watch tHe skies

Since my last photoreading post I’ve been very busy photoreading as much as I possibly can. Unfortunately getting in to state is still something that takes me a few minutes so I can’t switch it on and photoread everything in sight. However I am getting some photoreading in every day - not the 3 books a day but not at all bad. I did manage to photoread and process a John Adair book “Not Bosses but Leaders” on the train in a couple of hours last week, which was very impressive. You can check out my mind map here to see what you think of the content I extracted in a very short period indeed.

The most profound experience I had during that exercise was wondering what page was the most important for my purpose for reading the book (which was to understand what the key characteristics of a good leader are in Adair’s opinion), I immediately got a number in my head, and when I turned to that page, there it was, a summary of the key characteristics, on a page that I hadn’t even read consciously. (more…)

A guy I work with once said to me about a particularly awkward associate who is no longer with us “Why does everyone take an instant dislike to him… is it just to save time?” Aside from the gross generalisation and being very funny, that phrase has stuck with me for many years because it’s an extreme example of the old saying about first impressions usually being right.

This concept of first impressions took on more meaning for me when I began to learn the difference between the conscious and unconscious minds. The conscious mind is a relatively new development in our species, some say it’s only been around for the last 30,000 years or so. The unconscious mind has been around for millions, maybe tens of millions or so years and is so much more advanced. And it is the unconscious mind’s job to protect us - to keep us safe from predators by processing millions more bits of data at a time than our relatively feeble conscious minds could manage. The results of this unconscious processing is fed to our conscious minds in a form some describe as intuition - those feelings that we get. So when we meet someone and take an instant dislike (or like) to them, there is a lot more going on in that “instant” than you are consciously aware of, in fact a large proportion of that initial feeling about someone has been processed unconsciously by the part of you that is comparing the person to everybody you’ve ever met, reading micro-body language, tonality, facial expressions and much more in a fraction of a second, and converting that decision in to a set of analogue signals that you might consider intuition. (more…)

Last week I was jetting around the US drumming up some business. For part of my stay I was down near Norfolk in Virginia, not far from Virginia Tech which has been in the news following the terrible shootings. Clearly many people there are hurt and upset at the event, and some people I met had either attended the school or had children there, so it was a tough time for everyone, including the poor Englishman looking for business at that particular time. My heart goes out to a nation of kind people affected by the tragedy.

Staying in hotels as I was, I found the debates on television about the situation and what to do about it fascinating. Strangely, most of the ideas involved providing better defence against such events occurring in the future - better armed guards, arming teachers etc etc, were serious suggestions on major TV stations. It seemed to me that there was a much simpler one:

Ban guns

This is of course easy for me to say - I live in a society where it is supposedly very hard to obtain firearms. That’s not to say that we don’t have problems with guns - of course we do, but our incident rate is considerably lower even when pro-rated by population and I would like to believe that this is mostly attributable to our culture and the greater difficulty in obtaining firearms.

And I did speak to people about this whilst I was over there, and I got an almost unanimous reply.

“You can’t ban guns - it’s part of the Constitution - the right to bear arms”

And then it dawned on me - this right to bear arms is buried so deep down in the foundations of their society that they can’t consider it as a possibility. (more…)

Urgh the recent travelling and sleep depravation are obviously taking their toll on me because the 4am start this morning to get to the airport left me so absent minded that I left the £50 I withdrew from the atm IN the cash machine. Doh!

Now I don’t know about you but when I do something so ridiculously stupid (and costly), I agonise over it for hours, replaying the event and beating myself up, sometimes so much so that I struggle to concentrate on anything else.

Fortunately there is a cool little exercise that can be used for memories that have unwanted emotional content, and here it goes… (more…)

Whilst worshipping at the Apple Centre yesterday, I had a go on the Apple TV device. I must say it’s a very nice piece of kit - Apple’s approach to usability certainly shines through and is very simple to operate compared to my very clumsy Netgear EVA700.

However videos from iTunes look pretty awful on a big screen, which means the only way to get a decent picture is to code your own videos from DVDs. This however is a painfully lengthy process. Unfortunately for Apple I don’t see how this device can really take off until it provides a function in iTunes to rip DVDs to movie files… most people don’t want to mess with third party recoding devices and won’t want to repurchase a movie from iTunes store if they already have it on DVD, and more importantly, they shouldn’t have to.

I was in London today, strolling nonchalantly up Regent Street on my way to worship at the Apple store, when my unconscious mind brought to my attention one t-shirt in the window of Virgin Records. There were many tees in the window, however the one I was attentive on was interesting:

“I could give up chocolate, but i’m not a quitter”

Now quite why my unconscious brought this to my attention remains to be seen. However it did get me thinking about the giving up metaphor. It seems to me that we spend our childhoods having many messages tatooed in our minds, such as “don’t lose things”, “failure is bad” and “don’t give up”. Fundamental rules of society I hope that you would agree wouldn’t you?

So it comes as no surprise to me that most people that attempt to free themselves from an unwanted habit fail, as their very physiology is coded not to give up, to keep things. In addition to this you have the natural law that nature abhors a vacuum - this seems to be true both literally and metaphorically as the universe fills in vacuums of all kind with whatever comes to hand.

However this doesn’t mean that you can’t eliminate habits, you just need to think about them from another angle. Richard Bandler suggests that eliminating a habit is a simple case of identifying some state or situation that is incredibly attractive and compelling, one that gives you an almost magnetic attraction to that excludes that unwanted habit. For example you could enjoy really fantasising what you will look, feel and act like when you have reached your target, and indulge in this fantasy regularly, noting how in control you are in situations where previously you would have had little, and enjoying the wonderful feeling that accompanies that fantasy. (more…)

Firstly apologies for the lack of updates recently. I’m currently in the United States making contact with a few potential customers and catching up with some contacts. Everyone in the office assumes that a week in the US is a holiday, and conveniently filter out that travelling around, staying in hotels and getting up and working to ungodly hours is very hard work. I suppose when I get back I should remind them of all of these factors instead of just telling them about the excellent margharitas we had in Virginia Beach..!

So the other day I attended a function and hoped to meet some people that I met back in the UK a month or so ago. That meeting was the first time we met, and I worked hard to ensure that we would have a positive meet, which it was, and I gained very strong rapport with all of them. Consequently the meeting was very positive. When I arrived at the function, I met up with these people and rapport was immediate… it would appear that the rapport was triggered by our meeting again, and as a result our second meeting was very productive, strengthening this new relationship.

So I wonder whether rapport elicits a state that can be anchored with a simple handshake… after all the action of shaking hands defines the business relationship? So my point is that taking that effort to be in a positive, warm and interested state when meeting new people can elicit close rapport that is easily anchored and re-triggered, making the process of developing new relationships as easy as it could be.

As you read this I wonder what situations you are already imagining yourself in gaining stronger and stronger levels of rapport with people, aren’t you?

In the last month or so I’ve been pretty successful in acquiring some of the seminal NLP texts that are no longer in print. Titles such as Frogs Into Princes, Using Your Brain, Structure of Magic and Trance-Formations are easy enough to get… however for the most part you have to pay big bucks for them because demand outstrips supply and the fair price for many of these books is now £30-40. Indeed on Amazon you can get a brand spanking never been opened copy of Trance-Formations for a little over £300. The challenge then is not to find these books but to pay what I consider to be a reasonable price to uncover the jewels within.

I’ve also gotten hold of a few Richard Bandler recordings - State Of The Art is an excellent collection of his old McKenna \ Breen NLP Practitioner trainings, which I’ve copied over to MP3 so I can listen to them whilst gardening or taking the bairn for a walk. Most of the videos are of Bandler sitting on a stool doing his special brand of stand-up therapy, so they make for excellent listening whilst his multi-layered metaphors and embedded commands (hopefully) sink deep in to my unconscious.

It occurred to me as I cruised ebay, lost out on a few bids to people prepared to pay hundreds of pounds for some of these items, that perhaps NLP was becoming some sort of religion, and that perhaps one day, when the founding fathers have left their mortal bodies to become part of the great Unconscious, that NLP itself may resemble a religious faith more than a group of useful therapeutic and coaching technologies.

After all, most NLPers are evangelical about the topic in a way that you only experience elsewhere in those people trying to save us all in the market square on a saturday afternoon. Already the original scriptures of NLP are scarce and sought after by its followers, the truth behind much of the fall-out between Bandler and Grinder is now popular myth, and the whole premise is founded on the belief that there is something within us all that resembles the unconscious mind.

And perhaps that is the origin of religion - the point where fact becomes belief, I don’t know, theology is but one area I know little about. And of course all of this could a pointless wondering on a friday morning that does little more than give you a scary insight in to the stuff that I think about when most are asleep.

Man I’m busy today, so busy in fact that I’m afraid I haven’t had the chance to create a post today. However, my mate Andy is complaining of being bored today so I sent him five sure fire ways to relieve office boredom. I thought they were funny so I decided to share them with you.

1) Announce to the office that for the remainder of the day your name is Mr Yakamoto and then speak pigeon english. If there are any Japanese speakers in the office pretend to be Malaysian.

2) Make a necklace of paper clips. if this doesnt relieve the boredom, make matching earrings and actually pierce your ears.

3) Think of a really obscure TV theme tune and hum it over and over again. refuse to tell anyone what it is.

4) Invent a new swear word

5) Announce to everyone that for the remainder of the day you will LIE when asked any question.

If you have any good additions, let me know, however be sure to back up your ideas with proof of their actual ability to relieve boredom….

Recently I’ve begun reading Ben bedtime stories. He’s 11 months old now and although I don’t know how much of what I say he understands - I bet it’s a lot more than we think. So I thought he would benefit from a little story each night.

Thankfully there are millions of bedtime storybooks so I don’t think he’ll ever get bored of them. The one that we are working through has lots of little stories, maybe 3 to 4 pages long. To be fair they aren’t that riveting, but they help Ben to sleep and I’ve also noticed that reading them is damn good practice for storytelling.

Of course all of these stories are metaphors. In the case of this particular collection, all of the metaphors seem to be related to healthy eating - we have the boy who only eats cheese and peas who gradually learns to eat a balanced diet, the princess who only eats sweets and the giant who runs out of cakes. The beauty of metaphors with kids is that whilst they enjoy the story, the message gets processed by their unconscious and (hopefully) influences their behaviour. I wonder if they do one about the boy who nearly got an ASBO?

Anyway I digress. Metaphors don’t only work on kids. When anyone tells us adults a story - it’s time to curl up and enjoy the ride. Metaphors still reach our unconscious mind and get processed at least unconsciously. I like to think of a metaphor as a trojan horse… the story is accepted at face value by the conscious mind, which allows the horse to bypass its outer defences. Once inside the defensive walls of the mind, the deeper messages of the metaphor can be released, creeping in to the inner santums of the castle undetected. (more…)