NLPhilia Blog

Go take a look at this picture on Cute Overload. Make sure you read the caption underneath it. Go on. I’ll wait.

(Tum-tum-te-tum)

Welcome back. How are you feeling?

I thought it was hilarious. Keep in mind that I love cats, especially calicos, and especially kittens. Humor is thought to be a tension release, and that pic really inspires tension in a guy like me. So when I read the caption, I laughed.

Now go back and read the comments. Well over a hundred people who didn’t get it had to announce their didn’t-get-it-ness to the world. The comments on CO almost always suck (though at least it has comments, which most of my articles don’t) but the ones on that page suck differently. Self-righteously. As if their state is the blog’s fault.

Sheesh.

I’ve long loved Sun Tzu’s book, The Art of War. It’s a book on conflict resolution, not specific to war, and I’ve learned and used a great deal of its wisdom in my work.

Today I read an article by blogger Anil Polat at the foXnoMad blog, a blog about travel. Apparently, dealing with difficult airline ticket agents is an art form, and Mr. Polat has used Sun Tzu’s work to increse his own success:

Sun Tzu’s book, The Art of War, written more than 2,000 years ago is one of the world’s most famous books on strategy. While Tzu was writing for generals in the army, the fundamentals of his wisdom can help you overcome even the most stubborn airline representative.

I enjoyed the article tremendously, recognizing my approach with angry customers in it.

Read the full article, Use Sun Tzu’s The Art of War To Win Battles At The Ticket Counter, at the foXnoMad blog.

Here’s Lionel Giles’ translation of The Art of War at the Internet Classics Archive. (Free, but not prettily formatted.)

Here’s Thomas Cleary’s translation at amazon.com. (If you want to buy it, though, I encourage you to get it by way of the link in Mr. Polat’s article, so as to thank him for writing it.)

Chris Morris recently wrote a powerful article on his blog. The article is titled, “Can NLP be what it has become?”

In it, he points out that NLP was originally a methodology for modeling, and that now… well, it’s hard to tell what it is. Is it a bunch of techniques for self-improvement? Is it a therapeutic modality? Is it still modeling? There are hundreds of “NLP books” available, and they’re all about different stuff!

I think he has a strong point, and at the same time, I’m not worried.

Let me start with what he says he thinks NLP is:

From what I understand, these are all misunderstandings. NLP is about the structure of subjective experience. It’s about learning to recognise and interact with the structure of how people think. It’s a meta-discipline. You can use the “trail of techniques” to do many things, but the techniques don’t define the scope of NLP.

I start there because I agree with him. This is NLP to me, too. A meta-field, an epistemology, a set of tools. By way of analogy: carpentry is a way of building a house, but it is not a house, and calling a house “carpentry” just confuses people.

Then Chris goes on to say:

It’s got more confusing too. Like most groups of young people, the original NLP creators and developers fell in and out of love. Some even got married, and then divorced. 35 years on, most of them don’t speak to each other. And while mummy and daddy both still love their baby very much, they have different hopes and dreams for it, and very different parenting styles.

That’s correct, too, and there’s a little more to the story. In the process of giving birth to, and then raising, NLP, they either refused to or neglected to legally protect the property. Richard later tried to correct that, but it was too late. The label “Neuro-Linguistic Programming” is now a generic term, and people are free to apply it incorrectly if they want to.

Then Chris says this:

NLP has become like a horse with two riders, each going in different directions. In fact, it’s like a horse with hundreds or maybe even thousands of riders, because each of the co-creators and some of the developers have anointed a series of trainers, master trainers and apprentices to spread their word. And, inevitably, after a few months or years, these people discover they have ideas of their own too, and they start adding their own spin on things. Gradually or suddenly, they start spreading their own version of NLP.

He seems to me to be presenting this as a problem and a Bad Thing. This is where I feel compelled to part company with him.

For a few years now, I’ve been interested in the idea of evolution. (Now, evolution is a well-documented phenomenon, and there’s no credible argument against its existence. Whether or not you believe evolution is how we humans got to where we are has nothing to do with whether or not evolution exists, and we aren’t discussing that.) Evolution is how a species of organisms changes over time into other species. It seems to apply to other systems, such as language and economics, as well.

Just to hit the high points, there are four factors at work in genetic evolution:

1. Sexual selection. Based on criteria of their own, one organism chooses to mate with a particular other. The characteristics of those two organisms get passed to the next generation, and the characteristics of organisms not chosen do not.
2. Natural selection. Factors in the environment stress the organism, and those organisms that survive will grow up to pass on the characteristics that helped them to survive while those who die will not.
3. Mutation. Damaged DNA or errors in copying genes cause cells to do things they wouldn’t ordinarily do. If those mutations create characteristics that help the organism survive and reproduce, those mutations are likely to get passed on to the next generation, where they create an advantage in the offspring.
4. Genetic drift. Gene variants (alleles) are combined in reproductive cells at random. That’s why you look similar to, but not identical to, your siblings. Sometimes, these random combinations produce features that create a reproductive or survival advantage.

This is how I see what’s going on with NLP now. It’s the early stages of evolution. We’re in a Paleozoic-era-style experimentation soup, where everyone is trying something different just to find out what will work and what won’t. This unlimited freedom to experiment is the direct result of what Bandler and Grinder did, or, rather, didn’t do:

But how have they been as leaders of their field?
“Follow me, I’m right behind you.”

Again, I don’t see that as a bad thing. Chapter 66 of the Tao Te Ching, an ancient Chinese treatise on How Stuff Works, you read that If you want to govern the people, you must place yourself below them. If you want to lead the people, you must learn how to follow them. Now, I’d never accuse either Bandler or Grinder of abject humility, but teaching your followers to lead themselves is, I think, a mark of real leadership.

Chris asserts that Bandler and Grinder, by allowing almost unlimited freedom to experiment in NLP, are killing their legacy. I don’t know if I agree with that or not. Maybe they are, and if it dies, perhaps it should die. Maybe they aren’t, though; maybe what they’re doing is allowing their legacy to become greater than they themselves could make it.

So my suggestion is twofold:

1. Encourage people to differentiate, as Robin Manuell (in the comments of Chris’ article) pointed out that John Grinder does, among “NLP modelling”, “NLP applications”, and “NLP Training”. It’s high time to permit “speciation” in the field, and drawing people’s attention to the reasonable distinctions that can be made will be good for all three “species” of NLP.
2. You, whoever you are, whatever you do with and within NLP, should get exceptionally good at it and share with with others. The better you are, the more flexible you are, the more likely that what you do will matter, and then it will survive.

Remember the story about how giving someone a reason, even if it’s a nonsense reason, gets them to say “yes”? We got it from Robert Cialdini, if I remember correctly.

Thanks to a recent post on Language Log entitled Generalization and Truth, I’ve learned that the cited study is here: “The Mindlessness of Ostensibly Thoughtful Action: The Role of ‘Placebic’ Information in Interpersonal Interaction”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(6): 635-42, 1978.

I’ve also learned that the study didn’t exactly say what we’ve been told it says:

What I discovered was frequent misunderstanding of the 1978 paper’s results, involving both a different conclusion and a strikingly overgeneralized picture of the observed effects. Kahneman 2003 was merely the most prominent of these. So as part of my on-going exploration of scientific rhetoric…

For the details, go read Generalization and Truth at Language Log.

Back in June I wrote about how I met a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. Since then I’ve collected a few articles in line with that one, and I wanted to share them with you.

• Profiles in Manliness: Viktor Frankl is a post at a quite compelling blog called The Art of Manliness. I won’t try to explain it here, but if you’re a guy or are interested in guys, spend some time reading it. The article about Frankl talks about how he is a positive role model for men.
• Priorities in black and white and Priorities in black and white, part 2 are written by Rick Brinkman, one of my favorite CareerTrack presenters, and are focused on his recent relationship with his father, who survived the concentration camps.
• Here’s an amazon.com link to Frankl’s masterpiece, Man’s Search for Meaning.

A January article from the Victoria News, published by the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, shares some research by Paul Sulzberger, PhD into the teaching of languages:

Dr Sulzberger has found that the best way to learn a language is through frequent exposure to its sound patterns – even if you haven’t a clue what it all means.

“However crazy it might sound, just listening to the language, even though you don’t understand it, is critical. A lot of language teachers may not accept that,” he says.

Now, people who are good at learning languages have long said that immersion makes a massive difference, but they’ve never talked about why that’s the case. Dr. Sulzberger asserts that aural exposure to the language actually changes the brain, re-wiring it to understand what is being said:

Dr Sulzberger’s research challenges existing language learning theory. His main hypothesis is that simply listening to a new language sets up the structures in the brain required to learn the words.

“Neural tissue required to learn and understand a new language will develop automatically from simple exposure to the language—which is how babies learn their first language,” Dr Sulzberger says.

It’s an interesting idea, and it makes a lot of sense to me. You can read the rest of the article here.

And in the spirit of this snippet from the article:

“Teachers should recognise the importance of extensive aural exposure to a language. One hour a day of studying French text in a classroom is not enough—but an extra hour listening to it on the iPod would make a huge difference,” Dr Sulzberger says.

…by way of Lifehacker, here is a master list of free online language lessons.

A little while back, I made pancakes for someone, and she liked them a lot. She said, “My pancakes never turn out right. What’s your recipe?”

I had to admit that I took a shortcut and made them from Bisquick. She was a bit annoyed. See, she made them from Bisquick, too, but, she said, hers were always flat and tough and tasteless. Mine were light and fluffy and delicious.

She and I used the same recipe — followed the same prescribed steps in the same order — but my results were good, and hers weren’t. What’s the deal?

It turns out that there are a great many things they don’t write into a recipe. Things that a cookbook author, who is adept at cooking, assumes one knows. So people buy cookbooks, or trade recipes online or with friends, and complain that theirs doesn’t “turn out” and they don’t know why.

I taught myself to cook. I love to eat, and I enjoy good food, and I absolutely enjoy trying new things, so learning to cook was a must. I can read a recipe and hallucinate how it’ll taste, at least most of the time. It took me a long time to get where I am, and if I’d gone to culinary school I’d have cut that time way down. I’d be a lot better at cooking, too. But I’m still pretty good. I can follow a recipe and it’ll “turn out”.

Anyway, here’s what pancake recipes don’t tell you:

• Don’t beat the batter. Stir it. It’s OK if there are some lumps. If the lumps bother you, break them up with a whisk. Just don’t beat the batter. It develops the gluten in the wheat flour, which will make your pancakes flat and tough and bland.
• Let the batter sit for a while. Ten or fifteen minutes at the very least. Overnight in the refrigerator is great. This lets the milk and eggs soak into every bit of the flour, which helps the flavor a lot.
• The griddle or skillet has to be hot. Toss a drop of water on it, and it doesn’t sit there and sizzle; it jumps around and tries to get away. Pancakes cook quickly to trap air bubbles in the batter. Cook them too slowly and the bubbles can all break up and get away, making things flatten out.
• Flip the pancakes once and only once. Flipping is another thing that can develop gluten.
• Most important: use real maple syrup, not that godawful fake maple flavored stuff. It matters. Try it once and you’ll see. Just don’t use too much, because real maple syrup has a rich flavor you won’t find in those chemical compounds that pretend to by syrup.

Enjoy your breakfast.

(Jeez… why is he writing about pancakes on an NLP blog?)

Arnold Zwicky at Language Log pointed us to this great episode of Dinosaur Comics which explains the use and misuse of metaphors. Entertaining and educational!

Do you want to read what I think is the best newsletter article I’ve ever read?

I don’t know what it is about it, but I think it’s amazing. It may be the fact that I just finished listening to a lecture series on rhetoric by Professor Michael D. C. Drout; it may be that I’ve been leaning a little farther to the political right over the past few months and therefore finding Winston Churchill interesting; it may even be the mood I’m in.

Go to the Essential Skills blog and read Tom Vizzini’s article, “Tom, have you seen the chemtrails in the sky?” and see for yourself.

“You know what they call me?” he asked, a little too loudly.

I’d been keeping an eye on him for a little while, off and on, because he was Italian. Some of the staff, for all of their intelligence, don’t know how to handle it when a guy whose parents came over from Italy starts acting normal. “Normal” for an Italian guy is to talk loudly and rapidly, wave his hands about, and get “uncomfortably” close, and on rare occasion I’ll get a call about a guy “getting in my face and yelling and making threatening gestures”. It’s kind of funny, I think.

I had no trouble connecting with him, and he was free with his verbal affection for me. To top it off, he was intoxicated and getting “up there in years”. A little earlier, he’d mentioned that his father died at age 90; not too long after, he mentioned, in a little too offhanded way, that he himself was 89. So I’m thinking that he’s thinking about how he’s probably going to die soon.

Anyway, so he asked me if I knew what they call him, and I said, “No, what do they call you?”

“They call me Wagon Wheel.”

I thought that an odd nickname. “Wagon wheel?”

“Yeah, Wagon Wheel.”

That’s odd,” I said.

“Yeah”, he added. “Wanna know why they call me Wagon Wheel?”

“Sure.”

“It’s cuz I been through a lotta shit!”

How could I not laugh?

I tore myself away and went to take care of other business, but I stopped in and checked on him a couple of times. When it came time to let him go home, he said, “Hey… are you going to remember anything? Have I given you anything?” It really mattered to him.

“Yeah, you bet. I’m gonna remember “Wagon Wheel”.

“You a wagon wheel? You been through a lotta shit?”

“Sure,” I said, “I been through a lotta shit. They could call me Wagon Wheel too.”

“Well, then, remember this,” he said. “There’s four wheels on a wagon. Three other wheels been through the same shit as you.”

If he was worried about leaving a legacy, he can stop after that.