anekant wrote:

Yes a very interesting video Alistair... thanks.....

yup, I think the last point made was "once it's out there you can't take it back." A bit like the problems one or two folk have had with this forum.

the video was good because there were a lot of .....visuals ... written word and auditory... great if you are a teacher ...altho more and more teaching is done like this these days....one of the problems with the forum is that it is only (mostly) written word ...easily missunderstood particularly in the emotional sense....really a question of maps of the world not meeting....if more representations were there then perhaps more understanding......
yours anekant

Baroness Susan Greenfield's Seminar at Science World 2011 Part 2 - YouTube

baroness greenfield is always worth watching
She explains the effects of facebook, google and games etc on our thinking.....process and content....sensation and meaning....empathy etc
maybe it applies here
yours anekant

Nah, Anekant, The interweb hasn't affected my Attention Sp

wow

well actually being a bit more serious
for sure its more of a generational thing ...we did not grow up with it...but it applies to youff the young ones...
however i think that the lack of empathy stuff applies.
i relate to you very differently if i am on the internet than in real life....there are no subtle body movements 55% or whatever...no tonal variation...it actually deteriorates the level of communication....which means also that its a good training ground...we have to work a bit harder at it ....or just give up

when you respond with someone on the internet you form very quick opinions based on limited knowledge.....this leads to a lack of empathy....on the internet we are getting the small percentage of communication...just the content and nothing else...its unreal......unless you find ways around it....like..... giving room for misinterpretation....not taking it too seriously etc etc
however back to the video ....she has some great points about...about not having consequences for actions...in games you kill someone and they get up again.....great learning

altho i dont play these games there is a small part of this happening on facebook etc.....
I also think that there is a good point made about being in process all the time.

This may be one of the short comings of nlp ..to live in process is great for therapy ......or better put ...one of the consequencesthat some people get from nlp...not so great for lovers....if we are in process all the time we loose the content......
In old fashioned language......the heart is not there
I always feel that nlp needs a strand of pure unadulterated heart......poetry not prose
yours anekant

Hi Anekant,

anekant wrote:

well actually being a bit more serious...

Oh, all right then... {/wryness}

anekant wrote:

...however i think that the lack of empathy stuff applies.
i relate to you very differently if i am on the internet than in real life....there are no subtle body movements 55% or whatever...no tonal variation...it actually deteriorates the level of communication....which means also that its a good training ground...we have to work a bit harder at it ....or just give up...

when you respond with someone on the internet you form very quick opinions based on limited knowledge.....this leads to a lack of empathy....on the internet we are getting the small percentage of communication...just the content and nothing else...its unreal......unless you find ways around it....like..... giving room for misinterpretation....not taking it too seriously etc etc
however back to the video ....she has some great points about...about not having consequences for actions...in games you kill someone and they get up again.....great learning

I agree. Words are simply abstract signifiers; they have 'a sort of meaning' for people. Many expect the meaning to be the same for everyone else - a potential map/territory error.

One thing you may have noticed is that I sometimes provide a frame of meaning by using curly brackets in the way that web pages use text commands to give a sense of how I mean my communication - beyond an emoticon which may be too general (or simply unavailable) to express an affective meaning. {/see what I mean?}

Greenfield's comments about no consequences for actions highlights two points for me:

1. Many people think in the here and now without thought to future consequences - unintended or otherwise,
2. That many people classify (erroneously) people as things when they ought to be valued more than just things.

This is the problem with a person (choose your nemesis) with power (however you define that) is the all-too-easy to do, false declassification, to de-humanise people to objects, which means that there is an apparent negation of the 'other' and attendant empathy toward the other to VALUE them as people; not object nor as an abstract idea (as in the proletariat).

anekant wrote:

..altho i dont play these games there is a small part of this happening on facebook etc.....
I also think that there is a good point made about being in process all the time.

I don't play these games either. I find absolutely no pleasure in them at all. I am of the pre-space invader generation but then I find no pleasure in games such as cards, dominoes or...TA. {/ d'y'see what I did there!}

anekant wrote:

...This may be one of the short comings of nlp ..to live in process is great for therapy ......or better put ...one of the consequencesthat some people get from nlp...not so great for lovers....if we are in process all the time we loose the content......
In old fashioned language......the heart is not there
I always feel that nlp needs a strand of pure unadulterated heart......poetry not prose
yours anekant

NLP certainly has shortcomings although I diverge with you on the 'heart' of NLP. One can, in a Rogerian sort of way, have a unconditional regard for another person, yet keep a notional mental distance with any pathology they may hold;
to be able to disgree with their views, behaviours and affections yet to identify with their humanity. That is difficult for some who only see behaviour = identity. To say/write "That man is lazy" gives some permanence to the identification of laziness to somebody through that 'is'.

It's my opinion that one can hold one's sense of self whilst sensing the 'other' without complete projection or transference. {/definitions} (To do otherwise may be unhealthy).

An early NLP learning for me was to realise that my thought processes shape my perceptions. Knowing that, began to free me from the shackles of arbitrary attention to the world.


regards,

Steve
<3

anekant wrote:

Why does it seem as though nlpconnections is like a near fatally wounded animal staggering aimlessly onwards?

There are only so many topics of general interest in any particular field, and those topics tend to get exhausted pretty quickly on any forum. Answering the same basic questions over and over starts to become like unpaid (and often thankless) work for the posters who know the answers. Since folks generally don't like doing work for free, a kind of brain-drain inevitably begins, where the most respected knowers of answers start leaving the forum. The folks who stay tend to 1) engage in more and more off-topic threads, and 2) exact pay for answering tired on-topic questions by insulting the askers (thus driving most askers away).

what do you think would be the correct nlp approach for healing this situation

Successful forums tend to have two things in common:

1. Fresh content. This brings people back to the site, primarily. It also gives people new things to talk about, helping to keep the set of relevant topics from being exhausted. Sites like Slashdot, for instance, get lots of fresh content every day in the form of news stories.

2. Good moderators. These folks are in charge of keeping things on-topic and civil. That is, they keep the forum from devolving into a thickly knit clot of grumpy regulars who drive everyone else away.

Sadly, most NLP "news" seems to be advertisements, and that kind of content doesn't exactly drum up much conversation. It's not really clear to me what fresh NLP-related content there could even be since there doesn't seem to be much new coming out under the NLP label, and the good stuff that was there either wasn't original to begin with or else got absorbed into more scientifically respectable fields (e.g., CBT).

It may simply be that everything worth saying about NLP has already been said, and that the good posts should be archived somewhere and the forum killed off. (As opposed to the forum languishing into a graveyard and the whole thing--valuable stuff and all--getting destroyed in some fit of Spring cleaning.)

What I find missing in the NLP field in general is people using NLP for something different than the NLP business itself (this the direction this forum follows).

What I mean is that most people in NLP are in fact into teaching NLP in some way or another: coaching with NLP, therapy with NLP, NLP for sales, get a better life with NLP, ... these are just all different packagings of NLP material, but at the end of the day what's been sold/done is just NLP.

Very few people (from what I see here at least) are what I'd call "end users of the NLP technology". Most technologies have people working on the technology and people working with the technology. It's just that NLP is very highly focused on the first part, with people all over teaching the technology, thinking about the technology... but very few people at the other end using the technology (again "therapy/coaching/sales/... with NLP" isn't an example of using the technology, in most cases, people doing this are just teaching NLP in a packaged format).

As a software parallel, take ECLIPSE. To make it simple for those who have no idea, ECLIPSE is a software development environment (editor, designer, compiler, debugger, ....) mainly to develop JAVA applications. There're people all over talking about ECLIPSE and working on ECLIPSE (just like NLP). But there's also a load of business software developers out there that just use ECLIPSE in the background (unlike NLP, when they sell their software they don't mention ECLIPSE), and people in turn use that business software and don't even know that ECLIPSE exists.

I for example consider myself an NLP end user (whether or not I'm any good at it is a different matter). I never talk about NLP in anyway except on this forum, and I definitely do not make NLP a part of my sales pitch (wouldn't make any sense) or a part of anything say/show (for example when I help someone with a project management problem I might apply NLP myself, but I don't teach anyone NLP, and never use the term). For me NLP is a background/backoffice technology I use to do whatever I need to do (like using Word to type letter).

So, back to the initial question, my impression about NLP (and in turn the forums) is that it looks like a technology with no end users... so after a period of people having fun developing it, talking about it and evolving/improving it, it slowly decades because of a lack of real applications ... nothing really new or interesting happens because the end user applications/requirements which would pull the technology forward aren't really happening (not happening enough at least).

Note: This is my opinion regarding the question, but I do myself believe NLP is a worthwhile and working technology/philosophy, it's just that too few people are really out there applying it to pull it forward via these forums.

Steve,

I 'think' that your last post is one of the most insightful and well constructed pieces of valuable information that I had read on this forum in a long while...

The way in which you communicate via the written word and your descriptions of how and why you do so makes a boat load of sense and I shall be adopting a couple of your ideas..

To me it also demonstrates someone that really has a deeper appreciation of the traditional Map/Territory distinctions. Something I've identified in NLP as although being taught on most trainings; it's never really layered in enough (most likely due to ever shorter trainings) for people to embody the idea..

A great book for me was Robert Anton Wilsons - Quantum Psychology - Which to me is all about map/territory and choc full of brilliant examples and anecdotes.

Many leave trainings (me included at one time) holding onto the 'big guns', 'super jedi techniques', leaving some concepts behind like as JG would put it 'A whisper in the wind'.. Back-tracking and unpacking many of these concepts leads to a greater understanding of the foundations in which NLP was created and that only comes with dedicated practice, training and re-visiting ideas in order to gain new understandings..

I shall be cutting and pasting it into my evernote account.. Thanks

Wayne