NLPhilia Blog

(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”.)

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.

BoingBoing has a great little story on how a kid saved his sister and himself from a moose attack using skills he picked up from a game:

In the article he describes how he first yelled at the moose, distracting it so his sister got away, then when he got attacked and the animal stood over him he feigned death. “Just like you learn at level 30 in World of Warcraft.”

What a great example of learning through metaphor.

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

Over at lifehack.org, author Dustin Wax has written an article about the art of improvisation, based on the autobiography of jazz musician Charles Mingus.

If you’ve done any real work with NLP, you know that there comes a time when we have to improvise. One of my trainers calls it “The MSU technique“, a.k.a. “Making Stuff Up”. NLP is about individuals, and individuals are, well, individual, so if all we have is a bunch of canned patterns, we can’t respond adequately.

The high points:

Head on over to Lifehack.org and find out how to Improvise Like a Jazz Musician.

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.

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.”

I used to sell cars. I didn’t do it for very long, and I didn’t do very well. One of the reasons I did poorly, my sales manager told me, is that I didn’t “control the conversation”. When I asked him how to do it, he couldn’t really tell me. He “just knew”.

Now, though, I’ve spent some time learning and applying NLP, and I know how it’s done. But author Alex Shalman over at Lifehack.org taught me something new:

Let’s take a look at some of the benefits that manipulating or controlling a conversation can provide for us by tapping into the power of compliments.

I never considered leading someone in that way, but it seems brilliant to me. We just have to keep in mind the major point: “The key to being successful with compliment techniques is to be sincere.”

Follow this link to read the article!

I like to find instances wherein the NLP Presuppositions come in to play in Real Life.

Recently, there was a patient in the Emergency Department who was there for psychiatric issues. I’d seen him there a lot; he is what we often call a “frequent flyer”. I noticed a raw spot on his skin and asked him what had happened. “A dog bit me”, he said.

I wondered if the dog was rabid or otherwise sick… could the bite do him harm? So I asked, “Is the dog all right?”

The patient and the rest of the staff in the room started chuckling, and he looked at me kind of sideways, like I’d made a joke. “I don’t care about the fucking dog!”

I realized what they thought I’d done, and I had to laugh too.