By Joel Bowman, on March 20th, 2011% What’s been happening in your life while you were making other plans? World events in recent weeks have basically captured attention I had intended to “spend” elsewhere. First, the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear plant meltdowns in Japan…. As someone with friends and semi-relatives (my daughter-in-law is Japanese, and her parents live in Osaka), I have been following the events there with some concern. Second, recent events in the Mideast have been difficult to ignore. Compared with what’s currently going on in Libya, the “revolution” in Egypt was fun to watch.
In an article titled, “Washington vs. the Merciless,” Thomas . . . → Read More: Are We Having Fun Yet?
By Joel Bowman, on March 6th, 2011% Those of you who have studied NLP or persuasive communication are familiar with the concept of perceptual frames. The metaphor is fairly obvious: a window frame, for example, limits what we see on the other side of the window; a photographer can choose what is included in the frame of a photo by trimming the image so that it focuses on, say, one person instead of a group. The concept has been adopted by psychology for the purpose of understanding the context that determines how something is interpreted.
All communication (all? Yes, all…) occurs within a contextual frame. In . . . → Read More: Framing and Reframing
By Joel Bowman, on February 13th, 2011% One of the things NLP teaches is that details are important. Details have always been important, of course, but they are often overlooked. A TV show I saw recently had a couple of detectives enter a mosque to talk to the Imam. He has them leave their shoes in the entryway. We see them remove their shoes, and we watch the female detective use her shawl to cover her head. We watch them have their chat with the Imam, and then we watch them leave the mosque without stopping to put their shoes back on before hitting the cold and . . . → Read More: Details
By Joel Bowman, on February 5th, 2011% This blog is brought to you by a reminder notice from my dentist:
We would like to remind you that time has been reserved for your next appointment on
Mon, 02/07/11 at 10:00 am. We look forward to seeing you then!
WE WELCOME NEW PATIENTS
From the standpoint of business communication, the reminder contains a number of problems, but what really caught my attention is what in NLP would be called a failure to adopt second position.
In business communication, second position is usually called the you-attitude or the you-viewpoint. The writer is supposed to . . . → Read More: You, You, You…
By Joel Bowman, on January 26th, 2011% One of the concepts of NLP that tends to be overlooked is the way thresholds influence human behavior. Everyone is, of course, familiar with the idea of the last straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back. It wasn’t, of course, the final straw that did the breaking—it was rather the accumulation of straws over time. A camel, after all, can carry only so much weight before giving up in one way or another.
The concept of thresholds has a long history in Western culture, and—I would assume—in other cultures as well. Most Westerns, for example, are familiar with the . . . → Read More: Thresholds
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