Practical EQ

Book review - Tricks Of The Mind by Derren Brown

In which the celebrated TV showman and 'mentalist' reveals (some of) the tricks of his trade, plus a selection of tips and mind hacks that anyone would find useful.

Along the way he gives us a whistle-stop tour of magic, memory techniques (an excellent introduction), hypnosis (with a bit about NLP), unconscious communication and 'cold reading, and pseudo-science and sloppy thinking.

Naturally, being an NLP trainer, it was the bit about NLP I turned to first. Derren attended a large course on which Richard Bandler was one of the trainers (with 'four hundred or so delegates, some of whom were clearly either unbalanced or self-delusory') which he found 'highly evangelical'. He says it was a four-day course so it can't have been Paul McKenna's (unless Derren developed amnesia for some of the days) as this lasts for seven, as far as I know. Nevertheless, he likes NLP enough to include some nifty NLP self-help techniques (subtle mirroring and various submodality interventions including the phobia cure, mapping across and a couple of variations on the swish pattern for motivation and confidence) with step-by-step instructions.

By the way, if you only read one bit of the book, make it the 'Confusion and Self-Defence' section at the end of the hypnosis chapter - not only is it very funny, it could save your life some day.

The underlying attitude running through the book is one of skepticism - particularly about professional psychics and mediums. Given his background - an evangelical Christian in his teens, becoming disillusioned with it as he got into stage hypnotism and magic - it's not surprising that he's a skeptic. Having first-hand experience of how a circular belief system leads to an insistence on one particular interpretation of 'reality' while discounting all others, plus a professional's command of the tools and tricks of mental deception, will do that to you.

The final section of the book, on 'anti-science, pseudo-science, and bad thinking' is excellent - a skewering of alternative medicine, cold-reading tricks used by charlatans, and the 'thinking traps' that seem to be almost hard-wired into our thought processes, leading us to see patterns where there are none in coincidences and making some people a magnet for scamsters.

The writing style is delightful - self-deprecating and very funny. I hadn't actually seen that many of Derren's TV shows (no, I'm not on first-name terms with him, but reading this book will make you feel like he's your mate) but I'm now a confirmed fan.

Buy this book  if a) you're interested in the techniques he uses in his stage and TV shows, b) you want to improve your memory and confidence, c) you want to get better at thinking or d) you want a good laugh.

Order it now from Amazon.co.uk

How to find the best route to your goal

Even when people have set a compelling goal for themselves, they may struggle with knowing where to start. Of all the possible actions, which step should you take first?

One way would be to engage your unconscious mind by walking the goal into your timeline as we do on the final day of my NLP Foundation Skills course. As you walk back along the timeline from having installed your goal at your chosen date in the future, you may find that 'milestones' along the way just pop into your mind.

But what if you don't have access to the course and don't particularly want to learn about NLP, but just want to be able to set goals more effectively? You might want to try this more 'left-brained', based on the principle that it is much easier to find the route to your destination when you start from where you want to be and work backwards:

1. Take a large sheet of paper and write your goal at the right-hand edge.

2. Imagine that you have achieved your goal – take a moment to experience it fully in your imagination. What will achieving the goal mean to you? Write whatever it means and connect that to the goal.

3. Ask yourself: "What conditions needed to be in place immediately before this goal happened in order for it to be achieved?" Write each condition down to the left of the goal, and draw arrows joining them to the goal. For each condition, write what fulfulling it will mean to you and link it to that condition.

4. Treat each of the conditions you have identified as the result of some other previous conditions. Ask, "What conditions needed to be in place in order for this to happen?" Write each in its appropriate place to the left of the result you stepped into, and draw an arrow joining the condition to its result. Add each condition's meaning.

5. Continue to work backwards until you arrive at your first step, or at conditions that are already fulfilled.
   

You may be tempted to omit the 'what does it mean to me?' step, as this may not look like it adds much until you try it. In fact, the meaning of each step is what gives it emotional energy. Your route to your goal will feel much more alive and motivating if you take a moment to think about the meaning of each step.

You may find that you have more than one possible route to your goal. The 'meanings' of each condition along the way may help you to decide which route will be the best, most enjoyable and the least hard work.

In any event, you now have the essential steps to your goal that provide the "milestones" along the way.

Note: this method of working backwards from your goal, and eliciting the meaning of each step, is based on the 'backward chaining' method developed by the NLP trainer Jonathan Altfeld as a small part of his excellent Knowledge Engineering seminar and audio. Check them out!

By the way I teach some of this material ("Knowledge Engineering Lite") on the Modelling Excellence module in our Master Practitioner training.

And there's lots more about emotionally intelligent goal setting in my book Achieve Your Goals: Strategies To Transform Your Life (Dorling Kindersley 2006).

Cialdini's principles of influence and how charities use them

Today I had a package through the post from that fine organisation, the British Red Cross, which set a new benchmark for how charities use Robert Cialdini's principles of influence (as outlined in his excellent book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion) to get people to give them money (US readers can order it here).

Now before we go any further, I'm not knocking charities for using psychological principles to manipulate people into donating. There are loads of charities, loads of demands on people's money, and if they didn't use every trick in the book to solicit contributions, they would be out of business pretty quickly.

The most often-used application of psychological principles until now has been to play on Reciprocity. The idea is that if someone gives you something, you feel obliged to give a gift in return - think of how, when you get a Christmas card at the last minute from someone who wasn't on your list, you feel obliged to send them one, and how bad you feel if you've missed the deadline for the Christmas post.

Now - crucially - the gift the original donor can ask for in return for theirs does not have to be of the same value as the original gift. It would have to be worth quite a lot more before you would feel like overcoming the urge to reciprocate.

Charities rely heavily on this principle. Ever wondered why charities often include a pen in the letters they send you asking for money? It's because their market research shows that they get significantly higher donations when they give something away.

The Red Cross have now taken this to a new level.  This package I received this morning contained not just a pen but :

25 personalised address labels
2 greetings cards with envelopes
1 sheet of wrapping paper
4 gift tags
1 bookmark

A wealth of stuff, all quite useful. But it does pose a dilemma. In the past I, like Dr Cialdini in his book, have been quite happy to use the pens that come with charity requests without actually making a donation (unless I wanted to anyway) because I knew the pen was a marketing ploy designed to maximise donations.

The bookmark, OK. I could use that if I wanted with a clear conscience. But the address labels, greeting cards, wrapping and gift tags are different, because if they are used, other people will see them and assume I have donated to the Red Cross. Using them is making a statement about myself to other people which will only be accurate if I donate.

I could just use them anyway without donating - after all, I know they are a marketing ploy. But I don't want to. That's only partly because the value of the unsolicited gift is rather higher than the usual pen (thouth probably still only costing them a few pence to produce in bulk). More importantly, Cialdini's principle of Consistency means that  I would not be comfortable doing this. I don't want to see myself as the kind of person who misleads others, nor as a freeloader. These things are not consistent with my self-image.

So what to do? I could just throw them away. But I don't like to think of myself as a wasteful person either. Gaaaah! Now they've got me in what is called (in NLP and Ericksonian therapy) a double-bind!

The easiest way out would just be to donate, which I (and no doubt many other people) may just end up doing. In fact, I may give them something anyway, just out of admiration for the skilful way in which they've used Cialdini's principles of influence.

If you would like to learn more about Cialdini's principles of influencing, and much else besides about influence and giving presentations, you may be interested in our Advanced Influencing Skills course, which is one module on our NLP Master Practitioner training.

And if reading this has made you want to donate to the Red Cross, you can do so here (or to the American Red Cross here).