"You can't negotiate with insanity." ~Richard Bandler

Neuro Linguistic Programing is a style of ontology, the study of being.

Listen to the folks around you... the words they use reflect their inner states. When somebody uses militaristic words, they are often filled with unbridled fear. When somebody uses all livingry words, they tend to be a trustafarian or a trophy wife. A healthy balance between the two creates a middle ground.

In POKER WITHOUT CARDS, I discuss two frames of mind I label Attacan & Nacirema. I was exploring how these two patterns of thought affect the users of these thoughts.

Thinking about thinking gets precariously close to mental masturbation. I'm an advocate of multiple-braingasms, however you get them. Any way you want it, that's the way you need it. Beware, constant mental masturbations leads to isolationistic behaviors and inattentional blindness.

"Humans studying memetics is like a fish studying water, we’re inquiring into the invisible currents surrounding us."
~Howard W. Campbell

My study of ontology began while reading Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Persig.

My study continued while I was an ontology major at Bennington College, where I wrote my undergraduate thesis on How Patterns of Thought Affect Behavior, but my thesis paper was rejected and the college was done with me, so they said my work to date merritted a degree. Thank you Bennington.

My study of ontology lead me into consumer research, then advertising. In both industries, The American Marketing Association gave me national awards for my accomplishments.

However, I found myself rejected by Advertising when BBDO fired me for incompetence, three-weeks after I was the lead strategist on a $23mm winning piece of new business, RaceTrak. I agree, I was incompetent at keeping my mouth shut in the presence of eXetreme Loopholery. Nor, was I okay with my boss repeatedly calling me a heathen. That wasn't cool of him. I was the fifth Director of Account Planning in a row that he fired. I was a putz for thinking $180,000 salary + bonuses was a fair trade for his tirades. The court-reported transcript of Me with BBDO's lawfirm is a worthy read. They wanted to sue me, denied. I showed up alone, without an attorney, and I wish I could sue them for the experience.

I dropped-out of RPI's Ph.D. program in Media Studies because of a lot of reasons. I wish RPI had posted their take on Media Ecology before I got there. I'm grateful for the language I learned as a doctoral student. I learned enough of the doctoral dialect to co-author the Journal of Qualitative Research Journal article with Dr. Livingston, the journal's president.

When B.J. Fogg invited me to speak at Stanford's Computers As Persuasive Technology conference, then uninvited me, then asked me what it would take to get me to come out, I didn't take well when he laughed in my face when I said, "An honorary Masters would do the trick."

My confidence began to grow when I dropped-out of RPI and Tellman Knudson mentored me, built me a list and set me up with my own media lab of over 35,000 double-opt-in subscribers.

Suddenly, I had an audience. Academia diminishes the role and importance of access to audiences and the ability to create your own audience on demand. The hegemony has always had accesss to an audience. They appear to me as undervaluing the genius of Tellman Knudson who has mastered the craft of list building.

Tellman also inspired me to more formally study Neuro Linguistic Programming, also known as NLP. I studied NLP with Richard Bandler, one of the original two co-creators of Neuro Linguistic Programming. I am an official co-creator of NLP, as is everybody who is a Bandler certified practitioner. That's how a technology works. Those that are working the technology are co-creating the technology because technology is organic and growing.

Dr. Richard Bandler explains, "NLP is an attitude that happens to leave tools in its wake." In order to see this perspective, you see humans as the conduits of the growing organism called NLP, a meme-plex in the language of Dr. Susan Blackmore.

Dr. Bandler instilled a confidence in me to help others. Within 30 days of becoming an NLP practitioner, a woman sought my help. She heard I was helping people let go of fears and phobias. When I said yes, she requested I help her let go of a 45 year grave fear of water, what appeared to me as Post-Tramatic-Stress-Disorder from having started to drown when she was six-years-old. This woman had spent 12 years in psychotherapy, but her nightmarish visions of drown got worse, not better. In less than 45 minutes, she was free of these visuals. I helped her let go of her fear, and the visuals evaporated. There were witnesses. This was at a dinner following a day at UnSeminar in Austin, TX.

What happened next in my life is a blur... I could recount moving 7 times, but much of those details won't move this thread along. Suffice it to say, I chose not to be a professional healer for a number of reasons, the most important was that I wasn't consistent at state management. I got brittle helping clients let go of their traumas. Try helping somebody difuse the energies of having seen men burnt alive when you were four. The day after I helped a client with that I passed-out asleep unexpectedly and slept for 7 hours, waking up ten minutes before a teleseminar. I did the teleseminar fine, and I realized something important...

Clients coming to me for NLP tended to need basic business coaching, and those coming to me for business coaching all seemed to have some MAJOR trauma they needed help letting go of.

To make a long story short, I didn't feel competent in my skills until I started calling myself a Media Ecologist. Thank you for consuming this think piece, now think peace.