I must say I find it amusing to read some of the the all-knowing types with zero personal experience or theoretical background in clinical hypnosis declaring ‘this is bullshit’, ‘hoax’ and ‘NLP only working on dimwits’.

Fine by me. All the more for me and the less for you. My gain, your loss.

Just hope you never run into a really proficient NLP practitioner who wants you to think something you are not thinking or do not necessarily want to think in those terms.

Because when that happens, your current intentions will more than likely fail you.

Without you even noticing it.

On a related note, those interested in more mainstream situational psychology, I recommend the book The Lucifer effect by Phil Zimbardo about the banality of evil. 90% of people’s personality factors can be over-driven with situational factors – and the person be made to do things she would never otherwise do. They can swear on their mothers grave, be bible-school going devote do-gooders and it all falls apart, when situational pressure is applied.

All this without resorting to physical threats, violence, etc. Just pure sociological/psychological pressure.

An astute mind would observer something analogous happening in the current financial markets…

Also the tip on Bernays is excellent. I recommend the book ‘Propaganda’, which was always the favorite term for Bernays, instead of the later propagandist term, Public Relations.

There was once a definition of investment banking: selling something you don’t own to someone who doesn’t want it and doesn’t have the money to pay for it.

In some ways “politics” seems to work like that too.

Doesn’t the little discussion reflect both those worlds “I’ve got a package which contains something which will make you very happy, or provide all your wants” etc. “Look you can see for yourself the package is right here.”

One of the things some people in sales learn is that they are not selling a product, they are selling themselves as someone who is the best to sell a product.

I thought some more about this post after catching up with yesterday’s news. Huffingtonpost had a really cute picture of a tiny baby polar bear!

Embedded commands, pacing and leading, and all the rest I tend to see as deriving principally from Erickson's work, frankly, and I recommend that anyone interested read the published literature about him; one of the most remarkable men most folks have never heard of. But as you say, Matt, G & B's work with representational systems was specifically their contribution. Also as you say, much (most?) of what's been written on NLP is worse than useless. Go to the sources, and get some real training.

Regarding working with resistant subjects, there is a misunderstanding here, unsurprisingly. To put it simplistically, one's mind has multiple strata of perception and motivation. Most of these can be affected discretely, EVEN IF THEY HAVE CONFLICTING VALUES AND INFORMATION. This is all the more possible as it is done subtly and out of the direct awareness of the subject. We can, and do, believe entirely different things at different levels of our emotional and intellectual response, especially when some or many of those beliefes or responses are not fully articulated or even wholly out of awareness. You would be amazed at the junk, bunk, and misinformation we cart around in our heads _and act upon_ without really thinking about it. From that perspective, someone may be highly resistant at one level, and at the same time effectively influenced at another one, if not necessarily to the same goal at the same moment. This isn't simply a matter of content, but of pacing, framing, invoking moods and concepts indirectly whose reactions in the subject can then be shifted around to other parts of their awareness and motivation where they were not sourced, etc, etc. Operant conditioning, but at and outside of awareness, often in responses different from the focus of the overt interaction, especially so if done with skill.

With a resistant subject for a MBS buy, just to kick around an hypothesis, the goal would be more on the order of programming them to believe that they needed to buy _something_, and then parallelling them into asset classes. Like for example auction rate munis or covered bonds, not even necessarily bought from the instigator. Once their feet are moving backward, then move on to upselling them into securitized LBO debt, and then a few years after the start teasing them with higher points on the stuff they once disdained but now are all but skin to skin with. Good salesmen understand how to do this stuff implicitly: and they were the real market for pseudo-NLP if memory serves.

The only way to resist such conditioning is to know the inside or your head very well, to constantly reassess your motivation, and to have highly defined objectives of your own which you regularly assess. Americans all want to get rich, and believe that they can, so they are dead suckers for a pitch. But we are hardly unique in all that . . . .

Have you read Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle?

No need to correct; others had the same problem with the quote as well:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WbOUwbwr2w

Fool me once, shame on you.

Fool me twice, shame on me.

1. Judge things by their results not by their intentions.

2. A person with ethics will make a person the end of his means, not the means of his ends (sorry for the cliche).

3. Going forward: Fool me once, shame on me. Food me twice shame on you.

You are making a rational argument worth discussing. IMHO this is equivalent to Plato’s cave analogy.

For those needing reminding here is a synopsis:

Plato used the analogy of the cave to illustrate his idea of forms. The analogy goes like this:

Imagine several prisoners who have been chained up in a cave for all of their lives. They have never been outside the cave. They face a wall in the cave and they can never look at the entrance of the cave. Sometimes animals, birds, people, or other objects pass by the entrance of the cave casting a shadow on the wall inside the cave. The prisoners see the shadows on the wall and mistakenly view the shadows as reality.

However, one man breaks free from his chains and runs out of the cave. For the first time, he sees the real world and now knows that it is far beyond the shadows he had been seeing. He sees real birds and animals, not just shadows of birds and animals.

This man is excited about what he sees and he goes back to his fellow prisoners in the cave to tell them about the real world. But to his astonishment, they don’t believe him. In fact, they are angry with him. They say the shadows are reality and that the escaped prisoner is crazy for saying otherwise.

POINT OF THE CAVE ANALOGY: According to Plato, the world outside the cave represents the world of forms while the shadows on the wall represent objects in the physical world. The escape of the prisoner represents philosophical enlightenment and the realization that forms are the true reality. Most people are like the prisoners in the cave. They think the shadows are reality. Philosophers, though, are like the man who escapes the cave and sees the real world. They have true knowledge.

P.S. Actually the prisoners end up killing the freed man(aka philosopher) because his new enlightened perspective is very upsetting to the illusion of the cave mass.

I believe something similar happens in our daily conversations here at Yves’ blog. Fellow bloggers are seeking comfort to reinforce a pre-existing bias and do not necessarily wish to accept the truth, because the truth is unaccommodating and uncompromising.