NLPhilia Blog

Four great presuppositions for your daily interactions can be found in the Lifehack.org article, Four Rules to Understand What Makes People Tick. The high points:

1. People Mostly Care About Themselves
2. People are Motivated by Selfish Altruism
3. People Don’t Think Much
4. Conformity is the Norm

I think these fit nicely with Cialdini’s principles of persuasion.

Thanks, Cute Overload! You brought me a grin.

I just got Steve Andreas’ latest newsletter, and in it he posts some delightful news. Andrew Austin‘s new book, The Rainbow Machine: Tales from a Neuro-Linguist’s Journal is ready to be shipped! I just ordered my copy!

If you don’t already know of Andy, you’re missing out. He’s one of the most outrageous characters in the field. I’ve always loved his war stories… and now he’s collected a huge number of them in one book:

A delightful read! Outrageous, funny, insightful, & touching. You’ll enjoy it from start to finish. Packed with experiences from his background working in hospitals, social work, to private counseling practice, Andrew Austin shows how NLP can be anything but boring. Don’t wait for the movie! 🙂

Steve Andreas’ newsletter contained a couple of excerpts. Just enough to make me wish I had my copy of the book right here, right now. Oh, man…

Link to order The Rainbow Machine from Real People Press

I may seem to be leaning a lot on Lifehack.org lately. I don’t mean to. It’s just that there’s a really good reason why they’re one of the top blogs on Internet. Anyway…

In Your Brain is Not Your Friend and its followup, Three More Reasons Why Your Brain is Not Your Friend, Lifehack.org author Dustin Wax describes how easily fooled our brains are, and how seemingly determined they are to stay that way:

Whether because of the brain’s internal structure or the way social and cultural pressures cause our minds to develop and function, in the end the result is the same: minds that are not only easily deceived and frequently deceptive in their own right, but when caught out, refuse to accept and address their errors. If you have a mind — or even half a mind — you might be best off losing it entirely.

It’s long been my opinion that the greatest driving force of a human being is not the desire for survival, but the desire to be right. (People will die for their beliefs, but they rarely believe they are going to die. Or something like that.) Mr. Wax’s articles reinforce my opinion, so I’ll agree with him… thus perpetuating the cycle.

Nick Kemp is hosting Doug O’Brien on December 1 & 2, 2008 in Leeds, UK. From one of Doug’s pages, Sleight of Mouth is:

…a persuasion skill, a vehicle for the reframing of beliefs. It is a system of 14 different patterns of response to a stated belief. A system that, once mastered, can allow you to always have a response that will effectively elucidate your position and help you to persuade rather than be persuaded. Simply put, it will help you win any argument, be verbally powerful and powerfully verbal.

See Nick’s site for more details and sign up!

Jonathan Altfeld is in Los Angeles, California, USA on January 11 through January 13, 2008 with his most popular course, Linguistic Wizardry. I’d love to be able to describe this training, as I’ve taken it several times myself, but all I can really say is that it defies description. The training is so intense that it brings forward everything you’ve learned and ties it all together. And the “Village Council” exercise at the end of the last day is worth the price of admission.

Link to Jonathan Altfeld’s Mastery InSight Institute

Jonathan Altfeld is offering his Knowledge Engineering training in Atlanta, Georgia, USA on December 1 through December 3, 2007.

This is our most advanced material on Modeling. For those who want to learn to visually unpack beliefs, belief systems, decision sequences, values, and human reasoning heuristics. Awesome for coaches.

I have the home-study course and have taken “Belief Craft” with Jonathan and Doug O’Brien, and I can say it’s excellent.

Link to Jonathan Altfeld’s Mastery InSight Institute

Uber-blog Lifehacker loves online tools, especially if they allow collaboration. In one of today’s posts, they’re reviewing a new Mind-Mapping tool called Mind42.

Like all good Web 2.0 tools, it’s advertised as “beta”, and Tony Buzan wouldn’t recognize its output as a Mind Map, but it looks really handy anyway.

I love today’s Dilbert comic. It contains a wonderful set of instructions for emptying one’s mind.
NOTE: Updated a bad link.

Another article I wrote for Persuasion 101, this one from 2003:

Sometimes you’ll be faced with the task of persuading someone who is being, shall we say, unreasonable. Their emotions have gotten the best of them, perhaps, or maybe they just don’t like what you represent to them for whatever reason. I know what it’s like to be there. I work in a hospital and spend most of my “persuasion time” in either the locked Psychiatric Unit or the Emergency Department. You don’t get more “unreasonable” than some of the patients I’ve seen.

I’m a lazy persuader. I tend to realize that most of what people know about communicating is intuitive and natural, so I have learned to pay attention to my own other-than-conscious signals and trust them. Your unconscious can keep track of much more information than you think.

The psych nurses called me to help them with a man who was very angry with them for reasons that only he knew. When I got there, he was sitting (which is a good thing, generally speaking, for an angry person to be doing when you’re in front of them) and ranting to himself. The charge nurse stood aside and waited for me to say some magic words. (She’d seen me work before.) I listened for a bit and then opened my mouth to say something I thought was particularly persuasive, and I received a little nudge from the back of my mind. It went something like this here:

SHUT UP AND LISTEN!

So I did.

I listened for a little while longer, got some more information, thought to myself, OK, it’s time to talk now, opened my mouth to say something I thought would be even more persuasive than the first thing, and there was that, um, still, calm, gentle voice again:

SHUT UP AND LISTEN!!

OK, OK, so I shut up and listened some more while he ranted. Then he gave me what I thought was a truly important bit of information, and I was glad I had paid attention to my unconscious urgings to be quiet. With that key information, I again went to open my mouth to say something powerfully persuasive, and you’ll never guess…

SHUT UP AND LISTEN!!!

Now, I consider myself an intelligent fellow, and I can take a subtle hint. So I shut up for good. I sat and listened, just as I had before, making the little facial expressions and nods and grunts that demonstrated I was honestly listening to what he had to say. And within a minute or so he calmed down. And then he realized he was out of line.

The truth is, that’s all he needed. Someone to hear him out, to take in what he was saying without trying to convince him he was mistaken. The more he talked, them more I listened, the more he talked himself out of what he was saying. And I didn’t have to say a thing.

Because, you see, inside every “unreasonable” person, there’s a calm and peaceful person who’d rather be in charge.