Basically a textbook to NLP. All the basics are covered, but pretty dull at times. NLP as a whole is just a fancy way of applying some other sciences in real life, most notably psychology. Also, at this point, you can see the age when this book was first published.
It was still a worth read, although it was not as mind-blowing or eye-opening as I'd expected it to be. But I'd recommend it as a to-read if you're to make first steps into the "NLP". My trouble with NLP is that I feel it's something I call "popular psychology", it's a fancy name for something that is actually a cross-science collection of human behavior and language.
Here are some highlights that I noted in this book:
Chapter 1. What is NLP?
By Google: NLP ( Neuro-Linguistic Programming) - lập trình ngôn ngữ tư duy. Nó chứa đặng 3 thành tố ảnh hưởng lớn nhất đén việc hình thành kinh nghiệm cá nhân của mỗi người: thần kinh học, ngôn ngữ họ & các mô thức được lập trình sẵn. Là một môn khoa học nghiên cứu về con người, giúp con người trở thành xuất chúng hoặc tốt nhất trong 1 khoảng thời gian ngắn nhất - cách mô phỏng những người thành công khác.
By the authors: NLP is a cumbersome phrase that covers three simple ideas. The "Neuro" part of NLP acknowledges the fundamental idea that all behavior stems from our neurological processes of sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch and feeling. The "Linguistic" part of the title indicates that we use language to order our thoughts and behavior and to communicate with others. The "Programming" refers to ways we can choose to organize our ideas and actions to produce results. NLP deals with the structure of human subjective experience; how we organize what we see hear and feel, and how we edit and filter the outside world through our senses. It also explores how we describe it in language and how we act, both intentionally and unintentionally to produce results.
Whatever the outside world is really like, we use our senses to explore and map it. The world is an infinity of possible sense impress and we are are able to perceive only a very small part of it.
" What a piece of bread looks like depends on whether you are hungry or not"
=> Very narrow beliefs, interests and perception will make the worlds impoverished, predictable and dull.
Way of thinking about how you act:
1. The 1sr is an orientation towards outcome rather than problem.
2. Ask " How" rather than " Why" question.
3. Feedback versus failure
=> Failure is just a way of describing a result you did not want.
4. Consider "Possibilities" rather than " Necessities"
=> Look at you can do, what choices are available rather than the constraints of a situation. Often the barriers are less formidable than they appear.
5. Attitude of "Curiosity" or "Fascination" rather than making Assumption.
Learning, unlearning, relearning
One way we learn is consciously mastering small pieces of behavior, and combining them into larger and larger chunks, so they become habitual and unconscious. We form habits so we are free to notice other things. We live in a culture which believes that we do most of what we do consciously. Yet most of what we do, and we do best, we do unconsciously.
The 4 Stages of Learning
1. Unconscious incompetence
2. Conscious incompetence
3. Conscious competence
4. Unconscious competence
Unlearn is 4 to 2
Relearning is 2 back to 4 with more choices.
In any interaction, the person who has the most choices of what to do, the greatest flexibility of behavior, will be in control of the situation.
If you always do what you have always done, you'll always get you've always got. If what you are doing is not working, do sthg else. The more choices, the more chance of success.
Outcome
"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to", said the cat
"I don't much care where...", said Alice
" There is doesn't matter which way you go", said the cat.
The brain can only understand a negative by turning it into positive. In order to avoid something, you have to know what it is you are avoiding and keep your attention on it. You have to think of it to know what not to think of, just as you have to keep an object in a view to avoid bumping into it, Whatever you resist, persists. This is one reason why giving up smoking is so difficult, you have to think about smoking in order to give it up.
A problem is simply an outcome that is a wrong way up.
Communication - The enchanted rings
How do you know that the message you give is the message they receive? You have probably had the experience of making a neutral remark to someone, and being amazed at the meaning they read into it. How can you be sure the meaning they get is the meaning you intend?
The meaning of communication is the response that you get.
Communication is a loop, what you do influences the other person, and what they do influences you, it can not be otherwise. ( Bạn đã gây ảnh hưởng đến người khác rồi, giờ đây chỉ là bạn nhận biết hay không nhận biết được các ảnh hưởng mà bạn tạo ra.)
Rapport
How do you know when 2 people are in rapport? They tend to mirror and match each other in posture, gesture and contact. It is like a dance, where partners respond and mirror each other's movements with movements of their own.
=> Successful ppl create rapport and rapport create trust.
Voice matching is another way that you gain rapport. You can match tonality, speed, volumes and rhythm of speech. This is like joining another person's song and music, you blend in and harmonize.
=> There are 2 limits to your ability to gain rapport: the degree to which you can perceive other people's postures, gestures and speech patterns, and the skill which can match them in the dance of rapport. The rls will be a harmonious dance between your integrity, what you can do and believe whole heartedly, and how far you are willing to build a bridge to another person's model of the world.
Pacing and leading.
You gain rapport by appreciating what people say. You do not have to agree with it. One very good way to do this is to eliminate the word "but" from your vocabulary. Replace it with "and". "But" can be a destructive word, it implied you have heard what it said...but..., have some objections that discount it. " And" is " innocent". It simply adds to what has been said already. Words have great power in themself.
Chapter 2. The door of perception
Predicates
It is a good idea to use a good mix of predicate when you adress a group of people. Let the visualizers see what you are saying. Let the auditory thinkers hear you loud and clear, and put yourself over so that the kinesthetic thinkers in the audience can grasp your meaning. Otherwise, why should they listen to you?
Eye accessing cubes
A conversation between a person thinking visually and a person thinking in feelings can be a frustrating experience for both sides. The visual thinker will be tapping his foot in impatience, while the kinesthetic person literally "can't see" why the other has to go so quickly. Whenever someone has the ability to adapt to the other person's way of thinking will get a better result.
Chapter 3. Physiological state and emotion freedom
When you change state, the whole world out there changes to. We are usually more conscious of our emotional state than of our physiology, posture, gesture and breathing patterns. In fact, emotions are often considered to be beyond conscious control, they are the visible tip of the iceberg.
Whenever you remember unpleasant memories and access unresourceful states, your entire body takes up these negative states and holds them as patterns of muscle tone, posture and breathing. We all know what it is like to "get out of bed on the wrong side". People who suffer from depression have unconsciously mastered the ability to maintain an unresourceful state for long periods. Others have mastered the ability to change their emotional state and will, creating for themselves emotional freedom that transforms the quality of their lives. They fully experience the emotional ups and downs of life, but they learn, move on, and do not dwell on emotional pain unnecessarily.
Calibration ( Kỹ thuật nhận diện)
Often our calibration is so poor that we only notice someone is upset when he started to cry. We rely too much on people telling us verbally how they feel, instead of using our eyes and ears.
Chapter 4. Loops and systems
A good metaphor for the effort of limiting beliefs is the way a frog's eye works. A frog will see the most things in its immediate environment but it only interprets things that move and has a particular shape and configuration as food. This is a very efficient way of proving the frog with food such as flies. However, because only moving black objects are recognized as food, a frog will starve to death in a box of dead flies. So perceptual filter that to narrow and too efficient can starve us of good experience us, even when we are surrounded by exciting possibilities because they are not recognized as much.
Chapter 5. Words and meaning
Word can put us into good or bad states, they are anchors for a complex series of experiences. So the only answer to the question "What does a word really mean?" is " To whom?". Language is a tool of communication and, as such, words mean what people agree they mean. It is a shared way to communicate about sense experience. Without it there would be no basis for society as we know it.
