Being a great fan of Holographic Communication

[bufo_marinus]

There's a very significant technique that, for reasons that I've never been able to divine, doesn't get enough airplay in the NLP skill set transfer...

This is touched on at the start of the HC seminars, although I think it could be expanded and given more substance.

In one incarnation, it is taught as "first point to the container you want the thought to be put in"... i.e. inform the listener which category the discussion to follow will belong to... in old popular song it was the part where they begin "now let me tell you a tale about...."

I've noticed that there are more ornate versions of this, Stever Robbins goes on at some length in one of his CD presentations about The Setup.... psychological researchers connect this to the concept of priming...

The simplest description of The Setup or priming (the mind to receive a more detailed program) is that the speaker delivers a simple tale, a homily, a folk story or the like which is structurally isomorphic to the main teaching but compressed and simplified. The purpose of this storytelling is to lightly etch a neural track that the second telling will follow and have less resistance to, because the mind has just been there in a metaphoric sense.

The Setup proper is often a little bit different, as Stever elaborates Tony Robbins using a Setup to prepare the audience (in one case) for a direction he doesn't want the audience to go... i.e. the idea that Tony will allow people to attend his programs for free is deflected by Tony's homily of a man who knew Tony was broke but wouldn't give him something for free when he was a kid... it's a pretty neat trick if done properly...

[jaltfeld]

Hi Bufo,

Others had better be careful when reading this discussion. They might actually dramatically increase their persuasiveness and start closing more deals, become more charismatic, and improve their entire lives -- just from having read this thread!

OK. So, yes indeedy. I do think of this as semantic priming, or a form of intentional chunking. Not in terms of chunking up or chunking down, but chunking in terms of "how do I want this information to be interpreted, valued, & then effectively used, later on? It also helps determine in advance how specifically someone will judge our material. Very powerful.

So the beginning of the course develops the skill for "opening the right box." "The box" such as it is... if you leave it to chance... is where people put what they see & hear from us. They judge what we say and they try their best to categorize it for themselves (how people naturally chunk). Think of this as being about "sorting patterns" or metaprograms. People will use the sorting mechanisms they're used to using, and those are usually based on how they originally stored or chunked the information on the way in.

Well, I don't want to leave any of that to chance, if I can avoid it. And while I have high hopes and expectations for students, I also know that the likelihood that the average student coming into a workshop isn't using truly excellent information storage/chunking methods, is pretty high. I not only want to teach outrageously useful strategies of successful communication, I want to teach it in a way that maximizes understanding, retention, and future access.

We don't want people putting our ideas into the box of "that person's full of BS; I'll never use that idea."

Or into the box of "That's just like that other thing I learned elsewhere."

Ideally, we want our material/ideas to be interpreted as "Holy cow, that's amazing, and what's more, I can use that TOMORROW and get results!" (And then, of course, to thank us profusely and have a sense of deeper value received than paid for.) Further, we want them to think that for the RIGHT REASONS.

As you know, the way I initially train it is through values-based headlines. And yes, it's an under-appreciated skillset.

[bufo_marinus]

An an enhancement to the basic pattern, I'd love to have a daily warm-up for about an hour where the students would practice rounds of:

What is this an example of?/What is an example of this?
What is this a part of ?/What is a part of this ?
What is this an explanation for ?/What is an explanation for this ?
What is this a map of ?/What is a map of this?
What is this a consequence of?/What is a consequence of this?

These are all examples of granularity step exercises, where we get very fluid and dexterous in moving through grain layers,so when the headline concept is introduced, a richly primed set is already available at the preconscious level... I think a strong implicit model of granularity allows the next learning to "take" at a higher level... sort of like when they pre-treat cloth with substances that allows the dye to uniformly absorb and become a stable part of the fabric...

[bufo_marinus]

btw... this is also an example of taking the "scope and category" model and asking, well, what is "scope and category" part of .... then running with it into linguistic/semantic dimensions...