NLPhilia Blog

I got some great news from Doug O’Brien: he’s started a blog, and will be making regular posts on the subject of Ericksonian language patterns. Doug is an amazing trainer, and he’s sharing his expertise with the world for free!

Go to the Web site or subscribe to the feed!

As I read Randy Cassingham’s fantastic e-mail newsletter, This Is True, I was pleased to find that his “Bonzer Site of the Week” for this week is One Sentence: True stories, told in one sentence.

Did you know about Jamie Smart’s Real World NLP & Hypnosis Blog? I didn’t until just now.

Randy Cassingham of This Is True fame blogs a great article on the real-world differences between experiencing something and knowing about something.

Well, no wonder I’ve struggled so long trying to figure it out and explain it; why I couldn’t explain it has perplexed me for some time. I think Dan is right: that’s impossible. All I know is that many Premium subscribers absolutely love it, and say things like Belinda did — it’s a life “essential” — or liked Daniel, who “savors” it. Or like Dan: he’ll read it for life (his or mine, I guess: whichever comes first!)

Read Randy’s Mystery Solved. And if you don’t already get his newsletters, start with This Is True, collections of strange-but-true stories like:

• A man sued his doctor because he survived his cancer longer than the doctor predicted.
• Two robbers were in the process of their crime when one changed his mind and arrested the other.
• A woman had her husband’s ashes made into an egg timer when he died so he could still “help” in the kitchen.
• Only 68 of 200 Anglican priests polled could name all Ten Commandments, but half said they believed in space aliens.

(I’ve been a Premium subscriber for several years and have appreciated every issue.)

Michael Quinion’s newsletter, World Wide Words, has a section called “sic!” wherein he shares what are usually funny examples of phonological ambiguity. Today’s is especially good. I won’t quote it here
because it’s short and because the author prefers that it not be reproduced “in whole or in part”, but will simply refer you to:

World Wide Words: Michael Quinlon writes on international English from a British viewpoint: “sic!”

Jonathan Altfeld tells me he’s all but completed remodeling his Web page. It’s a vast improvement over his former page, which was good to begin with. Now, it just feels good to look at it. Clean, easy on the eyes, beautiful.

Visit the Mastery InSight Institute Home Page

Doug O’Brien has some really good news: Dr. Stephen Gilligan has submitted an article to his newsletter.

The article contributed today by Dr. [Stephen] Gilligan is an edited transcript of his opening remarks at a 12-day “Trance Camp” held near Hamburg, Germany, in January 2007. (The transcript of the entire workshop will soon be published in a book entitled, “Generative Trance.”) In this article Dr. Gilligan contrasts traditional hypnosis with Erickson’s approach to hypnosis and psychotherapy. He also gives us insight into what he terms “generative trance,” defined as “an opportunity to deeply accept every part of your life in ways that allow amazing new learnings and developments to unfold.”

Go read the Ericksonian Approaches Newsletter.

Alex Shalman’s recent article on questions led me to Liz Strauss’ Successful Blog. I’m really impressed by what I’ve seen here so far and wanted to tell you about it.

Take, for example, The Liz Manifesto:

I am a writer who uses the language to paint and to play word music, places my heart and head in the spaces, and writes in the hope that one person is better for having read what I wrote.

The sheer length of her popular posts page is quite impressive.

Yeah, I think I have a lot of reading to do here…

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

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.