This website is my basic writing sample; a small project with specific goals in a limited space. It is the first part of my presentation. Hopefully, it persuades you of my effectiveness at creating a product that achieves its goals.
The second part of my presentation is more complex and covert; I am demonstrating my understanding of how people work cognitively and emotionally and my skill as a facilitator. I am selling something more than well-designed and well-executed projects; I am selling a creative process; a workflow that you can enjoy participating in. To illustrate my skillfulness in guiding you through that workflow I offer three mini-guides on workflow basics, business writing, and academic writing. I also include a burner’s prayer I wrote one year when I thought I couldn’t go to Burning Man, to demonstrate how well I gather the essence of an experience and convert it to compelling content.
FIVE WORKFLOW TACTICS THAT EARN INTEREST
1) Polarize and integrate
Realize the parts of you that motivate and assess are in different sides of your head. The critical part does not motivate successfully; the motivational part does not judge accurately. Give each time to run its own race, side by side. Let each take the lead and get ahead. Act then organize. Organize then act. Let each weigh in at every stage of your project. Make sure both have a seat at the table. Let one talk till it is finished. Listen to it attentively. Take what it says seriously, then switch sides. Make sure both sides are fully listened to, and the corrections and suggestions are implemented. When neither has anything more to say, the project is finished.
2) Have needs
You have needs. Work at recognizing and articulating them. They may be as simple as being able to visualize the project you are working on, having a clear desk, or working in a space where people do not demand your emotion or attention. The better you are at determining these needs, the more efficient, effective, and successful you will be. So practice having needs every day. Practice saying them. Grow out of the social programming that numbed you.
3) Make your workflow your resume
Your workflow embodies your self-knowledge and your responsiveness to the needs of situations. Perfect it. Help it grow. Lovingly give yourself everything you need to function productively. Get to know yourself. Being needy and articulate about it helps upgrades happen. A famous musician was incompetent and frustrated until he learned to pluck guitar strings with his middle and ring fingers instead of his index and middle fingers. The regular neurological wiring virtually every instructor taught did not match how his hand had developed. Realize that you have unique neurological wiring and that you are responsible for uncovering it. Your ideal workflow is the one that matches you and evokes your best work.
4) Your process is the project
In the past decade, software development has oriented to an ‘agile’ model that allows for repetition and improvement rather than linear execution: The goal of a project is not just to complete the project, it is to complete the project in a way that makes completing future projects more efficient, in a lifelong learning game to become increasingly adaptive and productive. Process prompts product. Invest in process productivity and product output will be maximized.
5) Work smarter not harder
What if working hard is a mistake? What if playfully implementing process insights is a hundred times more effective than acting repetitively? Get out of the woman-as-machine metaphor. Be the programmer of the machine. Learn your own code and routines intimately so that you can tweak them to produce whatever you need on a moment’s notice. Nurture your creative power. Notice what it likes and give it more. No, not cocaine or compulsive video-watching. Give it what helps it feel grounded, spacious and powerful; regular doses of unfamiliar tasks help it feel confident and competent exploring the unknown.
Draw, play your own music, sing, do word puzzles, do Sudoku, or dance. Write down your dreams. Sketch. Scribble. Finger paint. Mold clay. Record yourself speaking stream-of-consciousness sentences. Make collages of images you find compelling. Get access to the parts of you that have something to say or play out, and enjoy witnessing them expressing themselves, as you would a friend’s three-year-old.
Develop unfamiliar neurological pathways that complement existing ones and offer alternate output channels for process insights. Socialized language is a very tight funnel. Develop a toolbox of input/output mechanisms unencumbered by language, that you can use first and translate later. And mandate their regular use. Give yourself a pressure cooker valve to use when you feel boxed in and need to reset. Use it!
FIVE NLP TACTICS FOR BUSINESS WRITING
NLP (neurolinguistic programming) is a methodology at the border of psychiatry and hypnotherapy. The suggestions that follow apply constructs from that system, and insights about how people respond to different types of language.
1) Make pacing statements
Name visitors’ and clients’ situations for them so they can identify where they are and move forward into solutions—the ones you are offering.
Example:
Choosing a new car can be overwhelming; there are so many brands and models to choose from and a gazillion features and options. Just knowing what you want and need is hard enough. Having pushy, dishonest salespeople in your face is the final straw; keeping you away from the dealer and pouring money into your beater till it dies.
At carbuyers.com we are not selling cars, we are selling services: helping you decide what you want and need, and making negotiations with car dealers for you. We are patient advisors and hard-nosed advocates who make buying vehicles easy, cheap and quick. We work for flat fees, not commissions, keeping your costs minimal. Get a car that fits you perfectly, painlessly, at the best price available, with our help.
The first paragraph helps the client feel understood and acknowledged, creating trust. The second tells them what to do to be successful: Work with their new, trusted friend. The way that friend talks—dispassionately and commandingly, in verb-centered sentences—demonstrates an emotional understanding of the customer’s situation and an intelligent, no-conflict solution; a full and easy yes; a relieving no-brainer.
2) Use ‘ing’ verb forms
They describe activity neutrally. Using them minimizes the chance of offending people and maximizes their yes. Put a word that ends in ‘ing’ at the beginning of a sentence and it will sound reasonable, frictionless, and true. Example: Using them minimizes the chance of offending people and maximizes their yes. Here ‘using’ acts as both a verb and a noun; as an activity and a thing; as a gerund (jare-und).
Psychologically, we are reassured by familiar activity. Gerunds orient us toward activity and away from arguing (about definitions). Compare the first example with another construction of the same meaning: Using them minimizes the chance of offending people and maximizes their yes. Vs. You want to offend people as little as possible and get them to say ‘yes’ as much as you can, so use words that accomplish that.
If you like being told what you want, this second construction is good too. If being told what you want reminds you that it is what you want, it achieves its purpose. But for many readers being told what we want is a command to raise our middle finger: We have already been told what to want too many times, and it worked out badly. Being told what we want tells us we are being coerced, and switches on distrust and hostility.
Go back and look at ‘Choosing a new car’ again. Notice how many sentences and phrases start with ‘ing’ verb forms, how quickly they read, and how effectively they work. There is no friction or emotion slowing them down. They seem factual, not personal. Use pacing statements as pacing statements. Use ‘ing’ verb forms to innocuously and hypnotically discuss abstract activities in ways that help people feel understood and cared for. Carefully build trust with them. Save telling them what to do (using commands) for the very end, to close the sale: Get a car that fits you perfectly, painlessly, at the best price available, with our help.
3) Speak in commands
Telling people what they want has big charge. Treat it as sexy but dangerous. It can seduce your potential client or enrage them. Use it with caution. Only tell people what they want if you have enough cards—knowledge of human nature and clarity that it applies to them—or have built your board through a sensitive and successful strategy. Play the first card of ‘what you want’ only if you are prepared to follow up by playing all the rest towards the same objective. If it is pleasurable and persuasive, the buyer will buy.
Leading people through a chain of their own needs and wants—by sensitively implying the needs, then naming the wants they are too polite to speak—can be erotic. Build erotic tension toward a climax of satisfaction. It may not win the aloof, but it entices some to act daringly. It may win the aloof too. You are charged. The interaction is charged. They enjoy the interaction and want to experience the satisfaction you are promising. It has all been feeling good and enlivening so far. They get on board because you are jumpstarting whatever passion they have and they enjoy being aroused by what you are doing.
When folks are paralyzed by deciding what to do, telling them what to do solves their problem. It frees them into motion. It shows that you have passion and purpose and invites them to align with it, and have it too. Speak in commands. Put the verb first. Tell people what to do. It is not just being pushy, it is claiming the full power available to you, and helping others claim the power available to them by making decisions and taking action. After you have proven to the client that you understand their needs and situation, tell them what to do: Get a car that fits you perfectly, painlessly, at the best price available, with our help.
4) Deemphasize defining
Deemphasize nouns and adjectives. Avoid the verb to be. Treat ‘it is’ and ‘that is’ as dangerous predators. Defining reality invites projection, reaction and conflict, so skip that. Stick to how things work and what to do. Use verbs, especially the -ing forms known.
Many of us have long-term unfulfilled needs about knowing who we are. Being in opposition gives us the illusion of having a secure position. Arguing is an unconscious behavior that fulfills the need for knowing who we are. It distracts and drains us, but many of us do it compulsively. Bypass it entirely by defining as little as possible and focusing on commanding and acting. Using language actively gives listeners or readers permission to be active. It helps listeners or readers connect with impulses and opportunities.
Defining lies like a dead butterfly pinned to the styrofoam of its story. It whines excuses as it lays around in its diaper of alienation. The pictures it takes are mostly vain, pathetic selfies. No healthy person wants to touch it.
Commanding has a libido that defining can never match. It struts around boldly. It aggressively charges into action. Emphasizing activity helps the full danger and glory of living breathe through your sentences.
Forget the passive, qualified constructions favored by academics. Give up the approval of nebbishes and produce words people want to have sex with. If you tell them how to do it, they will.
5) Write in blood—your own blood
Squeeze it out of yourself, then squeeze it out of your readers. Write ruthlessly to wring it from your soul, then theirs. Find out what you mean. Find out what you care about. Fondle and arouse the passions moving through you until the forces they conduct make you shake. Use writing to get real with yourself. Slice yourself with the sharpness of its honesty. Use its detachment as sights, and line up and shoot your excuses. Walk into the command bunker of the absolutes and play chess with them for your soul.
Use naming the abstract to gather clouds and call lightning. Make friction. Make heat. Make rain. Rub words together till they split with thunder. Remember that passion is attractive. Remember that attractive is successful. Charge your writing with passion and readers will be horny to know and work with you. The punctuation you stretch and liberties of diction you take will go unnoticed, because living is an erotic experience, and anyone who helps us own and experience its pleasure gets our loyalty.
FIVE TACTICS FOR THE ACADEMIC BATTLEFIELD
1) Write for yourself
Use your assignments as opportunities for building confidence in your perspective and competence in expressing it. Find your voice by expanding and editing it till it fits you perfectly. Use the impersonal to unlock the personal. Writing and speaking are opportunities for craftsmanship, not celebrity. Developing effectiveness in expressing yourself is the most powerful weapon for getting those evaluating your work to respect and value you, and getting you to respect and value yourself. Make sure you get that payoff.
Regard writing and speaking as survival skills to practice everywhere. Learn to discern the difference between getting ego buy-in from an audience and catalyzing cognition. Do not care if people like you. Do not care how they assess your intelligence. You are writing or speaking to develop the competence and confidence that help you succeed. On the academic battlefield, vanity kills. It distorts perception in deadly ways. When surrounded by idiots drunk on ideas of grandeur your job is to stay stone cold sober and shoot to kill. Handle your business. Survive and go home.
2) Focus on the metaprocess
Thrive in the most intellectually dangerous environment available—college or university education—by focusing on the metaprocess. What you learn is yours to keep, whether or not it is in the curriculum. Learning how to navigate human interactions and personalities is a life skill that is useful in any occupation, so learn it here. Mapping the interactional and institutional context—who has the power to do what, and how they perceive and act—produces consistent victories. Identify friendlies, hostiles, and uncommitteds.
Watch others pass successfully through personality minefields, and learn from their successes. Recognize and fight skillfully within the features of this map. Win interactions with administrators and professors by observing, understanding, and learning how to be successful with them. Learning is winning: Learn what they want and what you want, and provide both if you can. If you have to choose only one, choose what you want: learning and success.
3) Know what you want
…And want something worthwhile: your success. Make hearing the thunder of your words something you want. Make having a persuasive and authoritative voice something you want. Make stepping no further than the ground where you are solid something you want. Make discerning who you naturally are something you want: Chopin, Beethoven, or Pastorius; Ella Fitzgerald, Joni Mitchell, or Dolores O’Riordan.
Make these priorities and every academic battle will go better for you. Give luxurious time to figuring out what you have to say and what you most care about saying before trying to say anything. Give ruthless attention to what you know and what you do not know, and map them out as if your life depends on them. After preparing in this way, what you do say, even if short, will be a well-played sonata or well-placed kick to the guts.
4) Get out strengthened
Whether or not you graduate, get out of the experience strengthened. Observe the army of distorted idiots around you who imagine that using big words makes them important people. Research the roots of this illness and avoid them. Recognize the three-headed general who commands the weak of will: laziness, vanity, and self-importance. Shoot at him every time he exposes himself. Realize he is your ultimate enemy, the one who can turn you into a robot who dies for his cause.
Use words well. Practice relentlessly so that your skills improve as much as they can. But detach yourself from what you are saying with them. Realize your vocabulary is not your resume. Point your words intentionally, fire a burst, then log the results.
While you are in this war, practice the most disciplined hygiene: Stop talking about yourself. Stop telling the story of who you are. Be who you are. Notice what’s happening. The story of who you are is no shield from the bullets flying towards you. Observe yourself and suspend judgment. Observe yourself and give corrective commands. Self-knowing and self-care conduce survival.
Do what makes you feel clear, honest, and strong. Give your brain a break. Give your neurotransmitters a chance to recover. Make activities where you do not think at all your rest and relaxation. Avoid the verbal diarrhea that weakens and kills so many. Opt out of the emotional ass-eating so many academics seem to demand. Take those you refuse to service to the department head or dean if they undervalue you.
5) Play on their turf
You are on a battlefield with dangerous egotists (who may be your professors, administrators, or advisors). They are armed and they can kill you. But inside each one is a being whose ego is only a compensation. It is desperately trying to know itself and you can help it with that by giving it the attention it should be giving itself, and by doing it, remind it to do that too.
Observe that being. Show interest in that being. Study that being. That attention will more than compensate for your refusal to share its indulgences and perversions. You do not need to grease its ego. Show its heart true interest. It will be grateful to you and evaluate you as favorably as possible.
Opponents have unique strengths and weaknesses. Meet each on its playing field. Play on its turf. Study that turf and use its quirks to your advantage. Most speakers have words and phrases they favor and emphasize. Notice these words and phrases. Show interest in them. Discover why they are important and what they mean symbolically. Then use these words and phrases correctly in your own projects and collect the interest.