Fascintastic

What is it?
I find some interesting reactions when I mention that I’ve developed an avid fascination with NLP – which is the obfuscating abbreviation for the fascinating science that is Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

Some people say: “Oh you’re going to try to pick up chicks” to which I reply “Try?!”

No, I don’t use NLP to pick up chicks, but yes – that can be done. I just don’t need to, and don’t see the point. I do use NLP to get myself into a confident and engaged mood that makes me more attractive to women, but draw the line at using it ‘on’ them.

Some people say: “Uh, that’s just crazy bulls#!t” which I’m fascinated by and often ask: “What do you know about it?” to which they invariably say something to the effect of “Less than nothing.” Apparently awareness of something and how it works isn’t required when passing judgment on its efficacy.

My sister was one of these: “Don’t you know people think that’s all a load of crap?” – and she’s right, some people do – but what kind of people are they? How much do they know about it? And: What do they know of what does work? If Richard Branson, Derren Brown or Tony Robbins were of that opinion then I’d be swayed. Until it’s a large number of intelligent successful people that I admire, I’ll continue to make up my own mind.

I must also pause here to mention that my lovely and intelligent and successful sister is right. A lot of what is sold as NLP is complete crap. One of the major problems with the whole field is that there is no central regulating body, and that almost anyone can sell themselves to the general public as an NLP guru, regardless of training or talent.

For that reason, many people pay exorbitant prices and go to Landmark-style events that run a bit like Hillsong church meetings, feel duped and betrayed, and rather predictably hold that to be representative of NLP as a whole. It’s a field full of clever cons, and for that reason the buyer must beware.

Some people simply ask: “NLP? What does that stand for?” which I hate – because I reply “Neuro-Linguistic Programming” and they look at me like I just started naming chemical compounds. They wanted a meaningful answer and I battered them about the ears with meaningless wordage. Sorry – Bandler is a bit of a wanker when he names things.

NLP is a study of what works. It relates mostly to the way people learn and communicate, with an emphasis on observing successful strategies of other people and copying it, known as ‘modeling’. By simple nature of it being ‘a study of what works’ (albeit an anecdotal one) it can’t be crap if it’s working.

Some people say “But that only works ‘cos of the placebo effect” – and they’re totally right. Nothing about NLP will change your physiology, alter your chemical makeup or make you taller. It’s about making people believe enough in the change they want to achieve until they just do it. If they think they’re happy, confident or calm, then they are! If they think they aren’t hearing voices, then they aren’t! Unfortunately also, if they think they want to buy this shitbox used car, then they will.

These two American chaps (Bandler and Grinder) set about studying what worked in the field of psychotherapy, and in doing so developed ‘modeling’ – that copying business I referred to. They found some particularly successful psychotherapists and observed what they did in order to discover how it worked. That became NLP.

In the field of psychotherapy, lots of work has been done to discover the nature of mental conditions, the cause of them, their physical location in the brain, to quantify their prevalence, but there is very little in mainstream psychology that consistently cures it. The prevailing idea was (and often still is) that if it took someone years to become a neurotic mess, it’d take them a long time to un-get that way – hence the excessive focus on drugs rather than client-centered change. Drugs can mask a condition instantly, but again – they won’t cure it nearly as often as they will develop drug dependence and other yucky side-effects.

Even worse is problem in psychotherapy of over diagnosis. Mental conditions are almost entirely impossibly to independently verify – while physical ailments always are. If the doctor says I have malaria, he will take some blood and bam, the results will tell. In psychotherapy, conditions are usually nothing more than a grouping of symptoms – and anyone who’s had a hypochondriac for a friend will know that symptoms are pretty easy to fake, particularly if they’re mental.

Check out Wikipedia entry about the Rosenhan Experiment:

“Rosenhan’s study consisted of two parts. The first part involved the use of healthy associates or “pseudopatients” who briefly simulated auditory hallucinations in an attempt to gain admission to 12 different psychiatric hospitals in five different states in various locations in the United States. All were admitted and diagnosed with [a variety of different] psychiatric disorders. After admission, the pseudopatients acted normally and told staff that they felt fine and had not experienced any more hallucinations. Hospital staff failed to detect a single pseudopatient, and instead believed that all of the pseudopatients exhibited symptoms of ongoing mental illness. Several were confined for months. All were forced to admit to having a mental illness and agree to take antipsychotic drugs as a condition of their release.”

Now what does that say about the state of things? Consider what drives the industry’s desire to name more and more mental conditions – perhaps it relates to the pharmaceutical industry’s ability to create more and more ‘cures’? Sure, I’m not so stupid as to suggest that there are no real mental conditions, or that people who’ve been prescribed meds should stop taking them, but I’m just concerned that so many people are treating their mental conditions with chemistry.

‘Spontaneous remission’ has been almost completely ignored by psychotherapists as anomalous, rather than studied like the holy grail it should be. That’s exactly what you’re looking for: The structure of how people get better instantly, without the aid of dependence-inducing medication. After all, their problem isn’t physical, and aside from neural pathways which can make remaining depressed easy (as brain plasticity implies that building pathways to happiness is possible) – there is nothing to the condition that doesn’t simply require a radical change of perception.

So Bandler and Grinder found Frank Farrelly (who I think is a bloody genius), Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir, Milton Ericsson and probably a few more therapists who were particularly good at making people better faster. They took a look at what these people did Through that they developed an arsenal of effective applications that have proven their efficacy in all sorts of areas.

What is my interest?
I became fascinated when I was dating an amazing and intelligent market researcher who can and does read blogs.

She mentioned various techniques that can be used in ordinary life to improve communication. I think my fascination developed because some of the things she told me about were already obvious to me, in an untrained and natural way, while others like language patterns, were completely new. Mirroring and rapport-building are the most fascinating to me, because as a performer I started to recognise examples of it immediately.

When people are in rapport with one another, they will often begin to do things at the same time. They will sip their drinks at the same time, sit or stand at the same time, walk in step with one another – even breathe and blink at the same time. Have you noticed how a group laughing together suddenly makes you feel comfortable with them, but a person still laughing after everyone else has stopped seems a little out-of-sync? This is a result of a subconscious feedback pattern that sort of builds from nothing into a fully real feeling of ‘connection’ with someone else, and it can happen really quickly.

So the interesting application for this is when you purposefully mirror another person (do it subtly, there’s nothing weirder than someone doing it obviously). You will develop rapport with a person far more quickly than normal. Even before you’ve started speaking to them, they’ll develop the feeling that you’re ‘Their kind of person’. It’s an incredibly useful tool for selling stuff, getting jobs, making friends and yes, picking up (though it creates a funny feeling, because when I notice myself mirroring someone subconsciously, as a result of knowing these techniques I feel like I should stop doing it, as if I’m being devious doing what comes naturally).

It’s also interesting to note when other people start mirroring you. I sometimes over-accentuate the pronunciation of my words, mouthing them more and more and seeing how many people will start twitching their lips in sync with the words I’m saying. People who speak English as a second language really appreciate it when I mouth my words clearly – rather than the typical Aussie way of talking as if trying to keep the flies out.

I stumbled onto some work of Derren Brown, and the amazing blog-reading ex-girlfriend pointed out that there were some techniques from NLP that he was using to do some amazing things to people. Really amazing things. Like stealing their stuff:

This is Derren Brown’s Russian Scam – where the mind-bogglingly brilliant Derren robs a guy using a variety of techniqes that were initially developed by Russian Gypsies, and then the KGB (hence the name), and then by dodgy hypnotists worldwide. There have even been cases (most recently reported in Russia) of people robbing banks with hypnosis.

Derren asks the punter directors to somewhere, and then as the guy goes to point, Derren ‘mirrors’ him, copying his body language to develop rapport. He then starts using embedded commands saying ‘You’re happy to give that to me’ – then uses a handshake interrupt, which puts the punter into a trance – and anchors his trance state to a water-bottle. Then – with all of the jargon and confusing writing finished – he steals the guy’s stuff. He just asks for his possessions and the punter hands them over.

It’s amazing – and I challenge you to call it a hoax, because it should be, but isn’t. Check out (by which I mean purchase from a licensed vendor) a video of ‘Derren Brown, Controlling the Nation’ where he hypnotised a third of his viewers in Britain, or ‘Paying with Paper’ where he gives people slips of bank paper and convinces them it’s cash.

That’s not what I want it for, but I do want the skills because that’s what they can do. Here’s for my rather megalomaniacal mission statement: I want to fix the world.

I’ve been rather self-absorbed and selfish and vain for a long time, living in India and working in Bollywood does that to a guy like me. But I’ve also become massively knowledgeable, spending much of my down-time stumbling (thank you StumbleUpon!) around the internet looking for interesting things to amuse and entertain me. Aside from the funny, the inane, the fascinating (TED talks) and the insane, I’ve found immorality and public deception on a massive scale, and I don’t like where we’re heading.

NLP seemed like a valid way to add persuasive powers to the meagre amounts of fame I was developing as a result of my work in films and on TV. So I prayed to Google.

For the aforementioned reasons of NLP lacking in regulatory validity, I wanted to avoid any Indian operators who would stand an even higher chance of peddling counterfeit wares and handing out dodgy NLP Practitioner certificates. Particularly as it relates to inter-personal communication, I wanted to learn from a native English speaker. That’s how I found Sue Knight.

Then what?
I signed up for Sue’s course and waited. I was stuck in Sydney awaiting my Indian visa, and was getting anxious to see Pazhassi Raja, a Malayalam film that’d recently released, which had released in the same state where Sue was running her NLP intensive. The visa came in and off I went, had a flying visit through Mumbai and went on down to Kerala to do the course.

On my way there, I became apprehensive that I’d be the odd one out, that I’d be much younger, less experienced and less professionally engaged than the other participants, and as a result not fit in.

I came into the room, and it was instantly apparent that I was younger, less experienced and less professionally engaged than the other participants. As a result, I decided to fit in just fine.

The participants were a mixture of British and Indian, with one French guy – Raif. He was great fun, and a double-black belt karate champ.

Sue was very interesting – she has this trance inducing way of talking that managed to lull me into a near-sleep state repeatedly, while never actually making me nod off. That’s impressive, because my ability to fall asleep is comically intense. Sue runs the courses in a very open-ended kind of way, and they seem to flow seamlessly from element to element as if each were arrived at by accident, despite the fact that there is clearly a plan.

I must admit that until Sue introduced me to provocative therapy I was becoming tired of the course’s emphasis on therapy. I will also admit that tiresome feeling was a direct result of my own feeling of guilt – because as  a kid I’d wanted to be some kind of therapist, but the idea of having people whinge at me all day long didn’t really appeal – and certainly lacked humour. I’d abandoned the idea and instead gone for a hedonistic, self-serving career as a superstar. But hey, I’m funny and I talk a lot – so surely therapy is not for me. But then Sue introduced me to Provocative Therapy.

Provocative Therapy
Frank Farrelly (the bloody genius I mentioned earlier) was working with mental patients and became tired of listening to crazy people whinging incessantly and never getting better. I think out of sheer frustration, he started telling people what he really thought about them – and challenging people to change.

A major problem with many people that have mental conditions (aside from drug dependence and over-diagnosis) is that they are usually suffering from fairly reasonable neuroses. Shouldn’t we all be hand-washing obsessive-compulsives, after all – every unwashed hand contains trillions of harmful bacteria; and shouldn’t we all become anorexic – after all, anorexics usually rate their visual appeal more accurately that so called healthy eaters? Most fascinating is what is called Depressive Realism, where studies have found that people who suffer from mild depression actually see the world more accurately than ‘normal’ people. Depressed people have a more realistic view of their importance, reputation, control over events and abilities than ‘normal’ people, who tend to rate themselves higher, inaccurately. Check out the study.

Paranoid schizophrenics are probably right when they think that everyone is whispering about them behind their backs, because they invariably have some friend or relative hushing and shushing around, excusing their behaviour, telling everyone about ‘his condition’. Moreover, once there, there is little expectation to become sane again – because the nutter can then run about doing whatever they want with impunity as their concerned friends blame it all on his diagnosed condition. What they really lack is a challenge to be normal – and after a while, they start to believe that they are incapable of being normal. After all, if a knowledgeable man in a white jacket told you you’d be a basket case nutbag until the end of time unless you took this brain-numbing and expensive medication, you’d be inclined to believe him, wouldn’t you?

Provocative therapy is about being funny and challenging someone’s self-perception, to feed their own loony back to them in a funny and friendly, yet confrontational way. It has remarkable results, and it’s bloody fun to do!

Sue introduced me to provocative therapy and I went nuts on it – I read his book in two successive sleepless nights, I’ve watched almost every video there is, and have started using it a lot in my ordinary conversational life. It’s great, funny and really effective.

My avid fascination in the field had Sue fly me back down to Kerala for the next intensive. I was asked to run a workshop on vocal presentation on one day and one on provocative therapy (I still don’t know if that’s a proper noun!) the next. It was a really enlightening experience, and has changed the course of my future.

Practical application?
Okay, so here is the real test: Can you use it in the world? Yes, I have done, on a bunch of occasions. I’ll only mention the main one, because it was on a close friend Hale, who also appeared in my last blog.

Hale, mate: I love you and expect that you will appreciate the mention, even if you do reject my assertion that I enabled your state change. I realise that I’ll misremember parts of it, because your memory is far more accurate than mine, but so be it, add your recollection of events as a comment. Love ya!

Hale has been a friend for a very long time, and he has (among his numerous positive qualities) the ability to maintain a cranky state of mind far beyond what is ordinarily possible. In the 10+ years I’ve known him, to my recollection, I’ve only seen him make that change on request just this once.

We were out on the town, and some flippant remark I’d made had caused him to have discussions with his girlfriend Ngoc, and the resulting feeling had put him in a mood. I only had a few nights in Bangkok with him, and didn’t want to spend one with him being cranky, I said that, but he was unmoved.

So I suggested he stay cranky, until the end of time, and suggested that he was probably incapable of being happy. That ‘provoked’ him to have a reasonable reaction against it, where he said that he was just angry about whatever had been said, and that he was capable of being happy. I asked him if he remembered the last time he was really happy, and as his eyes went up and to the left (indicating that he was visually recalling something) I tapped him on the arm, anchoring his memory of that experience to a tap on the arm. I said “Oh, so it is possible for you to be happy?” and emphasised the embedded command to ‘be happy’ both verbally and physically by tapping him on the arm again.

I pointed out to him that his ability to not be happy was actually a demonstration of the remarkable ability he has to manage your state of mind such that he can choose to put on his cranky pants regardless of the stimuli, and similarly he can choose to be happy whenever he wants, because he has that power. I suggested that if we want to have a good night then he could use that power now.

By the end of the tuk-tuk ride, he’d decided to make that change – he made it himself, it was his choice to make. I hadn’t messed with his head or forced him to do something he didn’t want to do, I’d just suggested that he access a state of mind where he could make the necessary mental adjustments. It’s not a ‘trance’ that allows someone to have power over someone else’s mind – it’s just a technique that can help someone get themselves into a favourable state of mind.

Now that evidence is anecdotal, and could hardly be considered as proof by anyone with a properly rational mind. It is not evidence, but a personal example of a positive application of NLP. It must also be stated – and Hale said so himself – that it could have been my asking for it that caused him to make the transition, and had nothing to do with anchoring or embedded commands. He’s mentioned the state he gets in when he plays poker – to believe whole-heartedly that his opponents are sitting at his table holding his chips and playing with his cards, and so he’s not un-used to making that kind of transition himself.

If you want your own testable little game, then check out the visual accessing cues (I told you he made wanky names) that Bandler and Grinder came up with. Most people (around 80% I believe) will follow this rule:

Visual accessing cues: Be aware this diagram is for someone you're looking at

Some people will be switched left for right – some research suggests that it depends on which way they visualise time, some suggests it relates to handedness – the truth is that it’s not clear.

Try it out – ask someone a question that is likely to cause a visual recall, like ‘What does your front door look like?’ and see where their eyes go. If they’re going down, they may have been accessing the emotion of being at home, so ask another. Then ask how it’d look if it were pink, and see if where their eyes go to construct that image. You’ve calibrated them, and now they’ll be particularly easy to catch out when they lie: “What movie did you watch while you weren’t screwing your secretary?”

So where now?
Now I think is the time where I decide what I want to do in the world, and figure out how best I might alter my environment to make that possible. I want to take part in pushing the planet towards greater symbiosis, with greater understanding and compassion for all things, to dispel dodgy thinking, pseudo-science, religion and all manner of other horribleness in the world. I happen hold the unfashionable opinion that global warming is just one of these various mass-deceptions. The science behind it is bunk and the people pushing it have dodgy agendas.

I want to promote moral behaviour, so people will no longer invest in, work for or even benignly stand by as companies like Baxter International, who only last year were caught sending out flu vaccines that contained live H5N1 Avian Flu virus in vials that were meant to contain vaccine. Scum.

I’ve realised that so long as we live in this bullshit we call democracy, the media will have the power, so that’s where I want to be. But soon we must realise the a government should lead, not follow (what democratically elected party would ever propose a population control policy?) – and until we realise that the wealthy and the stupid will rule the world.

So Sue suggested I re-word my purpose – that ridding the world of religion was actually an ‘away from’ idea that is much less useful than a ‘towards’ one. So: I want to promote ecological and emotional harmony on earth through greater understanding of it. I want people to understand how homeopathy doesn’t work, because it’s just water, yet really does – because it triggers your ability to fix yourself. That is a powerful lesson, which is far more enabling (yet far less profitable) than the rather absurd an unscientific notion that an active ingredient diluted 7 trillion times actually has any theraputic effect. The former promotes positive self worth and personal empowerment, the latter makes people lesser.

So I’m sorry if you think that humans are making the world warmer (even if that is historically a good thing for carbon-based life forms); sorry if you think pharmaceutical industries are here for your health and wellbeing; sorry if you think that there is a god (and only your god) that cares whether you worship him; sorry if you think that drinking magic water will cure you and more than drinking tap water (though I’d stay away from the tap water in India). I’m sorry if you thought that wonderment and magic makes the world better – because it doesn’t. It just makes you happily deluded, another sufferer of positive cognitive bias. It gives people an innacurate world view that makes them powerless to affect real and positive change on the world around them.

So I’m tearing at the wool that’s covering my eyes and working on empowering myself with all manner of tools to affect powerful, positive and real change on the world. I want to constantly be disabused of my fantasies, and if I’m suffering from delusions then you’re doing me a disservice by allowing me to continue to hold them unchallenged. If I’m wrong, challenge me! But be willing (as I am) to have your opinion swayed by reason and evidence – beyond the anecdotal.

Thank you Sue – I look forward to working with you in the future. A real and proper discussion of my experience of your course will follow – this one turned into a bit of a rant about weird stuff.

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