot of expensive training over time, and get extraordinarily good at knowing & using NLP, which might help you to become good enough at it, that you can create the changes you want in your life. The benefit of this route is, you might also get good enough to help others. That may be a career choice that would excite you.
2. Hire an NLP-trained coach or Practitioner to do their magic on/with you, which may vaguely resemble therapy depending on how badly trained the NLP practitioner or coach is. Done right, you should get some of the changes you want, but you’ll be paying premium rates by the hour for such 1-on-1 work.
3. Attend one or several short, applied courses or seminars like this one, which instead of training you in NLP, the seminar leaders use NLP while they lead you through exercises or experiences that get you to think differently about your situation. Then you sometimes get the change you want, but you won’t have actually learned a lot of NLP consciously. If you want the results without a new career in NLP, this is the way to go.

Go learn more about the Mental Renovation Workshops in Chambersburg, PA and sign up!

Kevin Creedon and Doug O’Brien have set the date(s) for their 2009 weekend-format NLP Practitioner and Master Practitioner trainings:

1. January 17-18
2. January 31-Feb 1
3. February 14-15
4. March 14-15
5. March 28-29
6. April 25-26
7. May 16-17

Register before October 15th for early-bird discounts. The venue is TRS Professional Suites at 44 East 32nd Street in New York City.