Don
04-19-2009, 12:05 PM
Cracking the Code is a recent book from Thom Hartmann. Hartmann is primarily known for being a very liberal pundit. However, he has also been a psychotherapist in Vermont, the executive director of a residential treatment facility for severely emotionally disturbed and abused children, and written books on ADHA (numerous books including Thom Hartmann's Complete Guide to ADHD: Help for Your Family at Home, School and Work) and depression (Walking Your Blues Away: How to Heal the Mind and Create Emotional Well-Being). Hartmann is also and NLP practitioner and a certified NLP trainer. He trained with Leif Roland, Paul McKenna, and Richard Bandler. Bandler wrote the forward to one of his books.
Cracking the Code does something unique…or sort of. Hartmann's basic concept is that conservative politicians, including Carl Rove, Newt Gingrich, and Frank Luntz have made specific statements and outlines of how to reach the emotions and beliefs of voters, thus, he contends, getting the voters to cast votes contrary to their own interests. This book is an attempt to explain how the mind and belief systems of people works, how most current liberals have failed to understand it, and how liberals can become more successful if the "crack the code" of how the mind really works and use the techniques to communicate better with voters.
Now, before I go on, I am not trying here to convince people to become more or less politically liberal or conservative. Frankly, some of the comments in this book directed at the attitudes of conservatives will be objected to by conservatives, perhaps because it reveals what they believe. Similarly, however, it also attacks the techniques of liberals, and many liberals will object to his comments about people such as John Kerry, perhaps because it reveals too much of how liberals have acted.
Even so, the book is clearly liberal in nature. Remember, fellow NLPers, that a person is not their behavior, so the question about this book is, "aside from the politics, is there anything of value to an NLP practitioner?"
Indeed, I would contend that no matter your politics, there is a lot to recommend this book.
Although he barely mentions NLP more than a couple of times in the text, the book is filled with NLP concepts. Anyone who has taken a Prac training or even just read a bit about the subject will easily recognize numerous concepts ranging from ways to use modalities to encourage belief change to anchoring and future pacing. But so what? There are lots of books that cover these topics?
The advantage to NLP is that because it is a set of techniques, if one technique doesn't help a person, another will. That seems to be the focus of a lot of NLP training. Some aspects of training stress learning modalities for working with advertising (appealing to a number of people to encourage change). When dealing with a group of people in a live situation, the focus in trainings seems to be on gaining rapport and attracting attention via nested metaphors.
This book offers a different approach to using NLP principles to effect change in groups of people. Rather than focus on Rapport and attention gathering techniques, it looks at a concept Hartmann refers to as "the story." He contends that conservatives since the 1980s have constantly driving home a certain story as to how life in our culture should be. Curiously, even most conservatives disagree with the methodology of the story (the story chunks up), but they have been so indoctrinated with the conservative story that they'll ignore the details to feel good about living the story.
Liberals, the book states, have a story, but chunk down and tell the details without chunking up to share the story. As a result the message or story of the liberal is often turned off, and the voter is turned off, too.
In the conclusion--again without mentioning NLP--the author gives a program that liberals can use to share their story (in the sense above) and thus have a stronger effect on voters, bringing the voters' personal "story" in harmony with the liberal story.
To return back to my original concept of this review, if you ignore the politics, you can see the difference between effective and ineffective communication with groups giving practical and well-known examples. So Cracking the Code goes beyond theory and moves to practical information, in lay terms, on how you can use NLP to better communicate with groups of people. Specifically, he suggests and show how to chunk up to "the story" and use both away and toward arguments to help bring people toward your point of view.
Highly recommended for practical use of NLP when communicating with groups (especially), however only if you can separate you political views of the content from the NLP techniques.
Cracking the Code does something unique…or sort of. Hartmann's basic concept is that conservative politicians, including Carl Rove, Newt Gingrich, and Frank Luntz have made specific statements and outlines of how to reach the emotions and beliefs of voters, thus, he contends, getting the voters to cast votes contrary to their own interests. This book is an attempt to explain how the mind and belief systems of people works, how most current liberals have failed to understand it, and how liberals can become more successful if the "crack the code" of how the mind really works and use the techniques to communicate better with voters.
Now, before I go on, I am not trying here to convince people to become more or less politically liberal or conservative. Frankly, some of the comments in this book directed at the attitudes of conservatives will be objected to by conservatives, perhaps because it reveals what they believe. Similarly, however, it also attacks the techniques of liberals, and many liberals will object to his comments about people such as John Kerry, perhaps because it reveals too much of how liberals have acted.
Even so, the book is clearly liberal in nature. Remember, fellow NLPers, that a person is not their behavior, so the question about this book is, "aside from the politics, is there anything of value to an NLP practitioner?"
Indeed, I would contend that no matter your politics, there is a lot to recommend this book.
Although he barely mentions NLP more than a couple of times in the text, the book is filled with NLP concepts. Anyone who has taken a Prac training or even just read a bit about the subject will easily recognize numerous concepts ranging from ways to use modalities to encourage belief change to anchoring and future pacing. But so what? There are lots of books that cover these topics?
The advantage to NLP is that because it is a set of techniques, if one technique doesn't help a person, another will. That seems to be the focus of a lot of NLP training. Some aspects of training stress learning modalities for working with advertising (appealing to a number of people to encourage change). When dealing with a group of people in a live situation, the focus in trainings seems to be on gaining rapport and attracting attention via nested metaphors.
This book offers a different approach to using NLP principles to effect change in groups of people. Rather than focus on Rapport and attention gathering techniques, it looks at a concept Hartmann refers to as "the story." He contends that conservatives since the 1980s have constantly driving home a certain story as to how life in our culture should be. Curiously, even most conservatives disagree with the methodology of the story (the story chunks up), but they have been so indoctrinated with the conservative story that they'll ignore the details to feel good about living the story.
Liberals, the book states, have a story, but chunk down and tell the details without chunking up to share the story. As a result the message or story of the liberal is often turned off, and the voter is turned off, too.
In the conclusion--again without mentioning NLP--the author gives a program that liberals can use to share their story (in the sense above) and thus have a stronger effect on voters, bringing the voters' personal "story" in harmony with the liberal story.
To return back to my original concept of this review, if you ignore the politics, you can see the difference between effective and ineffective communication with groups giving practical and well-known examples. So Cracking the Code goes beyond theory and moves to practical information, in lay terms, on how you can use NLP to better communicate with groups of people. Specifically, he suggests and show how to chunk up to "the story" and use both away and toward arguments to help bring people toward your point of view.
Highly recommended for practical use of NLP when communicating with groups (especially), however only if you can separate you political views of the content from the NLP techniques.