Category: Tips & Tricks

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How to Write Poetry

Embrace inspiration: Seek inspiration from your surroundings, personal experiences, emotions, nature, art, or anything that sparks your creativity. Keep a journal to jot down ideas, observations, or phrases that resonate with you.

Choose a poetic form: Decide on the poetic form or structure you want to work with. Common forms include sonnets, haikus, free verse, or experimental forms. Each form has its own rules and guidelines, so study and experiment with different forms to find what suits your style. You can learn about these forms with a Google search.

Understand meter and rhythm: Learn about the different types of meters like iambic, trochaic, anapestic, and dactylic. Practice scanning lines of poetry to identify stressed and unstressed syllables. Develop a sense of rhythm and experiment with various patterns to create musicality in your poems.

Explore imagery and figurative language: Utilize vivid imagery to engage the reader’s senses and paint a picture with your words. Experiment with metaphors, similes, personification, and other forms of figurative language to add depth and evoke emotions.

Master the art of word choice: Select words carefully to convey your intended meaning. Consider the connotations, sound, and impact of each word. Use sensory language, such as taste, touch, smell, sight, and sound, to create a multi-sensory experience.

Play with line breaks and stanzas: Experiment with line breaks to control the pace and flow of your poem. Consider how breaking a line at different points can create emphasis or alter the reader’s experience. Organize your poem into stanzas, which can be used to group related thoughts or create visual structure.

Engage with themes and emotions: Explore themes that resonate with you and find unique ways to express them. Reflect on your personal experiences, observations, and emotions to infuse authenticity and depth into your poetry.

Edit and revise: Writing a first draft is just the beginning. Revise your poem multiple times to refine your language, structure, and message. Pay attention to the flow, clarity, and coherence of your poem. Remove unnecessary words and refine your metaphors for precision.

Seek feedback and learn from others: Share your work with trusted friends, fellow poets, or writing groups. Accept constructive criticism and use it to improve your writing. Read poetry by established poets to learn from their techniques, styles, and themes.

You may find Beyondosaurus helpful in honing everything including synonyms, rhyming, idioms, and more.

Embrace experimentation and growth: Poetry is a creative and evolving art form. Embrace experimentation, take risks, and develop your unique voice. Keep reading, writing, and exploring new ideas to continuously grow as a poet.

Remember, writing poetry is a journey of self-expression. Enjoy the process, be patient with yourself, and let your creativity flow.

Study the venues in which you can publish your poetry. Study Kindle, Audible, conventional publishers, poetry websites, and other ways to get exposure both conventional and unconventional.

Understand that having many people read your poetry will take time. Just like one can’t pick up a guitar and become a rock star in a month, very few poets have been successful until after years.

Happy writing!

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Abraham Lincoln’s Ultimate Organizing Technique

Abe Lincoln did a very simple thing that you can do too. It helped him keep track of an entire country. It worked back in the 1800s, and it will work just as well today.

He had an envelope on his desk marked, “If you can’t find it anywhere else, look in here.” In a way, that’s kind of the motif of 500Ways.com also. If you can’t find it on the entire rest of the Internet, you may find it here.

The one change you might like to make is to use a folder on your computer rather than a physical envelope for all the miscellaneous files.

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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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Physical Pain and NLP

What about physical pain? Can NLP help with that? Yes! You don’t even have to know NLP. The techniques are explained right here.

Here’s a two-part system for dealing with physical pain that works most of the time. This is written as if you want to use it on yourself, but it works great when you use it on others, too. And, like all of NLP, you don’t have to do it exactly right. Just get it approximately right, and do it with the right spirit. It will still work fine.

Part 1: It helps to understand that pain is not bad. It is a message system. It’s your body’s way of telling your conscious mind, “hey, we’ve got to take care of something,” that your conscious mind might otherwise disregard.

Using the parts of yourself that know how to do it, let your body tell you all about the pain. Really listen to the message. You may be surprised by what your body wants you to know. In some cases, such as a sprained ankle, the message may be simple, “You’ve got to keep your weight off that ankle so it can heal.”

A message like that can’t be argued with. And, you wouldn’t want that pain to go away, because you probably would walk on it, which would indeed interfere with the healing.

The message may be, “seek medical help.” OK, that’s the way to take care of this pain. If you get that message, skip the rest of this chapter for now and get that medical help, you can come back to this later.

Once you have listened to your pain message, you can work out a solution that your body can accept. For instance, “How about if the pain can be gone as long as I don’t walk on it?”

Be ready for really interesting messages. And, you may have to be inventive to come up with an acceptable deal.

Part 2: Did you know you can change pain? If the pain is sharp, like a knife, try making it duller. Or if it is dull, sharpen it a bit. So, if you can change that, what else can you change? Go ahead and experiment. How about the size of the painful area? The depth? Does it have a frequency? A sweetness? If you’ve never tried adjusting the submodalities of pain, you might be quite surprised how easy it is, once you get the knack of it.

If you are working with someone else, and they aren’t able to change the submodalities of their pain, you might take a break for a minute, and let them learn that they can learn new things of this sort. Try this: Have them learn to inhale deeply, by asking them to exhale forcefully and fully. To their delight, the deep inhalation then comes automatically. Then go back to adjusting the pain.

Oh, and an aside: Referring to it as “their pain,” gives them ownership of it. I don’t think they really want to own ‘their’ pain.

Now, the most interesting submodality of pain is location. Can you move one inch higher? To the left? So, if you can move it an inch, how about further? How about putting it in another part of your body? How about somewhere outside your body? Isn’t that a nice solution? When it’s outside your body, you can still have the safety of the awareness that it exists, but it doesn’t have to bother you any more.

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What is NLP?

At its core, NLP, also known as Neuro-Linguistic Programming, was originally about modeling successful behavior so that potentially anyone can have the skills of anyone else. What exactly is a financial genius thinking as she makes an investment? Master that, and you can invest the same way. Modeling top psychiatrists, psychologists and self-help gurus has been particularly successful.

That’s where it started. NLP has become much more, too.

NLP is the applied study of human nature. When well-applied, NLP is used to help yourself and others get more of what is wanted while honoring everyone involved. This is generally done by gaining new, often remarkable, understandings of current and desired situations. These are the most common formats:

Personal: Learn new ways to communicate more clearly, lovingly, respectfully, effectively. Help friends, family and co-workers when they are in need of support. Help yourself in many ways including better health, memory, personality, confidence, and so on.

Professional: Practitioners (also known as neuro-linguistic programmers) help clients discover blocks to success and happiness, and sometimes even health, typically in one- or two-hour sessions.

Business: NLP can be used to identify and repair less-than-perfect advertising and publicity. Use NLP techniques to create happy, productive work environments. With NLP, you can develop the best possible communication with customers and clients so everyone profits.

The process: NLP is more about learning to understand things from new perspectives than anything else. Often, it is about consciously discovering erroneous beliefs that we formed as very young children, and noticing how we have acted on those beliefs ever since. Many other times, it is simply a matter of attaching new meaning to things that we thought we understood. The Neuro-linguistic programmer will typically have a caring, honoring conversation with the client that involves asking specially-designed questions. Sometimes these questions cause wonderful changes all by themselves. The programmer may also offer metaphorical stories, reframing of perspectives, and anchoring. Anchoring takes many forms, such as a carefully timed squeeze of the arm, a bit of standing on specific spots on the floor, or a change of voice tone.

The changes can be remarkable. NLP is well-known for curing phobias, overcoming some addictions, helping with mind-body health issues, granting more confidence, or happiness, and ending procrastination. The changes are often permanent. (You can’t un-learn something. You can’t hide your car keys from yourself.)

There is also a negative side to NLP. It can be used badly by unlicensed programmers, it can be used to sell products, or for ‘speed seduction.’ However, like a pickup truck, it is innocent in itself. A pickup truck can carry bombs, or it can carry food.

NLP has its roots in many fields of research and practice, taking what works, and leaving the rest. The edges of the vast realm called NLP are fuzzy. For instance, you’ll often find NLP melded with hypnotherapy, law of attraction, the work of Byron Katie, Family Inheritance, and other pursuits. As your editor, I will attempt to bring you the most relevant and important information first, and work as far into those edges as is sensible. I am planning for unending growth of this website, and hope you’ll enjoy coming on this ride with me!

It is my intention that the NLP section of this website will teach NLP in its truest form, which honors and respects all people, and that you’ll not only learn NLP techniques here, but also the spirit of good NLP.

Take care! – Jeff Napier