“It’s the Frames Stupid!”

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.
It wasn’t nice. It wasn’t polite. It may not have been even accurate, but it was effective. What? The Campaign Slogan. Do you remember the campaign slogan that defeated President George Bush and that put Bill Clinton into the White House? A central one that Clinton’s ad men used over and over and over was, “It’s the economy, stupid!”

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Advanced NLP Flexibility Training

Alfred Korzybski described the training he designed as General Semantics as to develop “flexible semantic reactions with full conditionality” — what we recognize as simply Flexibility. In NLP, we also have come to think recognize that there are 4 Pillars of NLP. O’Connor and Seymour described them in the book Principles of NLP

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Mastering the Matrix of the Frames of Your Mind

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.
“WAKE UP, NEO! THE MATRIX HAS YOU!” The sci-fi movie hit of 1999, “The Matrix,” described life in the Twenty-Third Century, after the great war between humans and A.I. (Artificial Intelligence). The Machines won. As the movie opens, most humans are imprisoned in egg-like structures where they are harvested for their brain energy. There’s a few who live on the outside, but only a few.

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We are the Framers

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.
To think is to frame. To give something a name identifies it and doing so puts it within a frame. When an infant does this, the child begins to populate his or her world—“toy, doggie, mommy, daddy, eye, toes.” In this way we create the meanings that become the World that we live within.

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When Bandler Played the Paranoid Blame Game

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.
While working recently on updating “the myth” about the origin of the “Sleight of Mouth” patterns, I read Robert Dilts’ description in his recent book, Sleight of Mouth (1999). Robert tells about how he put together the very first list of 14 “Sleight of Mouth” Patterns from an NLP training in Washington D.C. The year was 1980.

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Dancing With Dragons:

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.
One of the most challenging aspects of Dragon Slaying involves tracking the dragon down, flushing it out of its cave, identifying it, and naming it. Dragons especially hate being named. They know that to name them robs them of their power. Every time you name a dragon, the dragon gets weaker. It gets weaker because it exposes the dragons for what they really are, and that demystifies them. It exposes the black magic which only operates for the uninformed by trickery, seduction, lies, and deception.

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