By Joel Bowman, on March 20th, 2011% What’s been happening in your life while you were making other plans? World events in recent weeks have basically captured attention I had intended to “spend” elsewhere. First, the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear plant meltdowns in Japan…. As someone with friends and semi-relatives (my daughter-in-law is Japanese, and her parents live in Osaka), I have been following the events there with some concern. Second, recent events in the Mideast have been difficult to ignore. Compared with what’s currently going on in Libya, the “revolution” in Egypt was fun to watch.
In an article titled, “Washington vs. the Merciless,” Thomas . . . → Read More: Are We Having Fun Yet?
By Joel Bowman, on March 13th, 2011% The Christian Bible says that Satan is the “Father of Lies.” The actual Father of Lies, however, is fear. Regardless of whether you believe that Satan is a metaphor for fear, you undoubtedly know that people lie when they are afraid. Everyone, George Washington included, has lied and will probably lie again. Lying is a normal part of human existence because humans experience fear. Think about the last time you told a lie, especially a significant one, and note that you felt fearful before uttering your lie. You can use knowing that fear is the “father” of lies to increase . . . → Read More: The Father of Lies
By Joel Bowman, on March 6th, 2011% Those of you who have studied NLP or persuasive communication are familiar with the concept of perceptual frames. The metaphor is fairly obvious: a window frame, for example, limits what we see on the other side of the window; a photographer can choose what is included in the frame of a photo by trimming the image so that it focuses on, say, one person instead of a group. The concept has been adopted by psychology for the purpose of understanding the context that determines how something is interpreted.
All communication (all? Yes, all…) occurs within a contextual frame. In . . . → Read More: Framing and Reframing
By Joel Bowman, on February 27th, 2011% What’s your view of those who take a “my way or the highway” stance? If you are in favor of having them hit the highway, please honk.
The impetus for this blog is the current “stand-off” in Wisconsin that pits Republicans against Democrats and corporations and the state against labor unions and those that belong to them. The Governor (a Republican) admits that the unions have agreed to 90 percent of his administration’s demands. But, he says, “no compromise.” It seems to me that we’ve been seeing more of that philosophy in recent years, and I am not at . . . → Read More: My Way or the Highway
By Joel Bowman, on February 18th, 2011% As I am starting to write this electronic blog, one of the headlines for the day is that one of the principal bookstores in the U.S., Borders, is filing for bankruptcy. Electronic readers—e-readers—are gaining market share. In related stories, Amazon recently announced that Kindle e-book sales have surpassed sales of both hardcover and paperback books. For those of us who have spent a lifetime reading books, the move to “electronic literature” is a bit unsettling. I still have books on my shelves that I read as a college undergraduate. They have moved with me at least eight times and kept . . . → Read More: “What’s a Book, Daddy?”
By Joel Bowman, on February 13th, 2011% One of the things NLP teaches is that details are important. Details have always been important, of course, but they are often overlooked. A TV show I saw recently had a couple of detectives enter a mosque to talk to the Imam. He has them leave their shoes in the entryway. We see them remove their shoes, and we watch the female detective use her shawl to cover her head. We watch them have their chat with the Imam, and then we watch them leave the mosque without stopping to put their shoes back on before hitting the cold and . . . → Read More: Details
By Joel Bowman, on February 5th, 2011% This blog is brought to you by a reminder notice from my dentist:
We would like to remind you that time has been reserved for your next appointment on
Mon, 02/07/11 at 10:00 am. We look forward to seeing you then!
WE WELCOME NEW PATIENTS
From the standpoint of business communication, the reminder contains a number of problems, but what really caught my attention is what in NLP would be called a failure to adopt second position.
In business communication, second position is usually called the you-attitude or the you-viewpoint. The writer is supposed to . . . → Read More: You, You, You…
By Joel Bowman, on January 31st, 2011% Perception is a strange thing. We can’t always see what is “right before our eyes,” and because perception is fraught with deletion, distortion, and unwarranted generalization, what we “see” may not be what is actually “there.” Self-perception may be among the most distorted of our perceptions. The classic question, “Does this dress make me look fat,” is a variation of the question asked by the Queen in Snow White: “Mirror, mirror on the wall / Who in the land is fairest of all?” The Queen doesn’t like it when the mirror proclaims Snow White the fairest in the land. The . . . → Read More: Does This Mirror Make Me Look Fat?
By Joel Bowman, on January 26th, 2011% One of the concepts of NLP that tends to be overlooked is the way thresholds influence human behavior. Everyone is, of course, familiar with the idea of the last straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back. It wasn’t, of course, the final straw that did the breaking—it was rather the accumulation of straws over time. A camel, after all, can carry only so much weight before giving up in one way or another.
The concept of thresholds has a long history in Western culture, and—I would assume—in other cultures as well. Most Westerns, for example, are familiar with the . . . → Read More: Thresholds
By Joel Bowman, on January 19th, 2011% CBS News recently ran a segment about the TV show “All in the Family,” which was a hit back in the 1970s. The theme of the segment was about the way the show represented political discourse at the time. Archie (played by Caroll O’Conner), who was an archconservative, and “Meathead” (played by Rob Reiner), an ultra-liberal. I had watched the show with regularity when it was popular, and the aspect of the CBS segment that came as a huge surprise to me was how slender Archie Bunker looked. Back in the 70s, I had thought of him as fat.
. . . → Read More: Weighty Issues
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