Wanna Observe like Sherlock? Holmes' Elementary Meta-Strategy!

Holmes' Meta Strategy!
This is the transcription and reflection on Robert Dilts' Strategies of Genius.

Perception of Clusters of Details ---> Behavioral Observations + Environmental Observations ---> Inferences ---> Combinations of inferences ---> Conclusions

Cultural Assumptions & Facts are matched up with the observations to draw inferences, then the inferences are "compiled" to generate conclusions.

Why is Holmes Strategy so useful to learn?
Well, for one, Sherlock Holmes (although fictional) is the greatest observational-deducer probably ever to exist in our imaginations or out of it. The fact that he's fictional does not prevent his techniques from being genuine, applicable, and highly useful. The observational-deducing strategies used by Sherlock Holmes seriously fall in the category of something expansively NLP because it increases the options you have in life. You can (and will) draw these truthful, accurate conclusions seemingly from thin air. Yes, that is impressive and makes for a great trick, but also for your own awareness and heightened observational skills this is extremely potent. It's so valuabl eto understand how we go from submodality observations and asking the who, what, how, where, when (and sometiems why) questions to arrive at the causes and behavioral conditions and capabilities behind what we see. Wolves are notably more intelligent than dogs because of their 30% increased intelligence and heightened "observational learning". Observational learning means that they'll figure out how the cage they're in works, and can quickly escape than anything without observational learning. Similarly, learning and Applying Holmes meta-strategy for drawing deductive conclusions from heightened observations frees you and expands your life MUCH more than the person who does not use this strategy. Ultimately, by using and applying Holmes' filtering and questing and tying up observations with cultural assumptions, imaginations, and facts to reach inferecnes and then conclusions from the summation and formulaic equations of those inferences, you truly will lead a more liberated, more full, more complete life than someone who does not use these strategies. So learn on! :D

The fusion of cultural assumption & Fact with the observation is key and often the overlooked step.

If you see someone lightly hesitantly putting his hand on a woman's shoulder (observation), it's likely it's their first date (inference) because if they had gone on many dates, there likely would be no hesitation (cultural assumption)!

NLP Concepts utilized in Holmes' Strategy

Submodalities -- specifically visual acuity has been massively heightened and he ties in visual representation system observations with assumptions and facts to quickly create inferences

Logical Levels -- Holmes rapidly cycles through the logicals to quickly create awareness of how, who, what, when, where, and why someone did capabilities, identity, behaviors, environmental clues, and motives. So a strategy to add complexity and more detail to the Holmes' Meta Strategy for Observations to Conclusions (HMSO).


Applying Holmes' Strategy!
You can discover all those W-H questions by looking for corresponding clues, causes, conditions, and motives.

Environmental Clues answers ----> Where and When
Behavioral (or Antecedent) Causes ----------> What answers
Capabilities Conditions -----------> How answers
Beliefs & Values/Motives -----------> Why answers (Typically not investigated because of the psychological nature...and obscured concept).

Inference calls you to "imagine which behavior, environmental, capability, or belief CAUSES created the clues in those areas that you observe". In other words, if you see someone wearing a dress with a slight notch in their shoe, you'd create inferences and ask "what beliefs and capabilities does a person hold or have" to generate that environmental clue etc.

"Life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it." -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes)

Examples

Example could be someone where's a nice dress antecedent cause, they're eager to impress. Behavioral Cause.

So just cycling through the Environmental, Behavioral, Beliefs/Motives, will inspire you to process in the W-H questions leading to logical level mostly-accurate inferences and conclusions about person!

Getting caught up in the "why" the beliefs and motives of a person can be useful at times, but usually is irrelevant. On certain levels, cognitive processes can be inferred from clues.

Exercises
Making the Magic of HMSO Holme's deduction-observation process a reality. Observe someone and try to deduce their profession.

Great trigger questions:
Right handed or left-handed?
Eye-correction?
Tan or not (do they work outside)?
Married or not? (Left-hand ring finger has ring?)
Where has the person been recently?
What's their nationality?

Professional tendencies: For example would a doctor walk differently than a technician or an actor or a farmer?
How might the different professional activities a person engages in effect their clothing?

Holmes reminds us "Singularity is almost an Invariable clue". So if someone has only one shirt cuff that's wrinkled, that's likely a clue that maybe they work at a desk and rest their elbow on the desk or frequently curl up only one shirt cuff. What profession would do that? Maybe a restaurant host who occasionally had to deal with priming an oily boiler or something. The key is look for individual asymetrical clues, those usual indicate something unique!

Plug in those answers and observational environmental clues to cultural assumptions, imaginations, personal memory, and context.

For the longest time I used to bombard my conscious mind with hundreds and thousands of these observational, environmental details. However, I never took the next two steps and drew inferences and deductions. So the environmental details was overwhelming. Drawing the conclusions from the deductions and inferences (which are from the observations) gives you the nice 1-4 "highly-probably" observational estimations instead of hundreds of seemingly (even though they're all connected pointing to 1-4 conclusions) disconnected observational details. In short, if you choose to observe many environmental, behavioral, or capable clues, be prepared to go all the way and make inferences from those observations, and then conclusions from those inferences. Otherwise you'll feel overwhelmed with a jumble of observations. So "to observe and fully reach conclusions from those inferences from observations" or "to not observe". Not observing is fine, and observing and following-through to inference and conclusion is fine and dandy, but simply observing details?? That's a recipe for quick overwhelm.

So I encourage you to practice these skills. And enjoy the discovery, excitement, and ease of using your visual (and auditory) acuity to draw seemingly astonishingly accurate conclusions from the "erroneously labeled" visual trifles:D Nothing is trivial!!!!!!

"Sir Arthur Conan Doyle -- “It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important. To a great mind, nothing is little”(Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictitious deductive genius creation whose entire method is “founded upon the observation of trifles”).

For calibration and detecting deceit

For detecting deceit and calibration use the 1/2-second rule! Any micro-expression response that occurs within 1/2 second of a question usually has been unmeditated and thus is likely truthful. Anything longer than a 1/2 second the person can/will change! :D Gotta have quick observation skills. Thus, the truthful micro-expression response (and thus the most accurate observation) occurs immediately after the question! And your partner may already know with what word(s) you'll end a question so you must start observing (the 1/2 second) immediately once they understand the question (not necessarily after you've completed saying the question)! A lot of timing!

Asking unique and/or complex questions means the partner will have to direct their attention to the question which means there will be more of a window for an answer that was not meditated upon! So complex or unique questions extends that 1/2 second response sometimes for a more honest answer.

Another great question is a meta-question: questions about what they just said: "Should I believe you?" Often times someone will react to their own answers in different way because of the amount of self-consciousness involved.

NLP Calibration!

Body language can never lie; words and statements, however, can. Learning to calibrate increases your ability to know what a person is feeling. This becomes extremely potent when trying to eliminate confusion in communication and also to avoid getting deluded with words.

State Calibration is just "indicators" of a person's state. When the red light is on on the oven, it mean it's heating up. When you've calibrated a person, you can know that a specific person a brow furrowed, right eye squinted and hunched means they're perplexed. Therefore the "brow furrowed, right eye squinted and hunched" state is like the red light on the oven; both the red oven light and the furrowed brow, squint, and hunch serve as indicators for what's going on "inside".

How do you calibrate a state? When you see a person having a unique body posture, or movement, you ask them what they feel, and if they respond, you'll know that that specific external body language, posture, breathing, and the like corresponds to their state! ANY time you see them with "brow furrowed, right eye squinted and hunched, ask them what they're feeling. If they respond, you've just successfully calibrated their state! Now whenever you see that external body languae, you will understand that for that person it calibrates to "perplexed".

A green light on the oven could mean, "cleaning mode", just as someone who's in a state where their breathing is steady, chest out, and smiling, and you ask them what they feel they'll say "happy" you've calibrated that "breathing is steady, chest out, and smiling" to mean happy for THEM. So to that specific person, just as the green light means "cleaning mode", "breathing steady, chest out, and smiling" means "feeling happy". Now, "breathing is steady, chest out, and smiling" does not mean happy for every person; just that specific person. To continue the analogy to now an absurd level of metaphor (LOL!) everyone's "oven" is built different with different indicator lights. The oven lights are just a metaphor for "external indicator" that calibrates to an "internal state".

So why is this useful? State Callibration has millions of applications, but we can focus on two: dissolving confusion and persuasion. Having calibrated a state is obviously clarifying because it decreases confusion from ALL of these external states and configurations of body posture, breathing cadence, brow, voice tone, etc, because now you know, after calibrating, those are indicators of internal states. If you ask them what they're feeling (so you don't fall into the trap of mind reading) and they answer with a response of their internal state, you have just calibrated their external sensory indicators to their internal state! Congrats!! Successful calibration!

Now let's examine the persuasive benefits of State Calibration. Let's say you've calibrated a state when you notice a person has "dilated pupils, slumped shoulders, and tapping feet". What state does that calibrate to? Well you ask them and they respond, "Interested. I feel interested right now." Excellent! Now you know that whenever that person displays that "dilated pupils, slumped shoulders, and tapping feet" external behavior, then you know they're interested. Why would knowing their internal state be so persuasively valuable? Let's say you're offering this person a sale and he suddenly pops into his "interested state" but SAYS "The price is too high; I don't have my heart set on the product." If you hadn't calibrated, you might've sold the product to him for a lower price. However, the calibration master would demand the sale as is or even increase the price! Why? Because the person who has calibrated already knows that this person is clearly interested.

Additionally, you can know when you've sucessfully put someone into a state. What if you've calibrated a woman to "aroused" or a prospective client to "attentive and eager". You know when your communication is successful because you have those calibration "lights" that flick on revealign to you that your communication is effective! All the best communicators and the most persuasive people utilize state calibration because everyone needs "checks and indicators" for if what they're communicating is working or not! You need feedback for what and how you communicate and all the lights start flashing and you can learn to read a person "like an oven" ;) with effective state callibration!


Some EXCELLENT Links on Callibration
http://www.howtomasternlp.com/2008/05/26/forget-mind-reading-calibrate-instead/

Tick, Tock of your Life Clock

See, society operates under the illusion that chaos will result if people don't follow a robotic pattern of 9-5 work to pay the bills, and have your life controlled by the illusion of material wealth and money. Ironically, what ensues from having 9-5 societal booby-traps is precisely what those myths aim to dissolve: chaos. The natural cosmos of trusting your conscience, your intuition, your inner voice perpetuates genuineness in your life with incredible efficacy.
Don't just “take break from your work”. Take off from your work! This does not mean doing "bad" things, but not the “societally prescribed” things. The ticking clock keeps you waiting in line and your life ticks away at every second.
Do you believe in what you see and feel? Or do you believe in what every mass says what you should feel? If you've innocently lived unconcious lies your entire life, what would it feel like to live a truth? Would such actions feel like a lie? Time to live the authentic lie, then...
It takes a gusto of herioc faith to listen your heart and do what feels right. Luxurious, lavish beds, ornate, intricate woodwork, opulent foofy extravagant sofas. I laugh at such improprieties lacking choice. 'Would you like spiral etchings or swirly stripes on your prison bars?' sounds like the more apt question. The essence of quality not just "hovers near", but flows from Nature and joyful, warm, colorful, clever people who have exonerated themselves from the fear of betraying, permanently, the loops and pitfalls of society's assembly lines.

Time is Money

Catalyzing Healthy and Dissolving Unhealthy Relationships to Money

When he said

“Time and money spent in helping men to do more for themselves is far better than mere giving,”

Henry Ford was in concordance with Lao tzu, who said,

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for life.”

Healthy Money
Time is money. This finally must be understood: we should put as much value on time as we do money.

You can do anything you want.

This variety of examples is listed because it’s absolutely essential to understand good scenarios for money usage. Although some of these listed are quite strange and outlandish, they are ALL good relationships with money.

• If you want to purchase a diamond ring, you can learn how to go to Africa and search for blood diamonds, learn the craft of diamond cutting, and learning how to do the jewelry molding and metallurgy, and make a diamond ring. Or you can pay the price of the diamond ring.
• If you want to buy a computer, you can either buy a computer or go through the enormous amount of time put into learning about computers, learning about wire soldering, motherboard programming, and all the things necessary to know to construct a computer, and it will take you years and years to do that, or you can pay the price of the computer.
• You can purchase a coffee maker which expedites the tedious process of filtering water through a filter, or you can put the time into heating water, and manually pouring it through a strainer. Again, money isn’t essential; it just expedites processes.
• You can go to Kinko’s and to get documents printed for you quickly, or you can put time into learning how to do the layout, document formatting, paper collation, and page alignment, and do it yourself. Time only speeds up the printing; the outcome is the same.
• If you want to surf in Hawaii you can buy (use money) a surfboard there, or you can put time into arranging for your surfboard to be shipped. If you want to buy a surfboard, you can fork over the $400 dollars for one, or you can put the hours and hours and years of time necessary to learning how to make and shape a fiberglass surfboard from Styrofoam.

So you don’t have to pay for anything! You do not have to use money. I repeat. You do not have to use money. You just have to put time into edifying yourself how to craft things that you would otherwise buy; or perform services you would otherwise purchase. You are never financially imprisoned. This is incredibly illuminating because you don’t really need money. If you want to do things more quickly than doing it yourself, that’s only when you need money. Money doesn’t get you anything you couldn’t get on your own; it just speeds things up. This is a healthy relationship with money.

A negative, unhealthy relationship with money is a fear relationship with money. Where you accumulate it because you think it will get you closer to God or closer to happiness, and, really, neither of those are the case with money. Money is not related to any emotion; it is only related to time. Money is related to the concept of time, and time is a perception. It’s important to not have that perception be distorted.

Money is a utility. It is merely a utility. That’s the only thing it is! People equate joy and freedom and all these positive sensations with money and that’s not the case at all. Joy and freedom are equated with your relationship to Ultimate Reality, your relationship with Nature. That is joy and freedom; that is certainty; that is creativity.

Unhealthy Money
Negative relationship with money is hoarding it, thinking that will provide security. If you’re insecure without money, you’ll be secure with it, too.

Negative relationships with money revolve around thinking that money will alter your mood, emotions, or level of happiness in anyway. If you think money will alter any of those three stays, look out! You have an unhealthy relationship with money!

I used to always have a compulsion to spend! I felt that that was “giving and loving”; if I spent and purchased something. However, you can go into a grocery story and not buy things. You can go peruse bookstores and not purchase anything. You can go peruse malls and not spend a penny. In fact try that. Do that! That’s exercise #1 for starting a healthy relationship with money.

Exercises to Catalyze Healthy and Dissolve Unhealthy Relationships to Money

Disclaimer: These are not pranks. I am not proposing economic mayhem nor financial anarchy at all. When its capacity is not mutilated, money offers a delightful time-saving mechanism. These exercises merely catalyze an eye-opening financial profundity, illustrating money’s sentient utility and its absence from emotional reactions.

Exercise #1:
Pennyless Shopping.
Feel the joy and satisfaction of entering a store(s) and knowing – absolutely knowing – that you will leave that store with exactly you had on your person upon entering – nothing more, nothing less. No items acquired, no money spent. There’s a certain freedom -- a celebrated joy operating from a vehement source of conclusive happiness – from not spending a penny in a shopping situation.

Purpose: Experience the celebrated joy operating from a vehement source of conclusive happiness from choosing not to buy something, doubt free.

Exercise #2:
Financial Transaction Retraction
Only try this a few times – once is probably best – and never in the same store twice. But bring an inexpensive, low-cost item up to the counter. It could be a pack of gum, or one golf ball, or a single can of soda, or one pencil. Wait until the transaction is completed and the receipt has already begun to print. Then, immediately, with as much sincerity, sympathy, and simplicity as possible say, “You know what, I’m terribly sorry for potentially causing any inconvenience, but I’ve decided not to purchase item name”.

See what happens. Was it possible to cancel the transaction? Was there a big brew-hawhaw? Did it simply occur without problems? Was there any eye-rolling?

Purpose: Whatever the item is, it must be only a few dollars and small in size. Why small and inexpensive? Because it makes the idea of retracting the purchase so much more ridiculous! If the item is small and inexpensive, the actual reason, the logic behind the canceling the purchase won’t be misconstrued. The choice for the financial transaction retraction must not be misconstrued for budgeting or physical accommodation reasons. With a something small and inexpensive, it would be implausible for the consumer to retract the purchase because of the item…
1. Not fitting a tight and/or limited budget;
2. Being incongruent with physical accommodations ( i.e. they don’t have the space for it).
This is a very bizarre, new, and exciting concept. It eliminates your attachment to money, and enunciates it only as a transactional device. If buying and selling is a factory, money would be the rollers and conveyor belts of the assembly line, nothing more. It is certainly not something to believe is equated to happiness. However, finding what is, is more important than anything.

Conclusion: When I envision the ideal, utopian world, it is without currency, green-slips of paper money, but with compassionate currency. The more you give, the more you receive is the mantra. Everyone does some component of life because that’s what they love doing. This would produce the best corn and tomatoes and vegetables and produce because farmers would be farming because they love agriculture. The entertainment venue would be the best because performers would be doing it because they love acting. Same thing for building construction – only the Frank Lloyd Wrights, people who love architecture – would be architects. All software will be incredibly efficient because the programmers love programming and would be doing so with their time, anyway. No one will ever feel “trapped” in a job, because their profession aligns them, makes them happier, is the best thing they can do for their and others level of happiness, love, awareness, etc. . Call this highly idealistic, spiritualized anti-capitalism with “wealth” only referring to state of mind, implausible. The best thing you can think of to do with your time is your profession! In time, we’ll all see how possible this supposed sea change is, and make the right move.

John Kooz -- “If you define necessity perfectly and possess nothing less, no depravity; explore nothing more, no burdens.”

Relevant alternate links: www.adbusters.org.