Tag Archives: Understanding

Admit Your Cluelessness

Accept Cluelessness

One movie I particularly like is, “Shooter,” with Mark Walhberg.

It is about an ex-sniper who is hired to reverse engineer what they say is an attempt on the president.

But it turns out to be some big conspiracy, with all kinds of cool plot twists.

There’s one scene that’s one my movie favorites.

The main character and his sidekick go and visit this old guy. He’s the archetype of the old wise character who’s been around, knows all about everybody’s dirty laundry, etc.

One line he says has ALWAYS stuck with me, after he goes on and on about how deep government conspiracies run.

“Just when you think you know, you’re wrong!”

Meaning we humans are good at convincing ourselves we know things. When we are really pretty clueless.

If you want to do an experiment, ask a bunch of people a difficult questions. One that HAS an answer, but one that most people don’t really know.

You’ll find that most people will have a hard time looking you dead in the eye and saying, “I really don’t know.”

What many people do is try to come up with an answer that “sounds” good. So we look like we know what we’re talking about.

But the secret is accepting that you DON’T know, or you COULD be wrong is the best thing ever.

Because it will OPEN your mind to NEW ideas, thoughts, models of the world, ways of looking at things.

One of the maxims from NLP is that whoever is most flexible will prevail.

If you have a flexible mindset, and can look at things in many different ways, you’ll generally be much more resourceful than people who need to be “right” all the time.

The natural way of learning (not sitting in school) is frustration, then curiosity, then exploration, then testing, then knowledge.

You are frustrated because you want something or you can’t do something. This leads to becoming curious about how you can get it. Then you start to take action, trying different things. Then you get feedback, and pretty soon you can get what you want.

Until this process starts all over again. The more you go through this, the more you’ll learn. The more you’ll learn, the more you’ll be able to get.

If you need to KNOW the TRUTH all the time, you’re stuck. Since you KNOW, there’s no reason to EXPLORE. To find out. To grow. To improve.

Knowledge in and of itself can be pretty boring.

Continuously searching for NEW knowledge is what life is all about.

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X Ray Vision

Get X-Ray Vision Into Their Minds

In Japan they have an expression called “reading the air.”

It means to understand the subtext of a conversation.

Here’s a pretty common one. Guy and his girl are at a party.

Some other girl comes up and starts talking to him. He thinks it’s just a normal conversation.

His girlfriend, on the other hand, sees it as direct threat against their relationship.

Since females are much better at “reading” body language than guys are, she can see all the subtle cues of flirtation.

To her, this “other woman” is completely throwing herself at him.

Later on, they get into a fight. She says, “How could you do that?!”

He says, “Wha??”

And she later complains with her friends about men being so dense.

Maybe you’ve been in this situation before (on one side or the other).

The truth is that in ALL human communication, there are MANY levels. Most we ourselves don’t even know about.

One of my favorite lines is from a Tom Clancy book, “The Sum of All Fears.”

About a third of the way through the book, he explained what it meant. When you get a group of experts around a table, you don’t get the sum of their experience. You get the sum of their fears.

Think about that next time you’re in a meeting. Everybody tends to be most concerned with keeping bad things from happening AS MUCH as trying to make something good happen. (Bigger profits, more market share, etc.)

One of the big breakthroughs of NLP was that it leveraged Noam Chomsky’s theory of “transformational grammar.”

Meaning you could look beyond the “surface structure” of what people were saying, and see what they REALLY mean.

Their fears, their desires, what they are going to do next, etc.

If all you do is pay attention to the surface structure, you can easily run into trouble.

But when you can not only see what the other person really means, as well as communicate on that level, it’s like getting conversational super powers.

Even if you never want to do any persuading or influencing, it makes social situations a LOT more enjoyable.

Like putting on X-Ray glasses and seeing into people’s brains.

This is exactly what happens when you start writing out the Covert Hypnosis language patterns.

After a while you’ll see a whole new world that few people know exist.

And since you’ll be able to read people a lot better, you’ll be much more likely to create fantastic relationships, for WHATEVER reason you want.

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Covert Hypnosis