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Three Crazy Words

Three very common words do not usually have the effect you’d expect.

When you say “don’t,” you are setting up a situation that is the opposite of what you literally say. For instance, if I tell you, “Don’t think about dragons,” what happens? Right, you immediately think about dragons. It seems that on some level, the mind understands that whatever follows “don’t” is important, but the “don’t” part itself is not emphasized. It’s as if parents who tell their children, “don’t put your milk so close to the edge of the table,” are asking for trouble. Teachers who tell their students “don’t run” are almost commanding them to run.

In NLP, you can use this aspect of “don’t,” to help people focus on new thoughts or behaviors. One of the most powerful uses is at the end of a session when you can offer a hypnotic suggestion such as this: “And, don’t be surprised if in the next few days, you’ll have wonderful revelations born out of our conversation today.”

“But” is a word that also has a special effect. Any part of a sentence before the word “but” is pretty much wiped out by whatever follows. For instance, if I tell someone, “I like what you wrote, but the last paragraph confuses me,” guess what happens? Right again! All the person hears is the critique. The entire complimentary part of the sentence is lost.

Another such word is “why.” When you ask “why” you get ‘story.’ Asking “why” is like an invitation or a challenge to defense – it puts the person who is asked in a space where they have to try to tell you “why,” on a conscious level, and this is often counter-productive. A better question is “How,” or something like, “What let you know to…” or “When…”

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How to Cinch a Job Interview

Using a combination of the techniques below, mostly borrowed from the techniques of NLP, you’ll be far more successful at a job interview. You don’t have to use them all. Pick the ones you like. The more you use, the better your chances.

1. Take a moment to imagine the interviewer’s perspective. It may be that this person is protecting her team from an ‘intruder’ or that this person is desperately looking for a new friend. You’ll be able to better identify the interviewer’s motives as the interview progresses. By understanding the interviewer’s needs, you may be able to present yourself as suiting those needs.

2. Build rapport through mirroring posture. When you see the interviewer take a certain position, copy that position as much as possible several seconds or a minute later. For instance, if the interviewer crosses his ankles, cross your ankles. Use mirror image, as opposed to using the same side of your body. So, if you’re facing the interviewer, and she puts her right hand on the table, and her left in her lap, then you can put your left hand on the table, and your right in your lap after perhaps seven seconds.

You would think that the person being mirrored would feel mocked. In fact, they almost never consciously notice, unless your gestures are overdone, or done immediately. And if they do notice, they feel complimented. You can try this with friends. Next time you are with friends, mirror them, and see what they do. Interestingly, the unconscious reaction is one of comfort, or rapport. The people being mirrored feels that you are like them in some fundamental way.

Another advantage of mirroring is that it puts you a bit on the interviewer’s map. This means you start to feel like the interviewer just a bit, and can better identify with their situation. Rapport works both ways.

3. You can also mirror gestures. This works best if done at least a few seconds after the interviewer’s gestures. Again, you’d be surprised how much this is not noticed, even with big, grand gestures, yet it can make the interviewer feel more comfortable with you. If there is not room to gesture as big as the interviewer, or if you feel that your gesture would be overdone if as big as the interviewer’s, you can make the same movement, but smaller.

Many times gestures point to specific areas relative to the interviewer’s body. The interviewer may be imagining an event in the past as over her shoulder, or a co-worker to her right or something heard is indicated by gesturing near the interviewer’s ears. When you mirror these gestures, indicating the same general position, it makes the interviewer feel ‘understood’, and in the case of a job interview, that’s a good thing!

You get bonus points if you can match a gesture with backtracking.

4. Backtracking is repeating key words or phrases. A recent popular trend called ‘active listening’ teaches that you can indicate that you understand a speaker by using your own words to state back what you heard. This may have a bit of merit, but backtracking works much better. You’re looking for words that stick out in the conversation a bit. They may be pronounced more loudly, slowly, consonants may be emphasized. A few seconds later, you want to incorporate these words or phrases in your conversation verbatim. For instance, you may notice the interviewer has said the word, “crazy” twice and rather loudly. You may not even know exactly what he means by ‘crazy.’ Still, if you use crazy in a sentence, ideally with the same inflection, the interviewer will unconsciously think you understand him perfectly.

5. If practical, ask for a tour. For the interviewer to have you in the work area, makes him comfortable with your presence, and starts him in a thinking process in which you are already included in the work area.

6. Turn the interview around. Most people in a hiring position have feelings about their work. They may be proud of the team, disappointed in the product, etc. Feel free to interview the interviewer. This gives them a chance to vent, show off, whatever they like, to you, their prospective new employee. You’ll get many points if you can cause them to digress into a long chat about their working life. You’ll become their friend. If you were hiring, who would you rather pick, a stranger, or a friend?

7. If you are asked a technical question to test your grasp of the work required, such as, “What color is ff0000,” and if you don’t know the answer, there is no need for panic. You can simply state, “I don’t know the answer off-hand, but I certainly know how to find out.”

8. Notice words or phrases that indicate the person’s primary mode of sensing the world. If the person says he likes the way something looks or ‘everything appears’ a certain way, then you can sprinkle similar visual ‘predicates’ into your replies. The speaker is likely to use visual, auditory, feeling or neutral predicates.

9. You might want to consider ‘meta-programs.’ Typical meta-programs are “away from / toward,” or “global / detail.” You may notice that the interviewer is always considering the big picture and his eyes glaze over when you talk about details. Or, the interviewer is always ‘moving forward,’ not ‘running away’ from a goal. You can modify your replies to work in the same meta-program, and/or an appropriate one. For instance, if the interviewer is looking to fill a detail-oriented job, such as one involving paperwork, you might want to use detail-based concepts in your conversation, instead of global ones, which would indicate to the interviewer that you are likely to be lost in the big picture and not able to complete the details properly.

10. Speak a bit with everyone around you, if you can, and practice these same techniques with them. They may be consulted by the interviewer after you’ve left, so you want them to be your friends also.

11. Enjoy the process. How often do you get to be interviewed? It may be a long time before you get this chance again, so you might as well have fun!

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Instantly Improve Your Typing Speed

If you are like most people, you probably type at around 20 to 30 words per minute on a good day. You may find it frustrating when you make mistakes, and you may find it uncomfortable to type only a little bit at a time, and then look at the screen to see how well you’re doing. If you’re like most people, you’re not very good at taking notes in real time on a computer. And, for most, typing is not relaxing. Let’s change all that! As you are about to discover, there are a number of simple techniques that make a remarkable difference, and most are so easy to learn you can start using them in one or two minutes. You don’t have to buy anything. You already have everything you need.

There are two techniques that are exceptions to the rule. One may require that you buy a new keyboard if your current keyboard doesn’t have what you need. The other may take a year or two to gain full proficiency. But the other techniques are yours to start using just as soon as you read this book. You don’t need to use all the techniques together. You can just pick and choose the ones you like.

I’m using most of these techniques right now, as I am writing this article for you. They work, and they work well. The last time I tested, my typing speed was 57 words per minute.

The first technique in this article can be used for handwriting as well as typing.

Technique #1 – Speed Writing

(tec- 1 sped writ.)



When you are taking notes or creating a first draft, you can speed up your typing considerably with the following simple little tricks. This way, you won’t fall behind, or lose your train of thought, while you’re trying to get everything written down.

* Instead of spelling out common endings or suffixes, just type “.” For instance, “improvement” can become “improve.” It is much faster to type “end.” than “ending.”

* Any long word that you cannot mistake for another in your current context, you can shorten by typ. the first few letters, then using a “-” to represent the rest. For exam-, “computer” becomes “co-.”

* You wont have much trouble read. senten- witho- punctuat- such as apostrophes, but you cant safely omit comas or periods.

* You can leave out double letters in most cases and stil have words that you can understand.

* Consider omit. silent letrs.

* Many smal words such as and, at, a, is, cn b left entir- out.

* U mst b care- avoid tak. so many shortcts u cant mak sens out of what u wrot latr.

Speed typ. taks longr to red but fastr to writ. Usually, yu r mor in hury wen wr-. than wen read.


Here is some very old advice, which is still totally applicable today:

“Composition: If you would write to any purpose, you must be perfectly free from without, in the first place, and yet more free from within. Give yourself the natural rein; think on no pattern, no patron, no paper, no press, no public; think on nothing, but follow your own impulses. Give yourself as you are, what you are, and how you see it. Every man sees with his own eyes, or does not see at all. This is incontrovertibly true. Bring out what you have. If you have nothing, be an honest beggar rather than a respectable thief.”
-Inquire Within, (by Garrett?) published by Dick & Fitzgerald, N.Y. 1858

Technique #2 – Mouse Highlighting Shortcuts

If you already know these three shortcuts, you may be amazed at how many people don’t know them.

1. To highlight a word, double-click it.

2. To highlight the entire line (or paragraph, depending on the program you’re using), triple-click.

3. To select a large area, simply drag over the beginning of the area with the mouse to highlight the first few characters. Or, easier still, just double-click on the first word to highlight it. Then, scroll to the end of the selection, and click while holding down a [Shift] key. This will highlight the entire selection without the annoying need to scroll and highlight at the same time.

Technique #3 – Instant Cursor Movement

Have you noticed how much time and energy goes into moving your hand from the keyboard to the mouse during the course of a day? What if your mouse was so close, that you didn’t have to move your hand at all? Of course that’s impossible, right? No! On a laptop, or a desktop computer or tablet with an external keyboard that has a built-in touchpad, or even with a smartphone and an external keyboard, you can learn to use the side of your thumb, typically the right thumb, on the touchpad, and with practice, it becomes second-nature. No more reaching back and forth for the mouse!

Technique #4 – Touch Typing

Touch typing is the ability to type without having to look at the keyboard. Imagine, no more glancing back and forth from the keyboard to the screen, or worse, from what you’re copying to the keyboard to the screen. That’s tiring! From now on, you’ll be able to simply look at what you want to copy, or watch your words magically appear on the screen. Then, you can see and correct mistakes instantly, on the fly!

You may have never learned touch typing. Believe it or not, most professional programmers don’t know touch typing. Oh, they’ve become reasonably proficient with whatever random way they learned to type. The reason more people haven’t learned touch typing is because they assume it is difficult. They believe it takes a course in school and a year. Not so! You can learn the basics in two minutes, just by reading the next few steps. Then, you can practice a little bit here, and a little bit there. In a few weeks, you’ll have it.

1. Learn to remember that there is a bump on the [F] key and on the [J] key so that you can tell them apart from other keys without having to look, just using your fingertips.

2. Whenever you can, lightly keep your left index finger on the [F] key and your right index finger on the [J] key. In whatever way you type now, just make enough of a change so that your fingers can rest on those two keys whenever you’re not actually pressing another key.

3. Whenever you need to type an [F] or a [J], just press your index finger down, and trust that you’ll get the letter you want. Once you can reliably do this without looking at the keyboard, go on to Step 4. For some people this will take a day, but for most, it may require a week or two.

4. Once you’ve become totally familiar with the F and the J, notice the three keys to the left of the [F] key, and the three keys to the right of the [J] key. These are called the home keys. Memorize them, and then use your fingers that naturally rest on those keys to press them when those letters come up. Once you can use these keys without looking at the keyboard, go on to Step 5.

5. Memorize the keys above, below, and between the home keys. You can just memorize one per day, or one per week. Trying to do it all at once might be a bit overwhelming. It doesn’t matter which fingers you use to press the ambiguous keys such as [T] and [N]. The only thing is whichever fingers you use for those keys, learn to use the same fingers consistently. As those keys are needed in your typing, try to press them without looking at the keyboard.

6. Learn the number and punctuation keys the same way.

7. Anytime you are not in a hurry, try to do more and more typing without looking at the keyboard. Soon your accuracy and speed will increase tremendously.

Technique #5 – Keyboard Shortcuts

Learn the keyboard shortcuts, and you can do a majority of your editing without having to right-click or go to the main menu. These are a combination of the [Ctrl] (“control”) key on Windows and most Linux computers. On a Mac, it’s the same combination but with the [Command] key (the funny four-loop-looking key). If you haven’t used [Ctrl] + [Z], you’ll start how to wonder how you could have ever done without it!

  • [A] Select All
  • [B] Toggle Boldface (in most programs)
  • [C] Copy
  • [D] Create Bookmark (if in a browser)
  • [F] Find (in most programs)
  • [I] Toggle Italics (in some programs)
  • [P] Print (in many programs)
  • [V] Paste
  • [X] Cut
  • [Z] Undo

Dvorak Keyboard Configuration

Learn the pros and cons of the Dvorak Keyboard Layout, how much faster you can enter text, how easy it is to set up in Windows and OS X, some celebrities who use it, and how to start with training and practice.

Dvorak keyboard Map

When you look at the picture above, you’ll see what looks like a computer keyboard, but the keys are laid out strangely. This is the Dvorak keyboard configuration, also known as “simplified keyboard layout” and “Dvorak keyboard layout.’ The purpose is to increase the speed and accuracy of typing the English language.

As you’ll soon discover, setting your Windows, Linux, Apple or Android device to Dvorak is easy to do.

According to a Wikipedia article, it was invented in 1932 and patented in 1936 by Dr. August Dvorak, a psychologist and professor of education at the University of Washington in Seattle, I have also heard that the keyboard was designed by a US Navy committee, headed by Captain Dvorak. I’m not sure which story to believe, but my money’s on the Wikipedia article.

The Dvorak layout helps typists in three ways. The most commonly used consonants are in the home row under the right hand, and the vowels are in the home row under the left hand. This reduces the amount of distance the fingers must travel for all but the least commonly used characters. I have heard that during an 8-hour day, a typical typist’s fingers move a total of 12 miles. The same typist with a Dvorak keyboard would move one mile. The keyboard also helps with sequencing. In many common character combinations, the keys that are pressed alternate between the left and right hand. On the QWERTY keyboard, the left hand does a majority of the work, even though 89 percent of the population is right-handed. In the Dvorak keyboard, it is nearly 50/50.

The standard keyboard that we have all grown up with is called QWERTY, named after the first keys from the left in the row above the home row. The QWERTY layout seems illogical until you understand that it was invented for early typewriters. Those typewriters would jam if the typist moved too quickly, so the keyboard was actually designed to slow them down. Unfortunately as more and more typewriters were built using QWERTY, it became the standard, even though newer typewriters could handle faster typing speeds.

Several famous people have used the Dvorak keyboard layout. Presidential candidate and consumer advocacy lawyer Ralph Nader is one of the most famous and eccentric – in a good way. He has always put social and environmental awareness high on his agenda, and likes to be an example of what he considers better alternatives. So, back in the day when typewriters ruled, he bought a custom-built manual typewriter with Dvorak. He could easily have afforded an electric typewriter, but I believe he figured it would be a waste of electricity.

Piers Anthony wrote his science fiction novels with Dvorak.

Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, uses Dvorak.

In fact, the world record holder for typing speed uses Dvorak. Barbara Blackburn set a Guinness world record in 2005 with a speed of 150 words per minute for 50 minutes straight. She can hit speeds up to 212 WPM for short bursts. Compare this to the average touch typist who might hit 40 WPM on a very good day.

There’s a downside of Dvorak: It takes a while to learn. If you learn Dvorak, you’ll find a QWERTY keyboard hard to use. And, if another user comes to your computer, they’ll find it impossible to use. It’s almost like password protection. I once had an employee come to work on one of my computers that I had forgotten to reset to QWERTY. The first thing he told me was that he had to remove a virus. I asked for details and he said, “Well, the keyboard is all scrambled up.” That was kind of embarrassing for me.

If you haven’t learned touch-typing, the ability to type without looking at the keyboard, it will take exactly the same amount of time to learn as with QWERTY. However, if you already know QWERTY, then you’ll find the old habit hard to break, and you may be frustrated for a while until your Dvorak speed finally exceeds your old QWERTY speed.

It took me two years to transition, and during that time, I was slower in both layouts. Oh, I probably did it the hard way. I kept switching back to QWERTY when I had to get something done in a hurry. I found the whole process rather frustrating. I don’t know why I stuck with it, but now, I’m glad I did. My typing speed is 57 words per minute, almost as fast as I can think – which is fun. Right now, as I type this page, I’m zooming along, almost as if I was speaking with you directly.

After the two-year transition period (I’ll admit I’m a slow learner), I’d get stuck having to work on a QWERTY computer from time to time. I was ridiculously slow in QWERTY, even though I had been a fairly efficient QWERTY touch-typist before I learned Dvorak. Now, twenty years later, I am able to switch back and forth between QWERTY and Dvorak almost without thinking and without difficulty. Of course, I don’t really like using QWERTY, because it is always slower and less accurate.

On many keyboards you can rearrange the actual keys, by pulling the key caps off and pressing them back down where you want them. But most Dvorak typists don’t do that. They have learned never to look at the keyboard, so there is no need to rearrange the actual keys.

Learning Dvorak

I think the best way to learn is to draw or print out a Dvorak keyboard map, such as the picture farther below, and keep it to one side of your keyboard. Find the home keys, then look entirely at the map as you write anything – stream of consciousness or whatever. Resist the temptation to look at the keyboard – ever. You can find the home key position by feeling the little bumps that are on he keys under your index fingers. These were the [F] key and the [J] key. Now they are the [U] key and the [H] key. Practice typing whatever you want for 20 minutes, twice a day, if possible. If your work demands it, you can switch back to QWERTY. But switching back and forth will probably lengthen the learning time. Switching between QWERTY and Dvorak is easy on all the major operating systems.

Soon, you’ll be able to look at the screen as you type, only glancing at the map occasionally for a forgotten character. Then, you can look at the screen entirely. This is a very enjoyable accomplishment if you have never experienced touch typing. You can now compose easily. You’ll never again have to keep alternating your gaze between the keyboard and the screen as you write. You can see your mistakes right away and correct them on the fly. The final step is being able to copy text from a page without looking at the keyboard or at the screen.

Installing/Configuring Dvorak on Your Computer

It’s easy! If you have a Windows computer, go to the Control Panel, and select Language/Internationalization – or something like that, depending on which version of Windows you have. There you can add the Dvorak configuration, and set up hot keys to switch back and forth.

On a Mac, go to System Preferences, then Keyboard, and then click the Input Sources button.

On an Android device, you need to download a Dvorak driver from Google Play. As of now, there are one or two available, and they’ll work fine. Once downloaded, you can change between QWERTY and Dvorak in the Settings menu under Language & Keyboard. In most Android applications, Dvorak is less important, because touch typing is not really done on tablets and phones. However, you can get an external keyboard. There is only one application in Google Play for switching external keyboard configurations that includes Dvorak. I forget the name of it, but you can just enter “Dvorak” in the Google Play search field. The problem with this driver is that it is a bit quirky. For instance, you cannot enter [q]. When you try, you get a comma instead. You may find Dvorak on an external keyboard connected to an Android device unacceptable at this time, but no doubt someone will improve upon it soon.

Almost all Linux versions also support Dvorak, but the way it is configured varies.

In general, you go to the settings, control panel, or configuration menus, where you’ll most likely have a GUI interface for setting up the keyboard layout you want to use. Almost all Linux flavors come with a Dvorak option.

Have fun and prosper! – Jeff

Dvorak keyboard Map


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Instant Comedy

Unexpected fun for everyone.
Just play around and see what happens!

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Enter a descriptive sentence with at least two nouns.

Instead of ‘he’ or ‘she,’ use an actual name, Ideally someone who is currently looking at the screen with you.

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While you may have great results right away, the more you play with it, the more you’ll understand how to make the most of Instant Comedy.

Tell everyone about Instant Comedy (500ways.com/instant-comedy). Make links from your blogs, websites, or emails. That’s all we need to keep this free forever.