NLPhilia Blog

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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”.)

I was listening to an audiobook today, as I try to do every day, and heard a neat phonological ambiguity. The book was “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, a 600-year-old tale from England which has been translated by Simon Armitage from Middle English into Modern English. Armitage does a wonderful job of using alliteration (which is to Middle English poetry what rhyme is to modern poetry) to recapture the “flavor” of the old language, and the reader (British actor Bill Wallis) is brilliant as well. (Wallis even reads the entire book in Middle English after he finishes with the Modern English translation.)

Anyway… I heard something like “…threw him into the copse” and immediately had a funny mental image of throwing a guy into a bunch of police officers. If you don’t know what a “copse” is, don’t be surprised; we rarely use the word anymore. I was surprised that I did know what it was.

So we have:

• cops, simple present tense of “to cop”, as in “to illicitly obtain”: “He cops a feel whenever he goes out with a girl.”
• cops, simple present tense of “to cop”, as in “to arrest”: “Officer O’Reilly cops at least one drug dealer every shift he works.”
• cops, plural of “cop” as in “police officer”: “If you fart like that one more time, I’m going to call the cops and have you arrested for attempted murder.”
• copse, a “bunch of bushes”: “Your kitten is hiding in that copse over there.”

Looking for more possibilities, Google led me to this wonderful resource: Suber & Thorpe, “An English Homophone Dictionary”. It’s no longer maintained, but wow… it’s loaded with goodies.

Incidentally, the audiobook seems to be unavailable from amazon.com. I got my copy from my public library. It’s published by BBC Audiobooks America and can be ordered by way of this link. The printed book is available from your favorite bookseller.

This is starting to get good!

Tom and Vik of “Modeling the Masters” fame have started blogging, too. Check out their new site, “NLP Times“:

It’s going to offer you lots of useful and practical NLP and Marketing
information. If you want to have a resource to take your skills to another
level and get first notice of innovative and NEW NLP products and services
you will want to check it out.

Go there now to enjoy:

• An in-depth Video explanation of Derren Browns creating amnesia
• Practical NLP – the use of Embedded Commands in story telling
• The difference between showing and telling in your business communications

Nick Kemp just let me know he has a personal blog. It looks like fun.

Stephen Covey just started blogging, too! There are two articles up so far.

Just in time for Christmas, BoingBoing shows us a beautiful map of the human brain:

If you go to New Zealand’s Unit Seven Web site, you can get free desktop wallpaper images and can purchase high-quality prints. The perfect gift for the brain lover!

Nick Kemp reports that he’s done a major redesign of his NLPMP3 site:

www.nlpmp3.com has just been redesigned and to date has free unedited interviews with many trainers including Richard Bandler, Frank Farrelly, Doug O Brien, Nick Kemp, Sue Knight, Michael Breen, Paul McKenna, Michael Neill, Steve Andreas and many more!

We are looking for new interview subjects for 2008 and all suggestions are most welcome. The subjects don’t need to be NLP trainers, but need to have something interesting to say from or on an NLP perspective!

Visit www.nlpmp3.com

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.