watch tHe skies

One of the things that has blown me away in my studies of NLP is the sheer quality of information that people give away in their words. Putting aside the information on how people perceive their world that is given away in body language, and the information there to process in their eye movements, the content of their language is fascinating.

Now I can’t possibly tell you everything I’ve learnt in a blog post. However I am going to tell you a little, and for most of you out there with the exception of you cunning linguists, this is going to be a shock. A surprise. And, hopefully something to think about and play about.

Most people listen fairly passively. And then only to the content. The what. So if I’m telling you about something that happened to me, you are listening to the detail of that account and reconstructing it based on your own map of the world.

And you miss the how. Consequently you miss a whole bunch of stuff about how I represent and perceive the world, which is priceless information if you want to communicate with me, because with every sentence I am giving away clues about the type of person that I am, and therefore, how best to deal with me and persuade me to get you a drink. And the interesting thing is, if you listened to how I say things, and used my language back to me, I would have to be really listening too to recognise what you are doing and ignore it. So influential is the how.

Now I’m sure many of you have taken personality tests. Sure, most people have done one nowadays. Systems such as MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) attempt to categorise our behaviours in to archetypes, programs if you will, and I for one read my profiles on such tests with amazement - how can a bunch of questions define me so well?

Well they can’t. They generalise. Behaviour is all about context, so whilst personality tests are interesting indicators, they can’t possibly predict our behaviour in a given circumstance because we humans are real-time, we do things in any given situation because it’s the best decision at that time given the data we have. Underneath circumstance you could say that these meta-programs do affect our behaviour, we have preferred ways of behaving, and this is the information that we give out in our language.

There are many, many books detailing many, many metaprograms and how to spot them and connect to them in people. I live “Words That Change Minds” by Shelle Rose Charvet and suggest you get hold of it if this subject interests you. Here, I am going to talk about a group of metaprograms that you can easily spot in people and use to motivate them… these are so much fun you may find yourself laughing out loud when you start controlling your friends like robots! (more…)

So Giles, a friend of mine from my NLP Practitioner course, has set up his website offering his coaching and NLP skills to you, the general public.

So if you think any of these apply to you:

• I just can’t get motivated
• This experience \ memory \ phobia is holding me back
• I feel a little lost
• I don’t know what I want

Or anything similar, then perhaps you should head over to www.emotion-magic.com and get in touch with Giles, because the fact that you’re aware of those feelings means that Giles can help you feel better and move on.

Hmm I’m really getting in to facebook. It’s addictive - all of these little applications to play with, lots of linking to friends and encouraging you to pull your less IT savvy mates in to its sweaty grip.

I’m currently racking my brain to think of all of the countries I have visited so that the world doesn’t look quite so barren.

And who would have known that the reason I’m a bit tired today is because of the biorhythms, not the violent food poisoning that I got at the weekend from my next door neighbour’s BBQ!

So this evening i must have spent at least 90 minutes fiddling around with my profile, and I’m not entirely sure that I have anything at all to show for it.

At least with MMORPGs you pay for your addiction, when the addiction is free and involves no dwarf tossing at all, then it is surely just plain wrong…!

Stuck in a hotel in Swindon last night, I watched the Director’s Cut of Payback, starring Mel Gibson. I remember hiring this movie when it first came out, and I thought it was terrible. However I read that the original director (Brian Helgeland) had walked out following creative differences with Mel Gibson and the studio, had been allowed to piece together his version of the movie from the  original footage, returning his vision to us.

Central to the story is Mel Gibson’s Porter, a guy looking to get $70,000 that was stolen from him by Val, his partner-in crime, some time before. Tracking Val down, he is double-crossed, blackmailed by the cops, beaten up and loses his wife to heroin. Yet he keeps after his money, leaving a bloody trail of organised crime bodies in his wake. As he climbs up the mob ladder, he is surprised to find that they even laugh off his paltry demand, and even forget how much he wants. Yet he never wavers, asking only for his $70,000, unconcerned about the carnage that he has to cause to get it.

Now some people would think it’s daft. “Why wouldn’t he take the $130,000 they gave him?”, “why is that so important to him?” and people asking those questions are right. Of course they are, if Porter’s motivation seems odd to them then it is because it isn’t their motivation. To you or me it might seem a little daft but I guarantee there are people out there that would watch the movie and nod in agreement with everything Porter says regarding the debt he owes, without necessarily being sociopaths.

Because it just means that their values are aligned with Porter’s in that respect.

My guess on Porter’s motivation is that his world rotated around the validity of a promise, an agreement between two people. When that word was broken by Val it invalidated the very foundations of his view of reality, with the effect that until that money was regained, nothing else held any sense or value. To the point where death was a viable option if balance couldn’t be restored. And you will find that the most supremely motivated people are those that have made a direct line of sight connection between actions that need to be taken and the achieving or maintenance of a fundamental belief. “Singlemindedness” is the term that comes to mind. I’m sure you can think of someone that is singleminded, not about everything, about certain things, and those things are closely aligned with their values.

Now Porter’s values aren’t mine. However I do sympathise with him… being let down by a broken promise would certainly wreck my foundations of belief. And I do find that actions that best align with what is important to me motivate me most.

So I wonder, have you ever considered what’s important to you, in life, love, work and play? Think about the things you simply love doing and ask yourself “what does that give me?”, and keep asking that question (chunking up) until you can go no further… those criteria that you get are your hot buttons… and if you can connect whatever you need to do to one or more of those criteria by line of site, then your motivation will be off the scale.

So as Porter drives off in to the sunset with Rosie, I smiled, and agreed with myself that the Director’s cut was a far better movie. Very cool in fact, and very re-watchable. I was glad that having gotten his money back, Porter could find time to notice what new directions his heart would take him in.

Another night in Swindon, I wonder what philosophical nonsense I will extract from old movies this evening?

The other day someone asked me what coaching is all about. I thought about it for a while and said that, for me, coaching is about giving people choice. That is, helping people to see choice where they didn’t believe that they had any.

And of course I’ve spoken at length before about how who we are and what we do is defined by self-imposed barriers, or beliefs, that inhibit choices.  Then, just to complicate matters, there are our actual, internal beliefs, and those that we say, or espouse, quite often they are different. I mean, how are we supposed to work efficiently when what we say isn’t even congruent with what we do or believe?? Complicated isn’t it?.

So coaching for me is about helping people to realise that they have way more choice than they thought that they had. And one way to further that is to understand how congruent your internal view of who you are is with the perception of those around you.

An interesting tool to use for this exercise is the Johari window. The idea is that the window is a metaphor for the four sides of who you are:

• Parts of your identity known to you and others - The Arena
• Parts of your identity known only to you - The Facade
• Parts of your identity known only to others - The Blind Spot
• Parts of your identity known to no-one - The Unknown

The idea of this tool is for you to map out words that describe you and see how aligned what you think about yourself is with what people think of you. It’s an interesting exercise to carry out and can yield some startling revelations to yourself. It also helps you to understand how other people perceive you and hence why they behave with you in certain ways, as well as help you to think about what signals you present to new people to cause them to react the way that they do. If people don’t react the way you would like, with some consistency, then it is likely that it is your first impression, rather than them.

So perhaps you could find it useful to learn how your perception of you differs from other people’s? Perhaps gaining an insight in to your own Blind Spots can help give you new choices on how to communicate with people. Remember - people do the best thing in any given instant based on their own personal values and the information that they have to hand. Do people around you know what you are really like?

Now it wouldn’t be fair for me to talk about the Johari window without showing you mine, would it? Fortunately the nice person over at http://kevan.org/johari provides a free Johari that you can invite people to contribute. If you read the rest of the article, you can take a butcher’s at mine, kindly filled in by some of my friends.

Now one thing about the Johari window is that it uses only positive words. There is one for you budding Darth Vaders out there, called the Nohari window, which again you can find interactively over at http://kevan.org/nohari. (more…)

So with Jenny currently refusing to see film of my suggestion following our recent disappointments, I decided to do this one solo. 

Now as a kid I loved the FF - I eagerly anticipated getting the next comic or annual, the crazy bad guys, the evil Dr Doom, and I longed to be The Human torch. FF was one of the earlier comics I was in to, I then moved on to Spider-Man, The Avengers, Iron Man, Daredevil etc. etc.

I was incredibly excited when the first movie came out, and I thought it did a great job of bringing the spirit of the comics on to the silver screen. It did, however, lack any depth at all, and was over without the FF actually having much of a challenge.

So I wasn’t sure about the sequel… although it would be cool to see The Silver Surfer (toughest hombre in the Marvel Top Trumps) on screen, I wondered how they were going to make it work.

Fortunately the production team seem to have taken the criticisms from the first movie and put about creating a more substantial sequel. It still retains the sense of fun from the comics and the first movie, with plenty of the inter-team squabbling you would expect from the FF, and it adds a few sub-plots and some personal anguish for a couple of the characters. Knitted around this is the arrival of the silver surfer who sets around preparing the earth for destruction whilst a resurrected Dr Doom seeks to use him for his own ends.

All in all its an enjoyable movie and a better overall experience than the first outing. That’s not to say that it’s a classic - it is still fairly superficial entertainment.. some characters being badly under-used (the thing could have pretty much taken the week off), and you dont see that much FF action. However the SFX are very good, and these few gripes aside it’s a lot of fun. Hopefully the movie does well enough to justify a third and we can see the improvement continue.

And I wrote that whole review without mentioning Jessica Alba in a catsuit.

The observant amongst you may have noticed that the theme has changed. You may have also noticed that it looks a bit messy in places. Bear with me I am tarting up the theme as I go so it will get better, I promise.

All of this is to bring the blog in to this century and allow me to do some whizzy new things, like hypnotise you and make you dance like rabid donkeys, which I have only seen once and it was disturbing.

I’ve added some links under “chat“ on to the right hand side of the site that will guide you to the places I frequent on the interweb. These are the forums that I hang around and make snide comments on. So come along, look for “matt hat” or similar and say hello. (more…)

So now I have mastered the HTML nightmare that is myspace, and given that The Hoff still hasn’t accepted me as his friend, I’ve signed up with another social networking site, Face Book.

So head over, say hello and let’s be friends…

It’s been a while since I posted about photoreading. And perhaps that is because it’s not a novelty any more.

I use it all of the time - textbooks for my studies, newspapers, reports, and I get great results with it, sometimes suprising results that I could harp on about for days, and you would either believe me or not.

Recently I photoread my first novel. A fascinating experience indeed. Not only did I read through the book quicker than I would normally read a novel, but I also had a much more vivid experience of the book than I normally would. Many times in the book I noticed that details of the scene I had imagined included details that weren’t described until later on, so my imagination was far more stimulated and multi-sensory, immersing me in the story as a witness rather than observer. That’s the best way I can describe the experience, you really need to have your own experience to get more information on this.

And there have been countless little moments where photoreading has surprised me. The most recent being when I had 5 minutes to read a 40 page report before a meeting to review it. I read it through, superread it to highlight my comments on the errors and headed off to the meeting. As part of the discussions it became clear to the attendees that I actually knew the content of the report better than the author, who had copied and pasted much of the content. I was also able to comment on the inconsistency of the themes in the document. And the interesting thing is I didn’t have time before the meeting to consciously process these things. As the meeting progressed and the report was actively discussed, the answers came and I just let them come out. Brilliant.

So there you go, some of my experiences. If you are intrigued, head over to this blog, a guy is documenting his experience with photoreading and I wish him the best of luck with getting out what I do.

http://withthebeginninginmind.blogspot.com/2007/06/photoreading-journey-so-far.html