Charlie Badenhop. That’s who. New York City. That’s where.

If you haven’t heard of him until now, it may be because he lives in Japan. He rarely gets back to the US. I hadn’t heard of him before my friend Joel Elfman told me about some bodywork training he’d done with Charlie. Couldn’t speak highly enough of him.

This past year, I got to meet him myself. He was a guest trainer at the Master Practitioner training offered by Doug O’Brien and Jonathan Altfeld in Vermont. He was truly amazing. It’s tough to put into words.

Go experience him firsthand. Read more about it and sign up for his rare US training in Seishindo.

Charlie is Coming originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2011-11-22 (Tuesday).

Back in 2008, I thought I’d try an experiment with keeping a calendar of NLP trainings.

Today, I trashed it. Consider the experiment to have failed.

I killed the calendar originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2011-09-24 (Saturday).

I had to break some bad news to some people today, and it reminded me that I hadn’t posted it here. I think I should fix that now.

My old Internet friend, the Gentle Giant of NLP, Quentin Grady, died over a year ago, on June 7, 2010, after a long and valiant struggle with cancer.

For you who knew him, there’s nothing I can say that could inspire you to appreciate him more than you already do. You know he was an amazing man.

For those who didn’t know him… I grieve your loss as much as I do my own. You could read over 1200 of Quentin’s Usenet posts from alt.psychology.nlp if you wanted to get a feel for who and what he was.

If this is the first you’ve heard of Quentin’s death, I’m sorry to have waited so long to pass it on.

Visit Quentin’s Memorial Web site and leave a comment.

RIP Quentin Grady originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2011-07-24 (Sunday).

Dr. Jack Schafer is a psychologist and a retired Special Agent for the FBI. He specializes in what he calls “narrative analysis,” which entails examining the other-than-conscious motivations people have for choosing a particular word or phrase in a given context. He trains peace officers and others in this skill for interviewing suspects. He’s started to teach Just Plain Folks like you and me, though, and he’s taken a blogging spot (Let Their Words Do the Talking) on Psychology Today.

Every article I’ve read there has been awesome in its usefulness. (Cops aren’t big on theory. Theory can get you shot!) What got my attention, though, was his five-part series called “The Poor Man’s Polygraph:”

1. The Well… Technique
2. The Land of Is
3. Forced Response
4. Why Should I Believe You?
5. Parallel Lie

Short, to the point, extremely useful, easy to learn and implement. Go check it out!

The Poor Man’s Polygraph originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2011-01-14 (Friday).

My Internet buddy Adrian Reynolds has started a blog. Go visit the Monkey Saloon or subscribe in your RSS reader. He’s already got some compelling stuff up there.

Let’s Visit the Monkey Saloon originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2011-01-14 (Friday).

Santa has a blog. It’s awesome.

Letters from Santa originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2010-12-24 (Friday).

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about an article I read on President Bill Clinton’s charisma and someone’s attempt to model a bit of it. I also mentioned that I’d be playing with it. I thought I’d update here.

According to the original article, there are three things Bill Clinton does that make people feel as if a “reality distortion field” has wrapped around them:

1. Eye contact;
2. Judicious manipulation of interpersonal space; and
3. Focused attention.

I’m pretty good at the second one, though there are a couple of aspects of it that I could improve. It isn’t so much the actual space, but the way the other person perceives it. There are things one can do to make interpersonal space seem smaller or larger without actually moving toward or away from the other person. I think that’s an interesting idea. I’ll play with that last.

The third one? I’m horrible at it. Nearly 25 years of security and Emergency Medical Services work have required me to habitually cast my attentiveness as wide as I can. It looks like I’m easily distracted, especially in unfamiliar places. I’m really not, but there’s no way someone talking to me can tell that. I’ll play with that next.

What I’m playing with now is eye contact. I’ve always been really bad with it. When I lock eyes with someone, I get the same feeling I get when I look into someone’s living room window. Sure, if the curtains are open, you can’t help but notice it in passing, But to really look? It feels invasive to me. Like I’m violating someone’s privacy.

Irrational, I know. I’m hoping to find someone who can offer me a better way to think about what I’m doing. In the meantime, I’ve been doing it anyway. Looking into people’s eyes and keeping it.

Two things have surprised me.

The way other people respond to it is a surprise. Most of them genuinely don’t mind, and some of the rest really seem to appreciate it. Those who (apparently) feel like I do simply look away quickly, but they don’t seem offended.

Many of the first group suddenly find me a better conversationalist. Not that I say anything. They do a lot more talking to me. I guess if I appear fascinated, they must assume they’re fascinating… which does make sense. A number of people have found it difficult to go on about their business. One deliciously beautiful woman actually accused me of preventing her from leaving.

The other surprise was my own internal responses. Absolutely nothing bad has happened, and sometimes I feel surprised at that. On occasion, when I lock eyes with someone and they look away quickly, I feel a small, but primal, sense of power that I’m not at all happy about in retrospect. With many, I really am a better listener; I want to listen, I actually crave it. And the most unusual response of all: one particularly blue pair of eyes actually fascinated me… and I mean that in the original sense of the word: “to cast a spell which renders one unable to move.” I have studied hypnosis long enough to be able to break that “spell,” but for the few seconds that I was there, I went meta to it and wondered how something like that could happen to a grown man.

I learned, as well, that there are times when I need to not make or hold eye contact.

In a restaurant, for example, no matter which staff member I looked at, they stopped what they were doing and asked what they could do for me. I was actually interrupting them without meaning to. Not polite.

I spoke with the CEO of the hospital for which I work a couple of days ago, and I intentionally did not lock eyes with him. I won’t tell you the circumstances (no, I wasn’t in trouble; far from it) but somehow I felt it wasn’t appropriate at the time. He’s the type of guy that I could connect with that way if the context were different, though.

Tonight, I made eye contact with a co-worker, and I quickly broke it. I believed that if I held it, he’d ask me what the heck I was doing. I didn’t feel like explaining because I was ready to go home. You know how it is.

It’s been interesting and pleasant so far, and I think it’ll continue to be.

If you have a good, strong belief that allows you to make and hold eye contact comfortably, would you mind sharing it with me in the comments? I’d appreciate it.

Locking Eyes originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2010-12-6 (Monday).

Bill’s, not Hillary’s. Um… obviously.

I wasn’t a fan of Bill. But there’s something to the fact that I feel comfortable calling him “Bill” in my own mind. I don’t think of any other President by their first name. His personal power is undeniable. And Michael Ellsberg has been studying it:

“I have a friend who has always despised Bill Clinton,” a person at a cocktail party told me during the time I was writing my book [...]. “Yet, somehow my friend found himself at a function that Bill Clinton was attending. And, within the swirl of the crowd, he was introduced to Clinton.”

“In that moment, face-to-face, all of my friend’s personal animosity towards Clinton disappeared, in one instant,” my new acquaintance at the party continued. “As they were shaking hands, Clinton…”

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a charismatic guy; I’ve actually taught myself to not be, though I didn’t realize I have been doing so. Ellsberg’s three-step model looks like it’d be very powerful to me. I’m going to play with it.

Read more at How It Works: Clinton’s “Reality Distortion Field” Charisma

Note: I searched for a while for a candid image of Bill Clinton looking at the camera. I found only one, and it was unflattering. Isn’t that weird?

Hacking the Clinton Charisma originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2010-11-23 (Tuesday).

Those of us with a fascination for the “P” in “NLP” may be delighted to learn that Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs has been updated to reflect the past 50-ish years of research.

The research team – which included Vladas Griskevicius of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and Mark Schaller of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver – restructured the famous pyramid after observing how psychological processes radically change in response to evolutionarily fundamental motives, such as self-protection, mating or status concerns.

The bottom four levels of the new pyramid are highly compatible with Maslow’s, but big changes are at the top. Perhaps the most controversial modification is that self-actualization no longer appears on the pyramid at all.

What do you think? Will you stop striving for self-actualization just because a group of psychologists says you no longer need it? Does the new pyramid make more sense?

We didn’t need self-actualization after all originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2010-08-23 (Monday).

In another installment of “Let’s Help Others To Take Seriously What We Write,” I’d like to offer a link to Solveig Haugland’s “OpenOffice.org Training, Tips, and Ideas” blog:

The key thing about many of these items, and useful grammar and punctuation in general, is they’re not just fancy-schmancy rules. They are important rules that affect the meaning of what you say. I think most people would agree is an important component of communication–controlling the meaning of what you’re writing.

Some of them don’t affect meaning, but do make it easier and more pleasant for your readers. That means they’re more likely to read your email, spec, or marketing blurb, and thus get the information you’re trying to convey.

Here are the high points. She goes on to explain them (and beautifully, I might add) in the body of the article.

1. Use the word that is correct (the correct word, which helps your readers understand you, is always a good choice)
2. Wherever possible without sounding dorky, put only in front of the thing it applies to.
3. Keep your intransitive verbs off my body
4. Lay off using lie incorrectly
5. Dangling participles are as bad as you’ve heard.
6. Few and less and more (but is less more?)
7. Remember the comma.
8. Cut down on the parenthetical phrases
9. Forget you ever encountered ellipsis….unless you’re quoting a movie review…and leaving out the…bad parts…
10. Hyphenation is important.

(For what it’s worth, I disagree with her about the serial comma. I think it’s important to use it. There are times when it matters a great deal for sake of clarity, and in those times when it doesn’t matter, it does no harm. Good habits are good habits.)

Go read — and learn well! — the rest: Top Ten Useful Grammar and Punctuation Points I Learned as a Techwriter and in Life in General (and Three to Ignore)

Useful Grammar and Punctuation Points originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2010-07-10 (Saturday).

Yet another “NLP was here first” example. I saw this on a trivia buff’s blog, “Futility Closet:”

In 2008, researchers at Oxford University found that subjects could reduce pain and swelling in an injured hand by viewing it through reversed binoculars.

Conversely, a magnified injury was more painful. “If it looks bigger, it looks sorer,” said physiologist G. Lorimer Moseley. “Therefore the brain acts to protect it.”

A judicious Googling led me to the pertinent issue of Current Biology online. On the right-hand side of that page, there are links to PDF and HTML versions of the article.

Shrinking Pain originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2010-07-10 (Saturday).

We have yet another “NLP said it first” moment in an article in a recent issue of the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology:

A new study underscores the benefit of receiving cognitive behavioral therapy CBT from a competent therapist who follows the guidelines for delivering CBT.

Prior studies have shown that while cognitive therapy is an effective treatment for depression, a clear understanding of the role therapists’ training and expertise plays in making treatment successful was unknown.

The new study suggests therapist competence may be a particularly important determinant of outcome for some patients.

I’ve heard this from my trainers from my first training with Richard in 1997. How is it that Psychology takes so long to catch up to NLP?

Go read the rest at Therapist Competency Important for Treatment Success on Psych Central.

Therapist Competence Matters originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2010-07-7 (Wednesday).

I challenge you to find a funnier typographical error than this one (follow the link):

That IS a strong winter storm..

Behold… The World’s Funniest Typo! originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2010-07-7 (Wednesday).

I’m a bit of a money geek. Not too crazy, but I like to keep an eye on what I have. So I read a couple of personal finance blogs. Recently, Monevator had an article titled, “Keep It Simple, Stupid,” and it pointed me to an interesting group of articles of interest to implicit modelers:

Appearing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the mystery of overimitation has been a long-standing one in developmental psychology. How is it that young children, who are able to learn and reason in so many impressively agile ways, can be utterly stumped by something as simple as the transparent Puzzle Box shown above? Specifically, when kids see an adult getting a prize out of that box in a way that adults — and even chimpanzees — can easily identify as clumsy and inefficient, they seem to lose the ability to figure out how to open the box “correctly”. Watching an adult doing it wrong, in other words, effectively blocks children from figuring out how to do it right. Children become stuck overimitating — or copying the adult’s wasteful strategy, even when doing so leads to bad outcomes.

We humans are too smart for our own good, and make things harder than they need to be. There’s nothing particularly revolutionary in discovering that. But I hadn’t heard of “overimitating” before. I’d heard that implicit modeling is the way we all do it from birth; it’s the way babies learn practically everything. At the same time, we forget how long it takes for babies to get it right. We don’t want to take seven to eight years to, say, learn a language… we want to hold a coherent conversation in a few weeks.

It’s important, then, when we model by imitation, to remember to take the model apart and find out what needs to be there and what doesn’t. We don’t want to have to tap stuff with a feather just because that’s how we learned to do it.

Read it all at The Mystery of Overimitation over at Hello Felix, a childhood development blog for parents.

Implicit Modeling? Watch out for this. originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2010-07-4 (Sunday).

In the October 2009 issue of Smithsonian Magazine, there’s an article on Amy Herman, an art historian and lawyer, who uses fine art to teach the fine art of observation:

A Caravaggio appeared on the screen. In it, five men in 17th-century dress are seated around a table. Two others stand nearby, and one of them, barely discernible in shadow, points a finger — accusingly? — at a young man at the table with some coins.

Among the officers a discussion arose about who robbed whom, but they soon learned there could be no verdict. No one was being accused or arrested, Herman said. The painting was The Calling of St. Matthew, and the man in the shadow was Jesus Christ. The cops fell silent.

Later, Deputy Inspector Donna Allen said, “I can see where this would be useful in sizing up the big picture.”

Some of the comments on the Web version of the article are interesting, too. One of them mentions the Sherlock Holmes stories. Another mentions a program called Visual Thinking Strategies, something I hadn’t heard of before.

If I ever have the opportunity to take Ms. Herman’s training, I think I’ll do it. What about you?

Go read Teaching Cops to See, from Smithsonian Magazine

Sharpening Observation originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2010-03-27 (Saturday).

There’s a great little blog called “It Made My Day.” Whenever something really cool happens to you, you can go there and post about it… and, even better, you can read those of others. Reading it makes my day.

Today, some guy called Richie posted one that got me to thinking. Which, naturally, made my day. He said,

In my Geography 101 class, my professor said: If I didn’t understand the concept of wind, I would think the trees were dancing!

That’s some serious philosophy there. It takes the whole problem of superstition, Magical Thinking, and so on and condenses it to bite size. I absolutely love it.

Thinking Critically originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2010-03-20 (Saturday).

I love this guy.

You can’t do what? originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2010-03-16 (Tuesday).

As a follow-up to my last post, Threats and the Perception of Time, here’s a recent article from Psychology Today:

…fear does not actually speed up our rate of perception or mental processing. Instead, it allows us to remember what we do experience in greater detail. Since our perception of time is based on the number of things we remember, fearful experiences thus seem to unfold more slowly.

Read the rest at How the Brain Stops Time at Psychology Today. Interesting stuff.

How we distort time originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2010-03-16 (Tuesday).

A co-worker and I the other day were discussing how to get hit by a train. (Never mind how we got on the subject. Conversations in hospitals can take strange turns.) I brought up something that a guy I used to know — he worked for Amtrak, and still does, I think — told me: you can’t tell how fast a train is coming at you if you’re standing in front of it. People on a track see a train coming, they think they have lots of time, but they don’t.

Then I read this article, which fleshes out the brain’s perception of time in threatening situations:

Finally, the effect might be due to the intrinsic dynamic properties of the stimulus, such that the brain estimates time based on the number of changes in an event.

Of particular relevance to the third hypothesis is the observation that looming stimuli are associated with a distorted subjective perception of time, such that their duration is perceived to be longer than it actually is. Marc Wittmann and his colleagues exploited this in their new study. They recruited 20 participants…

For more information on how to work with someone’s perception of time, go read Does time dilate during a threatening situation?

Threats and the Perception of Time originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2010-01-31 (Sunday).

This is from Fail Blog, but I’m not so sure it isn’t a Win.

Spot the Polarity Responder originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2010-01-31 (Sunday).

Someone dear to me loves her thesaurus. When I read To A Thesaurus today on the Futility Closet blog, I thought of her. Then I thought of you guys! Here’s the first verse:

O precious code, volume, tome,
Book, writing, compilation, work,
Attend the while I pen a pome,
A jest, a jape, a quip, a quirk.

To a Thesaurus originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2010-01-20 (Wednesday).

We’ve intuited for ages that faces reflect personalities, and that we can “tell just by looking at them” what a person is really like. Some new research is bearing out our intuition, at least in the domain of aggression:

Volunteers viewed photographs of faces of men for whom aggressive behavior was previously assessed in the lab. The volunteers rated how aggressive they thought each person was on a scale of one to seven after viewing each face for either 2000 milliseconds or 39 milliseconds.

The photographs were very revealing: Volunteers’ estimates of aggression correlated highly with the actual aggressive behavior of the faces viewed, even if they saw the picture for only 39 milliseconds.

Facial Features May Predict Volatility is on Psych Central.

Aggression is In Your Face originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2010-01-16 (Saturday).

A recent article on the Lingformant blog points to some compelling new research on how we parse gestures:

Your ability to make sense of Groucho’s words and Harpo’s pantomimes in an old Marx Brothers movie takes place in the same regions of your brain, says new research funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), one of the National Institutes of Health.

You can read the synopsis at Words, Gestures Are Translated by Same Brain Regions.

It Really Is Body Language originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2010-01-16 (Saturday).

OK, so it isn’t NLP-related, but I know there are those of us who run trainings and who manage practice groups and such, and there are times when it’s useful to have professional-looking name tags for the folks in the room. So I’d like to draw your attention to FreeNameTags.net. They have more than 60 ready-to-use printable name tags that you can download and print for free. (They take Avery 5395 or compatible adhesive labels, or plain paper.)

The Employee name tags might be great for associate trainers or other helpers you’ve got, and the Hello tags for your participants. Unless you’ve got an interesting sense of humor, of course.

Incidentally, the folks who run that site have lots of other free printable stuff for your business, too.

(Thanks, Lifehacker!)

Free Name Tags originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2010-01-16 (Saturday).

Sorry… there’s just no better title for this post. I’m talking about the punctuation mark that looks like : .

In the spirit of a couple of recent posts on punctuation (the use of the comma and the apostrophe), I’d like to refer you to DumbLittleMan’s Guide to Colon Use.

The high points are the following nine, though there are a few more:

1. To introduce a list
2. To introduce direct speech
3. When showing an example
4. To offer a conclusion
5. To explain something more fully
6. To Introduce a subtitle
7. As a substitution for a conjunction
8. To link independent clauses
9. To Introduce a question

(Hey, I used one to introduce a list!)

Get the full story at The DumbLittleMan Guide to Colon Use.

The Proper Use of the Colon originally appeared on NLPhilia Blog on 2010-01-15 (Friday).