Neurolinguistic Programming

[big_lurch]

What's everyone's thoughts regarding this?

[DRTY]

[big_lurch]

Okay. We get it. You like cats a lot. Thank you for your contribution, bud.

[DRTY]

no probs. The cat did have a message though; I don't know what you mean... like is your brain pre-programmed for language?

[big_lurch]

Just wanted to see if anyone actively practiced NLP or studied this type of stuff, and whether they feel there's any merit in doing so. Watched a documentary the other night called "The Secret", which deals with the Law of Attraction and how certain thoughts, feelings, and vibrations shape one's reality. Which kinda ties into NLP, I believe. I'm not completely new to these concepts, but just wanted to see if anyone was really into this sort of stuff.

[Mortal]

basically, you control the life you live, entirely, as does everyone.
Dont worry about NLP too much...the law of attraction is a good thing to look into though.
Start by exposing doubt from your life...might sound stupid, but listen to yourself when you talk
hope, try, one day, if...all doubting and therefore restricting words.

dont hope for something to happen, make it happen

dont try and do your best, do your best

dont wait until 'one day', tell yourself when its happening

you get the idea.

[DRTY]

I find it massively interesting, but don't study it or anything. Used to subscribe to a couple of brain science podcasts though

[joshisrad]

Studied it for a bit, not worth my time to "practice" when my presence influences people like crazy.

[joshisrad]

You can take away some good points from it though. The words you choose and the order you say them matter. But you don't need to be a fuckin nerd about the theory behind it. Gain life experiences and the shit will be ingrained in your brain like any other social habit. Normal people are practitioners of this sort of thing on a very minor scale. Normal people who are aware of what it is- doubly so.

[PinUp]

My mum is an NLP practitioner, lots of people find it very rewarding. I think it's a load of tosh.

[Mortal]

You can take away some good points from it though. The words you choose and the order you say them matter. But you don't need to be a fuckin nerd about the theory behind it. Gain life experiences and the shit will be ingrained in your brain like any other social habit. Normal people are practitioners of this sort of thing on a very minor scale. Normal people who are aware of what it is- doubly so.

this. i find the more i research into the science behind, the more restricted with the idea i become.
so instead, ive got a mate whos exactly on the same wavelength on this idea, but hes a hypnotherapist...and as such he finds it a lot easier understand and put into place if he reads up on it, where as i just like to talk about the idea and act on it. So together we have some pretty amazing chats and little impromptu experiments.

The best time was when we were in a busy pub, i came back from the toilet to find someone elses empty glass on our table,
so i looked at it and said 'alright then, how many empty glasses are we gonna get on this table in the next 10 minutes?'
and within the next 10 minutes, there were 7 or 8
its moments like that, that really help to reinforce the idea of how much control you're in.
reading up helps, depending on your person, but having experiences are far better!

[test_recordings]

I have never seen any critical reviews of NLP or serious trials of its effectiveness therefore I'm not willing to trust it as a 'standalone' strategy. I'm not saying all of it's bullshit and I can draw some comparisons to similar evidence-based activities but it has no 'hard' theoretical basis to back it up.

It also seems to be always fronted by really chirpy people that would do well as salesmen...

[Pedro Sánchez]

How to be a slimey twat and minipulate people out of money with agressive positive thinking

[Mortal]

I have never seen any critical reviews of NLP or serious trials of its effectiveness therefore I'm not willing to trust it as a 'standalone' strategy. I'm not saying all of it's bullshit and I can draw some comparisons to similar evidence-based activities but it has no 'hard' theoretical basis to back it up.

It also seems to be always fronted by really chirpy people that would do well as salesmen...

i agree with what youre saying here, definitely depends on your mentality as to how much you agree with it.
ive always been interested in the idea of limitless potential however, not exactly been the chripiest person either.
but since i've been talking this through with people, it makes sense. if you take things on surface level, its all you'll get back.

[big_lurch]

You can take away some good points from it though. The words you choose and the order you say them matter. But you don't need to be a fuckin nerd about the theory behind it. Gain life experiences and the shit will be ingrained in your brain like any other social habit. Normal people are practitioners of this sort of thing on a very minor scale. Normal people who are aware of what it is- doubly so.

this. i find the more i research into the science behind, the more restricted with the idea i become.
so instead, ive got a mate whos exactly on the same wavelength on this idea, but hes a hypnotherapist...and as such he finds it a lot easier understand and put into place if he reads up on it, where as i just like to talk about the idea and act on it. So together we have some pretty amazing chats and little impromptu experiments.

The best time was when we were in a busy pub, i came back from the toilet to find someone elses empty glass on our table,
so i looked at it and said 'alright then, how many empty glasses are we gonna get on this table in the next 10 minutes?'
and within the next 10 minutes, there were 7 or 8
its moments like that, that really help to reinforce the idea of how much control you're in.
reading up helps, depending on your person, but having experiences are far better!

Yeah man, see what you're saying. Actually had a rather crazy experience yesterday which lead me to start this thread. After watching that documentary I mentioned earlier, I started toying around with some of the ideas and started to really focus my feelings and thoughts on money and getting a new apartment, as I'm in the process of looking for a new place. By the end of the night I had been given about 30 nursing/medical textbooks for free to sell on the internet, and then had a message from a friend in my inbox saying she's moving out of her place come January 1st. I had been waiting for a room to become available in this building for a while, as they're quite nice and the rent is very affordable.

All of this happened seemingly out of nowhere, as I've been in a bit of a rut lately. Definitely doesn't feel like just coincidence!

[bright maroon]

It's definatly an interesting concept...

[Mortal]

Yeah man, see what you're saying. Actually had a rather crazy experience yesterday which lead me to start this thread. After watching that documentary I mentioned earlier, I started toying around with some of the ideas and started to really focus my feelings and thoughts on money and getting a new apartment, as I'm in the process of looking for a new place. By the end of the night I had been given about 30 nursing/medical textbooks for free to sell on the internet, and then had a message from a friend in my inbox saying she's moving out of her place come January 1st. I had been waiting for a room to become available in this building for a while, as they're quite nice and the rent is very affordable.

All of this happened seemingly out of nowhere, as I've been in a bit of a rut lately. Definitely doesn't feel like just coincidence!

and thats what its all about...you focusing on what you really need and realising the fact that youre able to make it happen.
Once thats working on a subconcious level, youve got people coming to you left right and centre because theyre connecting with
that need on a subconcious level, and providing a solution. Had you not have focused and what you want and your potential,
those books could have been chucked out that place could have been offered to someone else.

[hifi]

woah what is this

[test_recordings]

Sports psychology has a load of stuff similar to NLP with evidence to back it up, I know this from studying it as a module for my degree. It goes under different names for more specific purposes like "self talk" and "cognitive performance-enhancing techniques". Eastern martial arts already seem to be taught in a way that makes use of what 'Western' psychology is just catching on to... The USSR also used yoga to train their astronauts and there is a lot of research on this waiting to be translated (more recently, a skilfull Russian female yogi swam naked in sub-zero waters with belugas as part of an experiment to see how humans can be trained to withstand extreme conditions).

Yoga and Buddhist 'meditation' are actually very effective cognitive training techniques, yoga also for bodily functioning (Tibetan buddhists also have their own kind of Buddhist yoga). Chinese culture also has similar practices in its own indigenous philosophies like Daoism (check out Dao-In, too).

[Turnipish_Thoughts]

I think some of you are missing the point, or maybe I'm the one missing it. But this idea of "the laws of attraction" is nothing more than the "seek and ye shall find" nature of the human mind. There are some truths in NLP in respect to thinking positively will change your behaviour and put you in different situations than if you had thought more negatively about things. There's a direct causal relationship going on to do with real world interaction dynamics. There isn't some unseen psychic force coercing reality to your whim because you're focusing on certain things.

Ideas like that come from a belief in a certain system, we all have systems of belief (visa-vi understanding, they're one and the same.) (look at religion/science/psychology/maths/language e.t.c.), its an inescapable aspect of the human mind, every aspect of understanding/dealing with reality is essentially an abstract system of the mind (there is no spoon, no really, there actually isn't, but that's another story.) The point is, the human mind is completely conditioned to perceive things through the paradigm of specific systems, and once a certain system/belief is in place, the mind will colour perception along those lines. Which is why one person may have a religious experience, another person may seek medical help. Neither are 'true', but both 'real' as far as subjective reality is concerned. What's more influential is when people gather that believe in the same system because then the 'individual' is receiving feedback from the external world that's reinforcing that belief system, not simply from seeing 'coincidences' or other events that confer suspicion but actual human feedback which is much more intellectually potent and will do much more to reinforce this belief paradigm as being objective. When the 'truth' is in-fact, that it isn't. There comes a point where so much self conditioning and connecting of dots has happened that the person completely commits to that system because to them it 'makes sense', it must be true because it makes complete sense. But the point is, the mind has made it make sense, because in reality the world and every situation in it is a blank slate, it is the mind alone that colours it into a specific perspective, a perspective completely pre-determined by the belief structures we have in place, and are in turn re-enforced by the subconscious decision to perceive that situation in the way we chose to, its a complete psychological catch 22 and a very deep reaching and fundamental aspect of the mind.

I used to believe in a lot of far out things, at one point i thought i was a 'star child' that had come to help the earth evolve, i used to really look into metaphysics and all kinds of odd notions about the unseen sides of reality. I was much younger then though and have since spent a long time looking into and learning about the nature of the mechanism of belief within the human psyche from various philosophical and psychological perspectives and have since gained much more of a perspective on that entire arena, instead of simply running within it, on some level i feel like I was cheating myself, I feel quite ashamed that I had the ideas I did when I had them, it's a little shameful to become aware of how naive i was.

The point I'm making is that with things like "the laws of attraction" and "NLP" work entirely as a function of the mechanism of belief paradigms and should be understood as being just that. They have no actual hold or effect on objective reality in the physical world. Coincidences and apparent events that reinforce these things as being true are only seen because the mind perceiving them that way is conditioned to do so.

We live in a chaotic and emergent system where any series of random events can occur, like a number of glasses being placed on the table. That would have still happened regardless, except, Mortal, had you not been in the same frame of mind, you would not have noticed nor would it have been a 'significant coincidence' to you, it would have simply been an aspect of the background hum of experience we go through everyday. We find things to reinforce our beliefs because it consoles us as a reflection that we are in a common experience.

To quote:

...that really help to reinforce the idea of how much control you're in.

Which is essentially exactly what I'm talking about.

Its like with the idea of Karma. There is a common miss-conception that karma is some unseen universal force of morality, making sure people that do bad things get their just deserts. Which is a silly notion. Actual Buddhism understands the concept of Karma as the act of cause and effect within the universe. If you are a bad person, you will unavoidably find yourself in bad experiences because of the millions of dynamic effects your choices will make on how your social existence is evolving. Its a causal relationship within social dynamics again. Which is how everything on this level works.

So going back to NLP, it 'works' because its altering the way you interact with the world to being someone that's more pro-active. Directly effecting things on a social and personal dynamic level, any notions about tapping into some secret psychic energy and other people subconsciously tapping into that is ultimately unfounded conjecture and as stated simply a mechanism of the minds tenacity to develop abstract systems, of which, these notions are added 'fluff' and redundant tertiary glitter to make the whole thing seem a little bit more like a cool shared secret for 'those in the know', reinforcing the quazi validity of the belief, allaying any potential for anxiety that would be there if the person had any doubt in the notion he actually knew what was going on around him, you could call it a form of deep routed cognitive dissonance. We create our own versions of objectivity, which is impossible because we are bound to a finite locale and veiled by the mind. But we call it objective, decide on it and commit it to being so because we have nothing else, while needing for our own comfort to think we are objectively aware of our surroundings, understand the system that we perceive it as and in control of our interaction with it.

check out Taoism. That's about the only existential philosophy I agree with on any level. and Immanuel Kant is great reading material for things on the subject of belief and other mechanisms of human perception.