NLPhilia Blog

She was really going off on the nurses, and they couldn’t get control of her. It can get scary for a psych nurse when a patient goes there… probably because they believe Torrey. I’ve never found the mentally ill to be any scarier than anyone else, so I guess I have an advantage. I got there within a minute of the call. All they wanted was for her to go be quiet in her room for a few minutes.

The patient, a textbook Borderline, was throwing a first-class tantrum. Keep in mind that a lot of therapists refuse to work with people who have her problem, and that most of the ones who will work with them don’t have much success. The great skill of Borderline Personality Disorder is Jerking People Around; they do it better than absolutely anybody.

One of the things a Borderline will do is, they’ll place you into one of two categories. You’re an angel or a demon. You can jump immediately from one category to the other, depending on whether or not you’re doing what the patient wants you to do. If you care at all, even a little, about the relationship, they will quickly condition you. It’s either amazing or sad to watch.

Nurses are taught to maintain a “professional distance” with patients. That tends to work with most, but the Borderlines will scream, “You don’t even care about me! You’re supposed to be nurses! Nurses are supposed to care about people!” (Yes, I learned a lot about double-binds from these situations.)

Personally, I think the key is that I care more about my opinion of myself than I care about anyone else’s opinion of me. Like me? Great! Don’t like me? That’s still OK. I like me.

I walked over to the ranting patient and asked her what was going on. After she got a sentence out, I shifted my stance to mirror hers. Then I started to nod in time with the rhythm of her ranting. Once in a while, I’d feed back to her a word or two. One of the nurses stood nearby. I usually appreciate that. This time, though, the nurse picked up on something the patient said and tried to respond.

The next thing that happened caught me off guard. The patient wheeled on the nurse and shouted, “Excuse me! I’m having a conversation with this man!” The nurse blushed a dark maroon, apologized, and walked away. To my credit, I suppressed my smile before the patient turned back to me. (Well, it was funny.)

After a minute or so more, I said to her, “OK. Head on back to your room and wait there for a bit. I’ll talk to the nurses and get their side of the story.”

She thanked me and went to do what the staff wanted her to do all along.

Over at Presentation Zen is a review of Robert Cialdini’s new book, 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive:

The book is designed for anyone in business who is interested in becoming better at understanding how to persuade or influence isn’t that just about everyone?. The book may also help you understand why you decide to do the things you do. Even if you are a researcher or teacher or a medical doctor, and so on, and not a business person, it’s still important to understand how people are or can be influenced and persuaded by your words and behaviors. Each chapter focuses on a single question and is no more than 3-5 pages long.

Sounds like another real winner from Dr. Cialdini. It’s on my wish list. Go get 50 scientifically proven ways to be persuasive for yourself! (Note: this is an amazon link with Presentation Zen’s referral code intact. When you buy, you’ll be thanking Garr for the review and the referral.)

Facial expression, that is.

The Eyes for Lies blog points us to ArtNatomia:

ARTNATOMY/ARTNATOMIA is a Flash interactive english/spanish tool. It is intended to facilitate the teaching and learning of the anatomical and biomechanical foundation of facial expression morphology.

I’ve been playing with it; it’s fascinating and fun.

Alliteration is the way English poetry used to be done. If you read Old English or Middle English poetry (even if you don’t understand it) you won’t find rhyming; you’ll find alliteration. If I recall correctly, rhyme didn’t come into English poetry until after the Norman Conquest.

I find alliteration to be rather hypnotic, and I’ve noticed Richard Bandler uses it sometimes in his presentations. (I’ve heard him use rhyme as well.) A recent bit of research, outlined at Cognitive Daily, indicates that it may stimulate memory as well:

Some scholars have suggested that alliteration makes a poem easier to remember: an important skill back in the days when books were so expensive that it might be cheaper to pay a bard to recite a poem than buy a written copy. But there has been little research about whether alliteration actually acts as a way to spur memory. More to the point, alliteration is rarely used throughout a poem: some of the words have to start with different letters. So alliteration might help you remember some of the poem, but it can’t help you remember the parts that aren’t alliterative. Or can it?

Go read more at Cognitive Daily: Alliteration improves memory performance

Previous posts of this particular persuasion:

• Lovest thou English?
• Funny Logical Ambiguity

When in any Master Practitioner training and learning about metaprograms, one of the more amusing moments is when someone discovers that he or she is motivated by pain more than by pleasure. Often, they cry, “But I don’t want to be away-from!” (If you don’t know why this is funny, I can’t help you right now.)

There’s a prejudice in American culture against away-from motivation, a persistent belief that it’s somehow ineffective or worse. I think that’s garbage. People with away-from motivation can accomplish great things:

Scared, and more than a little frustrated, I made up my mind, then and there, to do SOMETHING about my situation. I took out a piece of paper – actually, the back of an envelope – and I began to…

Read the rest of You. Can. at No Credit Needed.

No matter what your response to Barack Obama, you’ve got to admire his amazing skill with language. His ability to stay both engaging and content-free is astounding.

Here’s a transcript of his convention address. I was just working through it. It’s got everything a hypnotist could want in a trance induction. I wish now that I’d watched it so I could experience his paraverbal and nonverbal stuff too.

(Edited to add: Bert Decker over at Create Your Communication has posted his critique of Obama’s presentation, and it’s worth a look.)

Via John LaValle, an e-mail from Richard Bandler landed in my inbox today. Here it is for your enjoyment, edited only to “linkify” the included URLs and obfuscate the e-mail address of the publicist.

Dear friends and colleagues,

This September, I’m excited to bring out my first U.S. published book in 10 years, GET THE LIFE YOU WANT: The Secrets to Quick and Lasting Life Change with Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

You have all noticed that the state of the world is a bit tenuous at the moment – to say the least. People are running around like chickens without heads about jobs going away, love lives crumbling, and subsequently watching their health deteriorate.

Now that I have unfortunately painted a bleak picture, don’t you think the time is right for a little NLP?

I’d like you to partner with me in getting the word out there. Let’s help others learn to acquire some valuable tools to turn around their lives. And, at the same time help co-create a NY Times bestseller.

What I’m asking is for you to send a message to your own email list of friends and colleagues (at least 10 people) and encourage them to pick up a copy for themselves and at least one more to share.

What we need, in order to create critical mass, is for this campaign to roll out over a few specified days. So, we want people to order their books from amazon.com on September 2, 3, and 4. The link to order is by clicking here.

I am also running a contest where a few lucky people will win a signed copy of GET THE LIFE YOU WANT. Be one of the first 25 people to email my publicist at hcibooks@yahoo.com will receive an autographed copy. Thank you in advance for helping me to get the word out. Together, we’ll sort out this chaos, one brain at a time.

Yours truly,
Bandler

P.S. Another item that might interest YOU and/or your friends is that I am giving a FREE lecture in Las Vegas on Friday night, September 5 at the Las Vegas Hilton from 7:00 – 9:00 pm which is part of a professional conference on neuroscience. You may want to spend the entire day there.

See more about the conference at: http://usjt.com/neuro08/schedule.aspx#be You can also get a copy of GET THE LIFE YOU WANT there and have it signed. Remember, what happens in Vegas…. hope to see you there.

And, of course, you can check out my Web site at http://www.RichardBandler.com.

For more information about the Las Vegas event and to save your place, call: 800-441-5569 or hcibooks@yahoo.com

P.P.S. Richard Bandler’s Guide to Personal Trance-formation will be out in November. You can also pre-order this book on Amazon.

I’m a big fan of Free and open source software. I’m running Ubuntu Linux at home, haven’t booted Windows in ages, and really enjoy the freedom and choice that gives me. But that isn’t what this post is about. I just wanted to mention how I happened upon the article I’m suggesting you read.

Solveig Haugland, author of the OpenOffice.org 2 Guidebook, has been working to convert people from Microsoft Office to the free, open-source OpenOffice.org suite, and she’s discovered the power of metaprograms… specifically, pain versus pleasure. It’s an interesting real-world example of the application of metaprograms in persuasion.

Go see Persuading people that OpenOffice.org is the right choice? Accentuate the negative.

Oh… and switch to OpenOffice!

Wow. Thorazine is magic!

Hate parenting? Here ya go!

Ladies, can’t make your man happy? Now you can!

Too healthy? Medicine has the answer!

And here’s scientific proof that money can buy happiness.

(I’m delighted to have found the Bonkers Institute for Nearly Genuine Research.)

This article at the Mind Hacks Blog summarizes some research being done in the area of how we decide to trust (or mistrust) a person based on the shape of their face. It starts with an article at the Boston Globe, with an accompanying graphic illustration of the pertinent facial characteristics:

behavioral scientists have also begun to unravel the inner workings of trust. Their aim is to decode the subtle signals that we send out and pick up, the cues that, often without our knowledge, shape our sense of someone’s reliability. Researchers have discovered that surprisingly small factors – where we meet someone, whether their posture mimics ours, even the slope of their eyebrows or the thickness of their chin – can matter as much or more than what they say about themselves. We size up someone’s trustworthiness within milliseconds of meeting them, and while we can revise our first impression, there are powerful psychological tendencies that often prevent us from doing so – tendencies that apply even more strongly if we’ve grown close.

Here’s something else I found interesting:

Another set of cues, and a particularly powerful one, is body language. Mimicry, in particular, seems to put us at our ease. Recent work by Tanya Chartrand, a psychology professor at Duke, and work by Jeremy Bailenson and Nick Yee, media scholars at Stanford, have shown that if a person, or even a computer-animated figure, mimics our movements while talking to us, we will find our interlocutor significantly more persuasive and honest.

Cute, eh? Go read the Globe article; it’s great.

If you love academic writing, or even more detail, here’s a PDF of a Princeton University study on the subject.