You: So Allen, what books did you read during your summer holidays this year?  Me:  Funny you should ask that.  I was just going to write a blog about it.  You: Where can I find this blog, which will no doubt prove a treasure-trove of weighty insights and witty repartee?  Me: See below, you sycophant.

Make Your Life Great: Richard Bandler’s Guide To Trance-Formation

by Richard Bandler

Yes folks, yet another concerted effort by your truly to get my head around the phenomenon that is NLP.  I’ve blogged skeptically about NLP before but I still described my mindset as ‘open but cautious’.  However after reading this book I’m heading more towards the ‘cautions’ end of the spectrum.  I don’t trust hypnosis, anecdotal evidence dressed up as science, or the promise of a “sudden transformation that will bring about a total change in one’s fortunes, bypassing work, luck, self-sacrifice, and time in one fantastic stroke” (Robert Greene – Law 32).  Actually, the book is quite readable in an L Ron Hubbard kind of way.  Paul McKenna wrote the Forward.  Take from that what you will.

Think Face, Black Heart: The Warrior Philosophy for Conquering the Challenges of Business and Life

by Chin-Ning Chu

Now this is a book!  Its kind of an Eastern version of Greene’s superb work.  (If you don’t know what I’m on about, see above).  Like Greene, Chu examines and advocates an amoralist – not immoralist – approach to success.  That is, she isn’t so much interested in what seems morally right, but what works in the real world.  ‘Thick faced’ means thick-skinned, beyond criticism, indifferent to what others think.  ‘Black hearted’ refers to a ruthless, relentless goal orientation that rejects short-term niceness.  Chu illustrates them with a shield and a spear respectively.  She covers topics like ‘Deception Without Deceit’ and ‘Acquiring the Killer Isntinct’.  As you can tell, this is a book about business attitude rather than the details of running a business.  It is therefore peppered with delightful stories from ancient history and her personal experience, woven together with philosophical insights.  Ergo my kind of book.  Highly recommended.

The Intelligent Warrior: Command Personal Power With Self-Defence

by Steve Jones

As you know from previous blogs, I’m interested in the martial arts (MA) and self-defence.  I’ve been on the look out for a book that covers MA techniques but places them within a larger personal development framework without the whole mystical ‘grasshopper‘ type thing.  This book is the closest I’m yet come to finding what I’m looking for.  Yes, there is a little about the elusive chi.  But the section of ‘Martial Science’ was impressive.  Jones starts with how the body works in terms of leverage and momentum, and draws from this basic techniques such as side-stepping and punching correctly.  He cover topics as seemingly diverse as meditation and personal security, breathing and verbal abuse, within an overall narrative that is as coherent as it is clear.  Although his basic style is Wing Chun kung-fu – the school I happen to have most experience in – I think any MA practitioner would benefit from this wide-ranging and well-written book.

Unspeak: Words Are Power

by Stephen Poole

I teach people to communication effectively, which often means to persuade and influence others.  Much emphasis is placed on the non-verbal element of communication to achieve this – what we commonly call body language – or the use of specific power words. This is fine for one-to-one dialogue.  But what about the next level up – words that  started out in political discourse but have now sneaked into everyday usage?  Some examples of such weasel words – a ‘tragic mistake’, ‘collateral’, ‘forward not back’, ‘questioned by experts’ and (my favourites) ‘extreme/moderate’. There’s a website based on the book. Recommended particularly to those like me whose addictions run into all things political.

Any recommendations for me?

Image credit: foolstopzanet.

Fear of failure, that’s easy to understand.  For some people, failure means shame and permanent defeat.  Maybe they haven’t learned the mantra: there is no failure, only feedback.  But fear of success?  Ridiculous!  But pause a second.  Why else do we sometimes set ourselves up for failure – self-sabotage – before we’ve even begun?

One article lists the ways we do this very thing. Any sound familiar?

• “Partying” the night before the big presentation
• Procrastination
• All talk, no action
• Negative, pessimistic thoughts and behaviours

Another articles takes us, I think, a little deeper down. It illustrates ‘fear of success’ by the following behaviours:

• Impostor Syndrome – feeling unqualified and unskilled to deserve any success achieved
• Discomfort with change – confidence is limited to familiar and repetitive tasks
• Good luck illusion – feeling that luck plays a great role to success and lacking it is unsolvable
• Loser mentality – finding rewards in self pity, dependency or complacency due to underemployment or a lack of challenge
• Fear of greater expectations – expectation that if success comes, other will expect more of the same results in the future

There are many different reasons why people fear success.  Sports coaches in particular are familiar with this phenomenon.

So now that we’ve recognised what fear of success is, what can we do about it? One author recommends six strategies:

1. Figure out why you’re sabotaging your goals.  Just accepting your reasons will give you a sense of freedom.

2. Prepare yourself.  The more you prepare, the more your fears may subside.

3. Accept failure as part of succeeding.  If you try and fail, you’ll gain experience, education, contacts, and self-confidence.

4. Be scared.  Feeling the fear and doing it anyway will help you overcome fear of success.

5. Compete against yourself – not others.  Competition in which one person must lose in order for us to win tends to undermine the best in most of us.

6. See your skills as changeable.  Research shows that if you think your professional skills and abilities are fixed, then you’ll become anxious if you’re successful.

My interest in it was sparked off during a lunchtime conversation with Mrs Sensei.  Researching this topic was uncomfortable.  Some of it hit a little too close to home for me.  What about you?

Image credit: csc4u.

I used a number of web resources during the day to test their growing skills.  Some of you asked me on your evaluation forms to give the links to these exercises.  The Spot the Fake Smile test can be found on the BBC website.  Simon Baron-Cohen’s Reading the Mind in the Eyes test crops up in a number of places, including here and here.

As well as NLP eye accessing cues, the other ‘systems’ we touched on were Interpersonal Deception Theory and Statement Analysis or Statement Veracity Analysis (essentially the same thing).

For further training in deception detection, I would suggest a visit to the site of Paul Ekman, or to another site that deals exclusively with his Micro Express Traning Tool (METT).  For further reading, try Albert Vrij (for something deep) or Peter Collett (for something a little more entertaining).  A summary of the all the slides I used for the event is available for downloading from the Box widget on the side.

My thanks to those who joined in the fun and challenged me during the teaching sessions.  Believe me when I say that I’ve never met a nicer bunch of people…

Never be fooled, tricked, manipulated, used, lied to, or taken advantage of again! Learn how to test true friendship, check out tall tales, see through people’s masks, spot the bluffers, and get anyone to say what they’re really thinking. Stop the lies in any situation or conversation. Influence others to tell the truth. Never feel powerless again!

I’ve delivered a few highly successful courses in non-verbal communication or ‘body language’ at Queen’s and I’m keen to take the subject a bit further.  This workshop is the result.  Most books on Body Language include a chapter on spotting deception, but the topic is so interesting and useful that I thought I’d expand it out into an entire workshop.  The enrolment demand has been profuse.

But just to forewarn you – I plan to have fun on this course!

Yes, we’ll cover all the serious psychologists like Paul Ekman and Albert Vrij.  We’ll certainly touch on the relevant systems of explanation, both the well known (NLP) and the well respected (IDT).  I’ll show the students what to look for in a lie and how to confirm it with questioning techniques.

But the main fun will reside in learning to deceive each other.  If you have to send a thief to catch a thief, then you also must become a liar to spot a liar.  Don’t worry, I won’t corrupt anyone’s innocent mind.  I do believe however that the best way to learn what to look for in a deciever  is to feel how they feel – the discomfort and fear, the alteration in tone and artificial word-patterns, the non-verbal leakage and hiding actions.

Lie detecting is a great skill to have in many jobs and work-place situations.  And if you don’t believe me… then you’re learning!

My feelings are mixed.  I would describe by own view as ‘open but cautious’.  Open, because it contains a heady mixture of philosophy, psychology, and self-help applications that I personally find attractive.  But I’m still cautious, very cautious.  Here are a few quick reasons why:

1. There isn’t a single, satisfactory definition of NLP. As a trainer-philosopher, this makes me nervous.  It is possible to take some of the most advanced theories and systems ever dreamed of and reduce them to a succinct definition – whether postmodernism, Marxism or whatever.  This implies that the meaning of the term is clear and distinct.  NLP can’t do this.  It is usually defined in terms that are are either so all-encompassing as to be useless (e.g. “the science of achievement”) or so fragmented as to point in a thousand different directions.
2. There isn’t much in NLP that is unique to NLP. So you open a book on NLP and ask yourself, ‘What is this really about?’  Well, there’s a bit on ‘mirroring‘…but this is a well-known technique of body language.  Then there’s something on self-motivation… but Emotional Intelligence already covers that.  The same goes for everything NLP has to say about learning styles, metaphors, memory, rapport-building, re-framing and the rest.  Even it’s central technique – modelling – was used by the likes of Maslow (my wife’s hero!) long before NLP came on the scene.  So I ask, What exactly does NLP do that other things don’t?
3. I don’t apprecaite the use of the word ‘progamming’. The human mind is neither a (sort of organic) computer, nor is it very much like a computer…in everything that matters.  NLP seems little more than a modern verion of the old behaviourist theory with its ‘stimulus/response’ model and its reliance on ‘operant conditioning’.  I find it interesting that Tony Robbins has called his own version of NLP ‘Neuro-Associative Conditioning’.  Such methods grew out of the training of animals in experiments.  They therefore exclude all that is vital to specifically human existence – freedom, conscience, an aesthetic sense, and intuition to name a few.
4. It doesn’t impress me when the founders of NLP can’t even live it out. The two founders of NLP – Richard Bandler and John Grinder – have been involved in a number of lawsuits about the ownership of their theory.  There were also the messy matters of divorce, bankruptcy and even a murder trial.  The NLP movement has splintered since then.  So much for rapport-building!  If they can’t provide a model of excellence in communication between themselves, I fail to see how they can dare to do so for anyone else.  As Jimmy Swaggart – another one who can’t practice what he preaches – might say: Physician, heal thyself!

Having said all this, people I respect have gained much through NLP to help others.  My mind is not closed.  Maybe I need to stop reading NLP books and go to one of their workshops to experience it directly.

If I can afford it, that is…

So I throw this challenge out there.  If any NLPers are reading - invite me to one of your seminars, make me a true believer, and I’ll blog you a golden write-up for free!  Any takers?