By Joel Bowman, on March 15th, 2013% Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comments have become a well-known example of how a person’s mouth can get him or her into trouble, especially in these days of cell-phone video and YouTube. The moral of the story is that people (you, me, and Mitt Romney) need to be aware that the demarcation between “private” and “public” has become increasingly fuzzy.
Even when people are being careful with their language and know that others will hear or read what they say, choice of words and manner of delivery may say more than was intended. In a recent column in the New . . . → Read More: What You Say Is What You Mean
By Joel Bowman, on January 22nd, 2013% I don’t very often write extended book reviews for my blog, but I am making an exception for Choice Points: When You have to Decide Which Way to Go, by Phil Hollander, Robert Reaume, and Harvey Silver. (See Amazon.com for more.) It is an excellent book in more ways than one. I will say more about those ways, but first, a bit of background:
In the interests of full disclosure, I need to say that I know one of the authors, Phil Hollander. We first met in 1994 at an NLP training with Richard Bandler in Toronto. We have . . . → Read More: Forks in the Road
By Joel Bowman, on June 9th, 2011% About a month ago, I blogged about metaphors we die by (and for). That blog entry barely scratched the surface of the subject (metaphorically speaking). One of the subjects that has been in the news a lot lately is the growing problem of obesity. Have you ever thought about the way language contributes to the size of that problem? The most obvious example is, perhaps, the now-defunct option at McDonalds, which invited customers to say, “Supersize me.”
That is just one example. For one reason or another, one of the meanings of the word “healthy” is “big” or “generous.” . . . → Read More: Metaphorically Speaking
By Joel Bowman, on April 23rd, 2011% If you’ve been paying attention for the past 20 or 30 years, you’ve probably noticed that “Science” keeps changing its mind about a lot of things. Also, if you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you’ve probably noticed that Galileo’s “problems” with the Catholic Church have been a recurring theme. It seems to me that the conflict between “science” and “faith” is at the center of a number of what might be called “modern problems.” Problems of the sort that Galileo had with the Church have, of course, occurred in a variety of ways over the years. In general, . . . → Read More: What’s the Deal with Science?
By Joel Bowman, on April 5th, 2011% Richard Bandler, who has often been called “the best hypnotist in the world,” is fond of saying, “Hypnosis isn’t the exception…. It’s the rule.” The fact is that people—you, me, and everyone—tend to be in one trance or another most of the time. It is more a matter of which trance you are in rather than whether you are in trance. What we think of as “normal consciousness” is just one kind of trance with a particular set of beliefs.
The more neuroscientists examine the way the human mind works, the more they discover that unconscious processes—processes operating below . . . → Read More: The Secret of Hypnosis
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
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What You Say Is What You Mean
Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comments have become a well-known example of how a person’s mouth can get him or her into trouble, especially in these days of cell-phone video and YouTube. The moral of the story is that people (you, me, and Mitt Romney) need to be aware that the demarcation between “private” and “public” has become increasingly fuzzy.
Even when people are being careful with their language and know that others will hear or read what they say, choice of words and manner of delivery may say more than was intended. In a recent column in the New . . . → Read More: What You Say Is What You Mean
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