There is a theory that there are other civilisations out there far more advanced that ours. They started tens of thousands of years before ours did and so have had more time to develop.
The truth is they only started fifteen minutes before and the reason they are so much more advanced is because they never had to rush to appointments.
Month: December 2011
Once upon a time, there was a man who was travelling and came to a river. The river was very wlde and wild, and he wondered how he might cross the river in order to continue his journey.
First, he thought that he might try to swim the river, but as soon as he stepped into the river, he realized that the water was too wild and that the river was too wide, and that he would be swept away by the strong current.
So he stood on the river bank for a long time and looked across the wide river and thought deeply about what he could do. And his head was full of crazy ideas and worries, and he even thought about just turning back and going back to the place where he had come from.
Then he decided to build a raft and he spent some time finding the wood along the side of the river and building the raft by tying the pieces of wood together. But when he tried to sail out upon the river, he found that he was immediately pulled down by the current and his raft began to come apart. Quickly he swam back to the safety of the shore before the river could pull him down or that he would be washed away by the river to the sea instead of being able to cross to the other side.
And after waiting a long time, he saw some other travellers who were travelling along beside the river and he called out to them for help. Most of them wouldn’t even stop but instead passed on their own way. One did stop and told him that he was crazy to try to cross the river. That person had already decided that it was impossible and was turning back.
So the man stood frustrated on the banks of the river and wondered what was the best way to go forward, to cross the river.
Eventually, he decided to take a walk to get a new perspective – to see what the river looked like a little further along the shore. And he found something very interesting – something surprising that he hadn’t even imagined.
For as he walked, eventually he came around a bend in the river and ahead of him, he saw a bridge – a lovely old wooden bridge – that crossed the river.
So he smiled to himself and laughed a little at the worries that were already slipping away and he crossed the bridge easily to the other side of the river.
And when he looked back from the other shore of that river, it was strange, but it seemed to him that the river was much smaller than it had been before. He shrugged his shoulders and thought to himself that things can indeed look different from a new perspective. Even crossing the river didn’t seem like such a big thing after all.
And then he looked further beyond the river that he had just crossed, and he saw back in the countryside beyond – the place that he had come from – that there were many rivers. And he realized and remembered that he had already crossed many many rivers.
Persuasion Engineering: Sales & Business Language & Behavior
©1996 by Richard Bandler & John LaValle
Meta Publications
In the past, I had heard the audio of the Persuasion Engineering seminar and this book seems to be a pretty close transcript of that seminar. Richard Bandler is a master of voice use and much of this is inevitably lost in the format of the written word. The embedded metaphors, too, which Bandler uses extensively in his training are not as effective in the book as they are in the audio. Without the appropriate auditory cues and silences, this book is often difficult to follow and confusing. Of course, Bandler does use confusion deliberately as a trance-induction techniques, but there were many points in this book where I felt confused only as I tried to figure out what on earth he was talking about. I have no doubt that the authors deliberately meant to keep these confusing sections intact, so that they could achieve more direct communication with the unconscious mind, but for me personally this communication worked far better in the audio format. Another read through it would surely reveal much more and help greater understanding.
The book is aimed at sales people and is presents many of the standard concepts of NLP in that context, including representational systems, eye patterns, anchoring, meta model, milton model, and timeline work. This is not an appropriate book to learn all of these things for the first time because they are only presented partially and in an ad hoc manner as they are useful for each demonstration or explanation or story. However, for a reader who is already familiar with all of the basic NLP techniques, this book will provide many rich examples of how they can be applied highly effectively in the sales process.
Bandler’s stories run throughout the book, often entertaining, always sounding considerably exaggerated, and often revealing their deeper metaphoric meaning on a second or third reading. For me, I found the audio more useful, but even just this book will certainly give the reader some powerful insights into how NLP can be used in practical ways in selling.
The Persuasion Engineering series is available as a book or on DVD from The NLP Store.
Participants in this experiment are fitted with a fake facial scar and told they are to be interviewed to see how their deformity influences the way they are treated. Just before the interview last minute adjustments are made to the scar but in fact, and unbeknown to the participant the scar is removed entirely.
Right after the interview, in almost every case, the participants were full of all kinds of examples of how the interviewer behaved negatively due to their “deformity”. Amazingly, in some cases the belief continued even after they were shown on video that the scar had been removed.