“Come to the edge!”
“Tis too high!”
“Come to the edge!”
“We might fall!”
“Come to the edge!”
So they came to the edge and
He pushed them and
THEY FLEW!
Month: September 2011
Worry is a useful signal. It’s like a telephone call from your unconscious mind. So it’s good, of course, to notice the call and answer it. That allows you to make the proper response. I mean, you don’t want the phone to keep ringing. Once is enough. So just make the appropriate response immediately and then the ringing will stop.
During 1999, a very bizarre fear and worry filled the newspapers every day. It was called the Y2K problem. The year 2,000 sounds a little ominous, of course, and people may have been looking for it to have a special meaning or even to mark the end of an era in a really obvious way. Or perhaps, Y2K was a serious fear for people.
It’s interesting to consider how this problem began before we look at its more interesting consequences today. Back when computers were first invented and developed, computer memory was really really expensive. And so programmers would try to save bits and bytes wherever possible. So when a programmer was entering the format for the date, he decided to use “55″ instead of the longer “1955.” By doing this, he could use half as much memory to encode the data. Saving two bytes may not sound like much, but when a program used a date in hundreds or thousands of places, this could add up to big memory savings.
Of course, the programmer didn’t imagine that the computer and his program would still be in use in the year 2000. Back then, people imagined the year 2000 as having flying cars and amazing anti-gravity devices. Although the world has progressed enormously, it is amazing how some things can still stay around much much longer than people imagine. And that’s what happened with the code that the programmer wrote. Just like a person can keep snippets of memory from long long ago, in the same way, snippets of code can stay around in newer systems long after could be imagined.
And of course, those snippets continue to play an important role in the system. So in the year 1999, people began to worry very much about the effect of all these old snippets that remained in the system. Because what would happen when the two digit representation of the year 1999 changed into the two digit representation of the year 2000? What the programmers had never imagined – 99 would change into 00 right at the first stroke of the clock in the year two thousand.
Let’s think about this to show what it could mean. Supposing a bank is calculating your interest according to how many years you have had it on deposit. For example, let’s say that you deposited $100,000 in the bank at a simple interest rate of 4% per year.
Interest = (99-60) * 100,000 * 4% = $156,000
So far, so good. But let’s look at the calculation when “99″ changes into “00.”
Interest = (00 – 60) * 100,000 * 4% = -$240,000
Yes, that’s right, instead of being ahead by about one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, your account is suddenly going to be massively depleted and you’ll be in the red by two hundred and fourty thousand dollars. That’s an overall loss of almost four hundred thousand dollars. For any investor, that is going to rate as a pretty bad one-second loss.
So it’s clear how financial institutes were worried by Y2K. But everyone else started getting worried, too. A lot of the old American military systems were also using very old snippets of code. What would happen if a nuclear missile computer got the date wrong. If the distance of a potential incoming missile were to suddenly become a minus number, would that mean that an attack had already occured and automatic retaliation was required?
Y2K was the worry of the decade and it showed. People started stocking up on food. They bought guns and gas masks. They expected World War Three, an earthquake, a famine, and a tornado to all hit simultaneously.
All the computer experts got paid huge sums of money that year to sift through these old snippets and to find any potential problems. People even worried that programmers might introduce new problems as they tried to Y2K-proof old code that was difficult to understand.
And at midnight 1999, many many people were very scared and very worried. What happened?
In a word – nothing.
Worry is a useful signal – a way of helping us to check that we have done things right and that we are prepared. But most of the time, nothing happens. The horrors that we can dream up are generally far worse than reality. So the next time worry comes to you – remember that it is like a telephone call to your unconscious mind. Go ahead. Answer the call. Check that things are ok. Make the appropriate response and then move on to a new exciting era.
©2010 by Brian Cullen
Years ago, I carried out my doctoral research into the songwriting process, in particular looking at how songwriters move from that first spark into a complete song. It was a whole lot of fun working with the songwriters (particularly for the first five years of the research!), and through interviews and workshops, I learned a whole lot about the process.
Every songwriter is different, of course, but one important lesson that emerged from the research is that spending a long time on writing does not necessarily produce a better result. In fact, it was almost the exact opposite. Songwriters who wrote quickly were the ones who were both happiest with their songs and also the ones who had the most success and favourable response in both live shows and recordings.
This slightly counter-intuitive result is probably due to a couple of factors. First, writers who write slowly tend to be critical about their work as they are writing. These writers question every line to the extent that they get in the way of their own creative processes and either fail to finish the song or over-analyze it so much that it has lost that initial spark that made it interesting. When a writer works very quickly or with a time limit, the critical filter becomes suspended, and often amazing things can happen. When we let the unconscious mind really loose, creativity can really flow. It is always possible to edit a song later, but applying the critical filter too early can mean that a song will never be finished.Second, songwriters who write slowly end up writing far fewer songs – simply because each song takes so long to write. And another important finding in the research was that good songwriters are the ones who have the experience of writing many songs. It is through songwriting that a songwriter develops his craft, and the writer who writes 100 songs will be far more flexible and creative than the writer who has written only 5. Writing more songs also increases the chances of writing really great songs. Like any other area of creativity, songwriters who write a lot may have more bad ideas but they are also much more likely to have more good ideas, too.
An Australian songwriter, Leon, was one of the faster writers and although he had little time available for songwriting or recording, he managed to use that limited time extremely effectively. Leon was working two jobs and raising young children. He said that he would write a song in his spare ten minutes in the morning, often while he was shaving or doing something else. Then he would rush into his garage studio and record a basic track on guitar and vocal. In the evening when he came home, he again had about 10 minutes before he had to rush out to his second job, so he would rush into the studio and add a keyboard part and a backing vocal. While his recordings were not perfect by any means, he very successfully wrote many great songs and produced good’sounding demos in this way. I asked Leon how things would be if he had a full day to write songs. “Oh, if I had a whole day, I’d do nothing – I’d probably sit around and watch TV or just chill out.”
I have had similar experiences myself. I had months and months to write six songs for a children’ education project. I worked slowly on demo after demo and nothing was really working. It was only on the day that the producer emailed me and said, “we need to talk”, that I realized how serious things had become. I knew that I was about to be fired if I didn’t do something. Once again, a time limit was a wonderful thing. I went into my studio at 8am, worked until midnight with hardly a break. By the end of the session, I had written six new songs, recorded all the tracks, added the vocals, and uploaded them to an online server for the producer. When he called me from New York at 3am, he said “where did these songs come from – I love them!”. Where did they come from indeed – good question because I hardly remember the day at all. I was working in a trance-like state with far far greater efficiency than my normal capabilities. The time limit focused my mind, let my critical filter and conscious mind take a break, and let my unconscious mind do what it is good at – creating stuff quickly and efficiently.
So often, people say that they don’t have the time to get things done. Yet sometimes, a deadline or limited time is exactly what is needed to get things done. There’s an old saying that if you want to get something done, ask a busy person. So if you’re a busy person already, maybe you’re exactly the right person to do that special thing that you have been putting off.
Using Your Brain – For a Change
by Richard Bandler
Edited by Steve Andreas and Connirae Andreas
Richard Bandler is a remarkable individual, with simple ideas that he develops in very interesting ways, and Using Your Brain is one of his best books. This book is completely based on the simple idea of submodalities, the idea that we can represent the world usefully in terms of our five senses (modalities) and that by changing the parameters of these modalities (submodalities), we can radically alter our subjective experience of the world. From this simple starting point, this classic NLP book shows how phobias can be cured, motivation can be used generated, beliefs can be changed, and much much more. If Bandler can written nothing else in his career, this book alone, with its deep exploration of the potential of submodalities, would have been a massive contribution to our understanding of how the human brain can be run more effectively.
When I say ‘written’, this is a bit of a misnomer, because like many books in the field of NLP, Using Your Brain is an edited transcript of a workshop or series of workshops. While this transcript format does not always work well, it does work well in this case, due to Bandler’s skill in oral presentation and the fine editing of Steve and Connirae Andreas. The book allows the reader to participate in the seminar virtually and to gradually deepen his or her understanding of the possibilities of submodalities in a natural and effective way. Questions from the audience answer many of the questions which I had myself, and the demonstrations provide excellent examples of how these techniques can be used to promote change in other people in counselling or coaching situations.
Submodalities are nothing new; it is in the exploration of the concept in such depth that Bandler’s contribution lies. In everyday language, people say things like “She has a bright future”, or “She has a colourful past.” While these are generally seen as metaphors, Bandler suggests that they are precise descriptions of the speaker’s internal thinking, and that changing these internal descriptions is the key to effective change, learning, or communication. For example, if you think of a pleasant memory and notice the picture that you see, what happens when you make that picture brighter? Or change the location of that picture? You will probably notice that these changes produce an instantaneous change in the type and depth of feelings that are attached to this memory. Even with this simple example, you can probably already think of ways that you can make other memories even more pleasant, or reduce any bad feelings associated with other memories. These simple submodality shifts are just the beginning of the possibilities that Bandler presents in this book.
Some of the vital NLP concepts that Bandler introduces in this book are Submodality shifts (Chapter II), associated versus dissociated perspectives (Chapter III), strategy redesign (Chapter IV), motivation strategies (Chapter V), changing state using submodalities (Chapter VI), removing limiting beliefs (Chapter VII), learning strategies (Chapter VIII), and The Swish process (Chapter IX). If you are interested in the field of NLP and haven’t read this book, get a copy as soon as possible. Even though it was published way back in 1985, I believe that there is still no clearer explanation of submodalities available, and apart from the important ideas in the book, the richness of Bandler’s language is highly useful for any NLP practitioner who aims to produce change in the most rapid elegant ways.
by Richard Bandler
Edited by Steve Andreas and Connirae Andreas
Richard Bandler is a remarkable individual, with simple ideas that he develops in very interesting ways, and Using Your Brain is one of his best books. This book is completely based on the simple idea of submodalities, the idea that we can represent the world usefully in terms of our five senses (modalities) and that by changing the parameters of these modalities (submodalities), we can radically alter our subjective experience of the world. From this simple starting point, this classic NLP book shows how phobias can be cured, motivation can be used generated, beliefs can be changed, and much much more. If Bandler can written nothing else in his career, this book alone, with its deep exploration of the potential of submodalities, would have been a massive contribution to our understanding of how the human brain can be run more effectively.
When I say ‘written’, this is a bit of a misnomer, because like many books in the field of NLP, Using Your Brain is an edited transcript of a workshop or series of workshops. While this transcript format does not always work well, it does work well in this case, due to Bandler’s skill in oral presentation and the fine editing of Steve and Connirae Andreas. The book allows the reader to participate in the seminar virtually and to gradually deepen his or her understanding of the possibilities of submodalities in a natural and effective way. Questions from the audience answer many of the questions which I had myself, and the demonstrations provide excellent examples of how these techniques can be used to promote change in other people in counselling or coaching situations.
Submodalities are nothing new; it is in the exploration of the concept in such depth that Bandler’s contribution lies. In everyday language, people say things like “She has a bright future”, or “She has a colourful past.” While these are generally seen as metaphors, Bandler suggests that they are precise descriptions of the speaker’s internal thinking, and that changing these internal descriptions is the key to effective change, learning, or communication. For example, if you think of a pleasant memory and notice the picture that you see, what happens when you make that picture brighter? Or change the location of that picture? You will probably notice that these changes produce an instantaneous change in the type and depth of feelings that are attached to this memory. Even with this simple example, you can probably already think of ways that you can make other memories even more pleasant, or reduce any bad feelings associated with other memories. These simple submodality shifts are just the beginning of the possibilities that Bandler presents in this book.
Some of the vital NLP concepts that Bandler introduces in this book are Submodality shifts (Chapter II), associated versus dissociated perspectives (Chapter III), strategy redesign (Chapter IV), motivation strategies (Chapter V), changing state using submodalities (Chapter VI), removing limiting beliefs (Chapter VII), learning strategies (Chapter VIII), and The Swish process (Chapter IX). If you are interested in the field of NLP and haven’t read this book, get a copy as soon as possible. Even though it was published way back in 1985, I believe that there is still no clearer explanation of submodalities available, and apart from the important ideas in the book, the richness of Bandler’s language is highly useful for any NLP practitioner who aims to produce change in the most rapid elegant ways.
Conversations with Richard Bandler
by Richard Bandler and Owen Fitzpatrick
The title of this book might be considered to be slightly misleading, or perhaps it was just my own expectations of the entire book being transcripts of conversations with Bandler. The back cover does describe the content of the book more accurately: “Conversations with Richard Bandler recounts Owen Fitzpatrick’s journey to discover the true nature of personal freedom and what is possible for the human spirit.” While the book does feature short extracts of conversations with Bandler on many topics, the majority of the book is written by Owen Fitzpatrick as a contextualization of Bandler’s ideas in terms of his own life.
This personal journey covers many different aspects of Fitzpatrick’s life and he does a good job of showing how Bandler’s NLP techniques have helped him immensely in taking control of his own feelings, working with his own clients, financial success, relationships, and spirituality. The personalized content took a while for me to get into, but by the end of the book I generally appreciated his anecdotes and descriptions of how NLP had helped him to achieve his goals.
The front cover of the book also gives the subtitle: “Two NLP Masters Reveal the Secrets to Successful Living”, and it is clear that Fitzpatrick (or perhaps his publisher) is using his association with Bandler to boost his own status in the NLP world. While I didn’t enjoy all of Fitzpatrick’s long clarifications and reiterations of Bandler’s ideas, it is evident from the book that he has a very strong mastery of the concepts of NLP and has successfully modelled Bandler’s methods of change-work and training. According to the book, Fitzpatrick became the youngest master trainer of NLP in the world at the age of 23 and if he can find his own voice a little more clearly, he is likely to go far beyond Bandler’s ideas and to bring positive change to a huge number of people.
Fitzpatrick frames the book using the metaphor of “chains of the free.” At the beginning of the book, he tells a story of a group of people who were “constantly criticized about what they did …. made to feel horrible each time they made a mistake …. victimized and given so many conflicting messages that they became insecure and unsure of who they were and what they could do.” After further description of these horrible living conditions, he reveals that the group of people are the human race and that their captors are their own minds. It is a powerful metaphor and one that will resound with anyone who has had a critical voice in their own head at some time telling them that something is impossible or wrong, i.e., every one of us. This metaphor underlies the whole book and all the techniques in the book are presented as increasing our personal freedom, taking responsibility for our own freedom, and giving us tools to achieve that freedom. Readers who follow the exercises will certainly achieve much in this direction.
In terms of NLP techniques, there is little new presented in this book for people who are familiar with Bandler’s work, but it is an extremely valuable contribution for NLPers who wish to understand Bandler’s way of thinking and his underlying presuppositions more deeply. For people who are unfamiliar with NLP, the techniques presented can probably best be supplemented by reading another of Bandler’s books such as Using Your Brain for a Change. I wish that the book had featured longer extracts from Bandler’s side of the conversation, but Fitzpatrick has had close access to Bandler for many years and his close modelling of his mentor does certainly allow him to act as a reasonable proxy. One minor criticism of the formatting of the book is that it is not immediately clear when the ‘conversation’ has finished and where Fitzpatrick takes over in commentary. This may have been a publisher decision, but I felt that clearer formatting would have been helpful to separate the conversations from the commentary. Overall, however this book provides a much closer look into the thinking of Bandler than has been available to date.
Postscript
This book was published in 2005, and since then Fitzpatrick has continued his close collaboration with Bandler, editing some of his talks into books.
by Richard Bandler and Owen Fitzpatrick
The title of this book might be considered to be slightly misleading, or perhaps it was just my own expectations of the entire book being transcripts of conversations with Bandler. The back cover does describe the content of the book more accurately: “Conversations with Richard Bandler recounts Owen Fitzpatrick’s journey to discover the true nature of personal freedom and what is possible for the human spirit.” While the book does feature short extracts of conversations with Bandler on many topics, the majority of the book is written by Owen Fitzpatrick as a contextualization of Bandler’s ideas in terms of his own life.
This personal journey covers many different aspects of Fitzpatrick’s life and he does a good job of showing how Bandler’s NLP techniques have helped him immensely in taking control of his own feelings, working with his own clients, financial success, relationships, and spirituality. The personalized content took a while for me to get into, but by the end of the book I generally appreciated his anecdotes and descriptions of how NLP had helped him to achieve his goals.
The front cover of the book also gives the subtitle: “Two NLP Masters Reveal the Secrets to Successful Living”, and it is clear that Fitzpatrick (or perhaps his publisher) is using his association with Bandler to boost his own status in the NLP world. While I didn’t enjoy all of Fitzpatrick’s long clarifications and reiterations of Bandler’s ideas, it is evident from the book that he has a very strong mastery of the concepts of NLP and has successfully modelled Bandler’s methods of change-work and training. According to the book, Fitzpatrick became the youngest master trainer of NLP in the world at the age of 23 and if he can find his own voice a little more clearly, he is likely to go far beyond Bandler’s ideas and to bring positive change to a huge number of people.
Fitzpatrick frames the book using the metaphor of “chains of the free.” At the beginning of the book, he tells a story of a group of people who were “constantly criticized about what they did …. made to feel horrible each time they made a mistake …. victimized and given so many conflicting messages that they became insecure and unsure of who they were and what they could do.” After further description of these horrible living conditions, he reveals that the group of people are the human race and that their captors are their own minds. It is a powerful metaphor and one that will resound with anyone who has had a critical voice in their own head at some time telling them that something is impossible or wrong, i.e., every one of us. This metaphor underlies the whole book and all the techniques in the book are presented as increasing our personal freedom, taking responsibility for our own freedom, and giving us tools to achieve that freedom. Readers who follow the exercises will certainly achieve much in this direction.
In terms of NLP techniques, there is little new presented in this book for people who are familiar with Bandler’s work, but it is an extremely valuable contribution for NLPers who wish to understand Bandler’s way of thinking and his underlying presuppositions more deeply. For people who are unfamiliar with NLP, the techniques presented can probably best be supplemented by reading another of Bandler’s books such as Using Your Brain for a Change. I wish that the book had featured longer extracts from Bandler’s side of the conversation, but Fitzpatrick has had close access to Bandler for many years and his close modelling of his mentor does certainly allow him to act as a reasonable proxy. One minor criticism of the formatting of the book is that it is not immediately clear when the ‘conversation’ has finished and where Fitzpatrick takes over in commentary. This may have been a publisher decision, but I felt that clearer formatting would have been helpful to separate the conversations from the commentary. Overall, however this book provides a much closer look into the thinking of Bandler than has been available to date.
Postscript
This book was published in 2005, and since then Fitzpatrick has continued his close collaboration with Bandler, editing some of his talks into books.
Every day when he opens his lunch a man says “Not peanut butter and jam sandwiches again, I hate them,” At the end of a week of complaining a colleague asks, “Why don’t you ask your wife to make you different sandwiches next week”? “Oh I’m not married” the man replies, “I make my own sandwiches”.
Our minds are like school playgrounds that are surrounded by secure high fences – they keep children in, and others out. Any bullies in that playground mean that the other children can’t escape for long. This particular bully uses verbal abuse, shouting, teasing, and threats (rather than physical violence). The children are all fenced in together, and ideally, they have just got to learn to accept and learn to be with each other. So neither can we escape our thoughts, we cannot stop them, but perhaps we can learn to live with them by seeing them differently. Along comes bully, and takes on 3 potential ‘victims’ who all react differently.
Victim 1 – believes the bully, distressed, reacts automatically (bully carries on)
Victim 2 – challenges the bully “hey I’m not stupid, I got 8 out of 10 in my spelling test this morning, you only got 4” (bully eventually gives up)
Victim 3 – looks at the bully (acknowledges the thought), then walks away and goes off to play football with his mates (dismisses the thought), then changes their focus of attention.