I had a bit of a diatribe today about the word, "to read".

What does that mean?

To stutter out a string of letter pahonetically and somehow understand that this string of letters is supposed to mean "cat"?

No. I don't know what that is, but that's not reading.

Once in a while, I have a little outburst with my NLP hat on. I do love it when that happens! NLP is SUCH fun, and simple things like the NLP reframe can be taken to SUCH extremes - and then it's even more fun. Now, to business. There is something more scary than public speaking. And that's ... singing in public!

Apart from basic NLP reframing, there are another happy dozen NLP patterns employed in this short sequence. See if you can spot them all - and if not, just lay back and enjoy!

I just had a lovely NLP language/internal representations experience on a German translators forum. The poor guys there were tearing their hair out how to translate this sentence: "As the credit crisis deepens and morphs into uncharted waters, a little perspective is necessary on what it is costing, in both dollars and human terms."

The word "metaphor" derives from "amphora," an old system of carrying goods on ships much like containers are today.

These clay made, vase shaped containers all looked the same, and they were the same size, allowing for standardised handling, transportation and storage - but their contents could be quite literally, anything at all.

I've just written a review for the Harry Potter movie Harry Potter & The Half Blood Prince.

My biggest complaint is that the colours are dark and dingy, and there isn't enough LIGHT in this movie - practically as well as metaphorically.

Every NLP practitioner KNOWS from day 1 of their NLP training that ...

Amazing - I had a personal experience a few days ago of creating an event which I knew at the time would CHANGE a lot of things. As I walked away from this event I noticed that a whole group of past events were changing color as I was walking - the memories were turning to SEPIA!

Now for something really useful, extremely neat and quite delightful in every way - the hypno-sleep spiral.

This is a very, very cool pattern to help someone get to sleep at night by entering into consecutively deeper and deeper trance states, ending up with hypno-sleep that turns into natural sleep by itself; but there's a lot more to this self hypnosis pattern than meets the eyes.

When you tell people to "practice NLP" or anything, for that matter (and I tell people this often!), I wonder what internal representations they are making, or what they think I mean by "practice".

What do you think that word means?

As we are working our way through the various new websites, I came across an article containing a really interesting version of an old favourite NLP TimeLine pattern - The Guardian Angel.

I've been watching a TV program about astrophysics and I am being driven INSANE by their appalling misuse of metaphor.

Here is an example of "mad metaphor in science" - see if you get this ...