NLP Rep Systems – Putting the pieces together
Beautiful blue eyes
So far we have talked about representational systems and eye accessing cues. Now it's time to talk about how to apply this in normal, everyday life?
As you begin to be able to understand the ways that other people are representing the world, you can recognize it and do nothing, recognize it and utilize it, or recognize it and influence it.
Let's start with an example that is quite simple to understand, although depending on your life circumstances may or may not have immediate application.
NLP Spelling Strategy
In the early days of NLP, it was observed that people who were excellent spellers almost all did a couple of common things. They visualized the word they wanted to spell (eye access up and to the left for a normally organized person) and then they do a kinesthetic check (eyes down to the right) after spelling it to see if what they said or wrote, felt right. If you ask a good speller how they know if the word is spelled correctly they will say something like "It feels like its right" or "It looks right". When they see a mis-spelled word on a page, a good speller may literally feel uncomfortable. (In NLP, when two senses are linked together like this it is called a synesthesia.)
If we want to help someone learn to spell better we want to teach them this strategy by building this synesthesia. It is worth noting that poor spellers use all kinds of strategies, none of which happen to do this. Some will try to sound the word out using a phonetic strategy which is ironic since if you try to spell phonics that way you should end up with "fonnix".
So how to teach the strategy.
(1) Take a written word and position it at or above eye level slightly to the left.
(2) Think of a feeling that is confident, comfortable or relaxing.
(3) If you positioned the word straight ahead, look up and to the left and picture the correct spelling in your mind. Try spelling the word backwards. This is a great test that you are truly seeing the word.
This process when repeated will form a pattern of remembering words visually and generating a feeling when you are seeing the word correctly. This is the strategy of great spellers.
If you are teaching this strategy to someone else you will use language and gestures to guide them in accessing this correctly. You will direct them to look at the word while gesturing up towards their left (assuming they are normally organized).
If you want to prove this out, test it out by finding some great spellers and watch what they do. (NOTE: I have only experimented with this in English, but it likely applies more broadly, although some languages, like Spanish, are easier to spell in phonetically).
Are they lying?
Another potentially interesting use of eye accessing cues is to help tell if someone is telling the truth. There are many cues you can use to determine lying and we won't go into them all here, but eye accessing is one way to help detect truth or lying.
So if you have asked someone some questions and you know how they access construct memories and recalled memories then you have the basis for determining when they are telling the truth (recall) and when they are making up an answer.
Imagine that you ask your friend, "Did you go to that party over at Harry's this weekend?" Assuming you know that your friend is normally organized and they access Visual Construct and they say, "Why yes I did. It was great." They may be making up what it would have been like to be at that party. If they access recall then they might be remembering the party.
Now when you do this in the real world you begin to realize that people don't just make one access and answer. They might first access recall of what they actually did on the weekend and then construct something that they can tell you that they did.
Sometimes you'll ask someone a question and they will access auditory first, which might mean they are repeating the question to themselves, then they access recall or construct as part of their answer. Unfortunately it's not cut and dried, so you need to pay attention, ask questions, and learn. The key is to understand that you can notice what people are doing and influence it.
Now some of this can be faked, and they may answer untruthfully by remembering something that has actually happened (perhaps not at that time and place or even not to them). It is an interesting indicator that you should experiment with.
A great source on this subject is Dr. Paul Ekman.
Play with these strategies and see what you can learn. You might surprise yourself.
GTD Mac Showdown – OmniFocus vs. Things
OmniFocus vs. Things
Having been a long-term and obsessive OmniFocus user (since the early Alpha builds) I thought it was time to look at some of the alternatives out there. I didn't really have time to review all the choices out there, but so I decided to do an evaluation of Things from Cultured Code. There are plenty of exhaustive reviews of these products and the world probably doesn't need another one, so I'm going to describe just the key issues that drove me to ultimately replace OmniFocus with Things.
Like I said I've been an OF user since before it was officially released and purchased its iPhone app the day it was released. OF has been a good friend, but it hasn't been without some trouble. The iPhone app has never worked reliably for me. I admit that I have a very large database and my workflow creates many of the tasks from e-mail. OF currently includes email text and attachments in its database which causes significant bloat (according to their technical support). This results in painful loading time on the iPhone and in my case it simply crashes almost all the time, either on start-up or after using it for 30-60 seconds. After repeated attempts to resolve the issue I stopped using the iPhone app.
As I began to use Things I was excited by the chance to have a working iPhone app again. The Things iPhone app provides a lot of the capability of the desktop and is very easy to use. I like it, but with it lacks two features the OF iPhone app has. OF has a wide variety of methods for syncing the iPhone and desktop databases. The one I use is using .Mac/iDisk so that my databases sync no matter where I am as long as I'm on a network. Things syncs over a wireless network when your iPhone and desktop software are on the same LAN. This works very well, but really requires you remember to sync them before you go mobile. So while I like the Things iPhone app, it still needs more work. This wasn't a big deterrent for me in switching since I had adapted to not having a reliable iPhone app anyway. The other feature the OF has is the ability to tag locations to your tasks and use the GPS to find tasks that can be completed in your vicinity. This sounds like a neat feature and I know people who use it, but again without the app working for me is theoretical. I would love it if Things added this though.
The things that really drove me to switch are:
(1) A beautiful UI. The Things UI is simple and clean. OF is feature-laden, but a bit clunky. There are tons of modes and settings, none of which I find profoundly useful. One day I accidentally, without realizing it, set my system into a "Perspective" which caused many of my projects to simply disappear. I was convinced by entire DB had become corrupted. There are many clunky things like this in OF, that the simplicity of Things simply avoids.
(2) Tags. I really love the idea of Tags in Things. It's a general idea that you can Tag projects and you can Tag tasks and then filter the next actions you are looking at by Tag. Tags can be used to implement Contexts and it also allows multiple Tags to be assigned to a single task. I love this because I can easily implement the idea of "Waiting For". When I delegate a task out I simply add the Waiting For task to it, which still preserves the other tags assigned to it. In OF a task is in only one Context so I add it to Waiting For context, but lose track of which context it was originally in.
It also allows implementation of priority. OF has a Flag capability that is binary, it's flagged or its not. I used this to indicate priority, but invariably too many tasks get Flagged and it begins to lose its meaning without very careful management. The Tag capability lets you implement whatever scheme you like. This is a HUGE benefit of Things for me.
(3) Areas. Things lets you group projects into Areas. This is quite flexible and lets you group tasks into "Work", "Home", "Father", "Husband", "Finance". Then you can easily look at all your projects in that context. This feature is completely optional, but I find it incredibly useful. In OF previously I managed the same thing with SubProjects, but I found this quite cumbersome and grouping a large number of projects and making sure they stayed organized was fairly painful.
(4) Today. This might be my very favorite feature of all in Things. There is a category called "Today" and you can simply take any projects in your "Next" list and designate them as "Today". I love this for implementing the "Most Important Tasks" idea (See Review of Power of Less). First thing in the morning I select 3-4 tasks that really must be done that done and add them to the Today category. I begin working on those first and try to make sure they are done by the end of the day. There is no good way that I know of in OmniFocus to implement this.
Conclusion and how to integrate with e-mail.
These are the major things that compelled me to switch to Things. I am so happy I did. Before I finish this I want to describe how I integrate with e-mail. A very large number of tasks that come my way come via e-mail, but in my opinion neither OF or Things really handles this correctly out of the box. I find this a shocking oversight. To be fair they have both implemented a service that allows clipping and this can be scripted, but as far as I know you can only tell it to insert the selected item. Normally when doing e-mail you want to add the e-mail to your inbox or directly to a project and then Move the e-mail out of your Inbox into some archive or reference folder (I call mine Reference).
So I am using Apple Mail.app for mail. When I want to convert an email into a task hit the `-t key sequence and Mail Act-On will then invoke a script that launches the Quick Entry feature populated with a meaningful subject and a link to the e-mail in the Notes section. Then when I want to do the task I can simply click on the link, the original e-mail is there which I can then reply to, forward, or whatever I need to do. By default the task is entered placed in the 'Inbox' which I find to be the best place as I can more thoughtfully go back and assign it to a project, add tags, etc. later.
When I first started evaluating Things I wasn't sure if it was going to be possible because Things lacks a proper Apple Script interface, unlike OF which has an extremely powerful one. Fortunately I found that Niclas Nilsson has developed and published a very creative solution that does exactly what I was looking for. This mimics exactly how I want to use it and how was doing things with OmniFocus. If you want to use Things I strongly encourage you to review his posting here.
NLP Eye Accessing Cues
Last week we described the basics of NLP Representational Systems and how to identify how another person is representing their own internal model of the world. This week we are going to refine this a bit more by showing how the eyes reveal important information and and we'll follow that up with an article that will really explain how to put all this information together into useful applications.
Eye Accessing Cues
In the early days of NLP, Bandler and Grinder noticed that people who were visual tended to look up when accessing their thoughts; auditory people tended to look sideways; and kinesthetic people tended to look down. These are somewhat generalizations, but are surprisingly accurate. In addition they noticed that if you ask someone a question that requires that they acccess an image (e.g. "What did your first car look like?") about how something looks that they are remembering they will look to a different side than if you ask them to "make up" up an image (e.g. What would George Bush look like in a mini-dress and stiletto heels?"). So for the first question, it's quite likely (better than average chance) the person will look up to their left (at least for a moment), but for the second question they will look up and to their right. The same basic pattern applies for accessing auditory representations. It's useful to distinguish between what is called "Auditory Analog" and "Auditory Digital" as well. Digital refers to words and analog refers to anything else you would hear including tones, tempo, pitch, etc. So when someone is generating internal self-talk they will tend to access Auditory Digital (down to the left).
NLP Predicates and Phrases
In our last article we described the NLP model of representational systems. In this article we are going to provide an extensive list of sensory based words along with the system they identify.
The lists below define the most common words and phrases that you can use to help identify the internal representations that someone else is using. There are a number of words that can refer to multiple systems, so you have to rely on other clues (as described in the earlier article) to determine their usage. For example the word pierce could be used with visual, auditory or kinesthetic representations. The word bouquet might bring to mind an image of a wedding with a bridal bouquet or the full bodied bouquet of a wine. Smell and taste are often linked and the words can easily refer to one or both, i.e. something can taste burnt and smell burnt.
NLP Representational Systems
Have you ever wondered why some people get along so well and hit it off right away and other people when introduced have an awkward silence, or maybe more particularly why are some people be able to get along with anyone they meet. You might start, if you haven't already, by reading Building Rapport Part 1. Our Building Rapport Part 2 post (coming soon) will include part of the answer to this question. For now we want to introduce the idea of Representational Systems that will become a part of the foundation for how to connect deeply with others.
A brief word on NLP models. Everything we present on the topic of NLP is just a model. Very often there is good science to go with it, but these models were primarily built based on observing and experimenting with what worked in real situations with real people. Then models were build to allow others to assimilate the skills and produce the same results. It's very important to understand and not get too caught up in whether something is literally true, but rather whether its useful (or not) in achieving the desired result. The way to determine that is to test it. Nothing you will read in the next 100 or probably 1000 postings on this blog is of any use at all if it isn't used and tested out there in the real world - away from your computer.
The model we are talking about right now is called Representational Systems (or lets say "rep systems" for short).
What is NLP?
In the last post we mentioned that we intend to post a foundation set of posts on "NLP". So for those who don't know what NLP is, here is a quick introduction. NLP is the brain child of two men named John Grinder and Richard Bandler in the early 1970s?
Let's be clear up front.
Building Rapport – Part 1
Defining rapport can be somewhat elusive, but most people have an experience of really connecting with another person. You just feel in sync with them. Maybe you finish each other sentences or know what they are going to do or say just before or as they are doing it. You can talk and carry on a conversation for hours and the time just flies past. Most people have experienced this at one time or another, but few people are able to generate rapport with everyone, on demand, whenever they want.
What is it that generates this kind of rapport between two people and do you have any choice of it being present, or is it just fated that some people will have rapport with one another and others won't?
