Monday, October 30, 2006
Monologue Vs. Dialogue
Having put together some of the first few posts here as well as the first podcast (or perhaps the more generic 'netcast is a better word, I'll ponder that), I'm wondering what people can be thinking about these conversations. After all, most conversations have some give-and-take and provide feedback, feedback which can then be used by both parties to find even better ways to communicate with each other about the topic of conversation or even decide when to move on to a different topic.

Monologues

In my experience, the further you move away from close, personal interaction, the closer you come to a monologue, where one person says something in a vacuum and then others who listen can then respond internally to what is said or not. Even the kinds of interactions that are normally referred to as monologues usually aren't.

For example, a comedian delivering a comedy monologue before an audience is usually engaging in a conversation with that audience because their applause and other analogue communications will tell them whether or not their material is working or whether or not they need to make subtle changes in their delivery in order to better reach the people they're interacting with.

And the true monologue can happen even in the most intimate of one-to-one interactions. People can become so fixated, fascinated or even obsessed with what they're saying that their focus becomes entirely internal and they can ignore the other person that they are talking to. Sometimes they can even use this orientation of internal focus to take external communications and completely re-render them using their own internal point of view to the point that rather than addressing the other person, they essentially reframe the entire conversation as an internal dialogue. Needless to say, this isn't a really great communication strategy if your intention is to understand someone else.

Dialogues

Therefore, I prefer to think of this medium, (and by that I mean both this blog and my podcast, as a dialogue, albeit one that evolves more slowly than a direct conversation might. So I'm going to rely on you to give me your feedback and ask me your questions so that the conversation can move in a direction that's useful for you, for all of you and, by extension, for me.

You'll find that when you post a reply here on this blog, it will tell you that the replies are moderated. Although I'm trying to make sure that I eliminate content that basically amounts to spam, that doesn't mean that I'm only willing to post positive comments. I'll let through most things as long as they're reasonably coherent and seems to bear some vague relation to the content at hand, even if I don't immediately see what that relation might be.

And that's not the only reason that I'm choosing to moderate the comments here.

Since the comments are moderated, it means that I get an e-mail every time somebody leaves a comment here. That means that I can also pay close attention to everything that's written and I can take all of those things into account and keep them in mind as I write the next things that will appear here. In this, the monologue becomes the dialogue and we can all enrich one another with the conversation.

So, I'll ask you to please comment where you think you have something that's worth saying. Even if you're not sure, write it anyway if you think it might be the least bit constructive, and who knows what can come of it?

And to further the spirit of this, I'd like to announce that future podcasts will include a questions and answers segment. You can e-mail questions to me as text or, if you'd like, you can even record yourself so that you can ask your question directly on the next podcast! Just E-Mail the recording of less than 10 MB (or the plain text if you want to chicken out ;) ) to me and we'll all look forward to what will come!

I look forward to hearing from you soon!

Be Well,

Michael Perez

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posted by Michael Perez at Monday, October 30, 2006 | Permalink | 0 comments
Podcast Episode 001 - Analogue and Digital

The first episode of my new podcast is out. it's a quick 15 minute look at analogue and digital communication and how understanding just how to use one and the other together, in a congruent way, can absolutely cause your communication accuracy to shoot through the roof, not to mention get you out of a bad spot on occasion... ;)

A word to the wise. There is a fair amount of hypnotic language in the content, so I wouldn't recommend listening whilst driving or operating heavy equipment. Wait until you have an opportunity to lie back and relax for a few minutes and we'll both be better off for it!

Love it, hate it or anywhere in-between, I look forward to reading your feedback!

Be Well,

Michael Perez

PS: To subscribe, just click the title of this entry, it's a link. Or just click here.

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posted by Michael Perez at Monday, October 30, 2006 | Permalink | 0 comments
Sunday, October 29, 2006
How Jack Nicholson Taught Me to Control Pain…
You think I'm kidding, right? And no, I'm not talking about taking a clue from some of his exploits in the 1960s. Do enough drugs and you might not have any pain, and you might not be able to think very functionally either... ;)

Sam Hamm penned the script to Tim Burton's first Batman movie many years ago and I will never forget one particular line as immortalized by Jack Nicholson, hamming it up to perfection as the Joker as he complained about the Caped Crusader’s interference in his elaborately planned and now-ruined dastardly deed. Glaring with his best demented smile in full force, Nicholson intoned, 'I have given a name to my pain...'

Now of course Batman never caused me much pain (there were the Joel Schumacher Batman movies, but that's not the kind of pain I'm thinking of), but the concept of giving a name to pain is a powerful one.

I spent several years debilitated by intense chronic pain. There were a few basic distinctions that allowed me to begin to control my pain and eventually help me arrive at the place where I am now, a place of being pain-free. One of those distinctions was the understanding that I could change my subjective experience of pain. I could do things that would allow me to experience the pain differently and, with trial and error, I learned that some of these ways were more or less useful for me; depending on how I thought of it exactly, my pain was more or less intense. And eventually, I found a way for the pain to tell me everything it needed to tell me with no suffering at all on my part.

So, just like Jack as the Joker, I've given a name to my pain and that was the beginning of a process that eventually gave me my life back. I wonder, what things in your own life might you find can be different if you decide now to experience them differently and change the way you represent them to yourself? We'll never know until you find out...

We'll talk more about this as time goes on.

Be Well,

Michael Perez

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posted by Michael Perez at Sunday, October 29, 2006 | Permalink | 0 comments
And So It Begins...
Hi everyone,

I'm Michael Perez and some of you may know me from my writings and forum moderation on NLP Connections or perhaps one of the various psychology, self-help or NLP mailing lists on which I write. If you've come to this place from one of those places, I'm glad you're here and you're welcome to sit back, kick your shoes off, wiggle your toes around and relax. Think of this as your home away from home.

For those of you who don't know me from those places but perhaps know me from other times in my life, it's great to have you here! I hope you'll stick around so that we can get reacquainted and pick up where we left off.

For those of you who don't know me from Adam and are here because the great g-d Google told you there was something here of interest, there is and will be. It's nice to meet you and I look forward to the wonderful conversations and feelings to come.

Whoever you are and however you got here, let me tell you a bit about who I am and about this place, Trancecendent, what it is and what it's meant to be.

Who I Am

Well now, figuring out a way to say who you are exactly is quite a tall order!

I could tell you my name, but that's not really me, it's just what I'm called.

I could tell you that I do life transformation seminars, life coaching or change work, but that's not really me either, that's what I do.

I could tell you that I am my mother's son or my sister's brother, but that's not who I am, those are just relationships that I have with others.

I could tell you that I've been passionate about Japanese culture and philosophy or that I love to draw and considered being an animator or that I love writing fiction and may one day publish a novel, but all of those are hobbies or interests and not who I am.

Who am I? This isn't really a satisfactory answer either, but here it goes. I'll tell you for now that I'm a person who helps other people find a real, deep meaning to this question. And once you find that answer to that question, you can answer every other real question in your whole life informed by that knowledge of who you really are. And those answers, in turn, can allow you to live, really live, in a deeply satisfying way that can allow you to experience real happiness.

So that's not really who I am and I guess it's close enough for the sake of argument and for this message. I think you'll see more of who I am revealed directly and indirectly in what is written here over the days and weeks to come.

What This Place Is

This place is meant to be a place for me to write and reflect on my learnings and experiences in a way that is useful to you and that will give you something really worthwhile to take away from this place and bring with you wherever you go.

You see, you gave me something very valuable when you came here and you're giving me something very valuable right now, something more valuable than anything else you own. You are giving me your time.

Now people are sometimes quite stingy with time. Sometimes they're trying to save time or make time. Others seem to be more free and waste time or lose track of time. And yet the moment that you're spending with me right now reading what I've written is a moment that you'll only have this once and will never have again. So, when you give me this precious, irreplaceable, utterly unique-in-the-history-of-the-universe moment, you're giving me something that you'll never have again and will never be able to give to anyone else.

In exchange for this precious gift of your time, I believe that I owe you something and it'd better be something pretty damn valuable considering what you're putting on the table! I guess I could have you give me your e-mail address so that I can PayPal you some cash, but I don't think that all the money I have would be enough to pay even one of you for this, let alone all of you that will ever read this over the course of time. In fact, I don't own anything that valuable even if were to stack all of my possessions up to weigh them against what you're giving me right now. I owe you and I owe you big.

The most valuable thing that I have and therefore the only currency that is commensurate with what you're giving me are my thoughts. Now you might be thinking, 'this guy seems to think his thoughts are pretty damn valuable!' and if you've already begun to think about your time about being that valuable by contras, maybe that thought will already be valuable enough to help pay you for the time we're spending together right now.

Pretty soon now, not in this post but in the ones to come, we'll begin to talk about more and more about how being who we are affects every aspect of our lives and how changing our ideas about who we are can make incredible transformations in our lives, either for the good or, hopefully, for the even better.

We'll talk about more specific things like how to control pain and feel wonderful, how to learn to take advantage of our mind-body connection to create great outcomes for our health and how to achieve all of our goals and dreams so that we can live the kind of really fantastic, happy life that we're meant to live.

And all of these things seem to come back to the same thing for me, which is what I believe about who I am and how that affects every part of my life and can mean and do the same for you.

I built this place so that I could have this discussion with you, so thank you for being here, for having the discussion and, in so doing, allowing this place to be what it's supposed to be. And I'll look forward to being here with you again, soon.

Be Well,

Michael Perez

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posted by Michael Perez at Sunday, October 29, 2006 | Permalink | 1 comments