Jananas

Do you see, feel, or hear things? Neuro-linguistic programming is a theory built around how the words people use to communicate about the world provide clues about how they interpret their environment. There are three main ways to process information – visual, auditory, and kinetical.

• if something is clearer now, then you are using a visual representation to process the information
• if that ring’s true for you, then you process information through auditory pathways
• if grasp hold of a concept, then you process information kinetically

NLP itself goes into significantly more detail how you can read a person’s behaviour, breathing patterns, eye movements, etc. in order to get a complete sense of how they are interpreting their environment. For the sake of this blog post and given the direction I want to take my ideas in, I’m going to focus solely on language and its clues.

Over the last few months I’ve been observing my language. It provides clues about what sense I’m using to pay attention to and process the world around me. I’ve also been observing the people around me and how they process information (according to verbal clues). These can be very subtle clues but I think that it is important to pay attention to.

Why is this relevant? Because I believe that we often miscommunicate with people because we are using different processing pathways. We can provide better explanations if we can target examples to the natural way someone processes information. I.e. if you “see” an answer, then I should provide you with a visualization of the problem at hand. The more effectively we can communicate and interact with people, the bigger a difference we can make in the world and the faster we can get things done.

I’ve fallen off the Akoha train over the last little bit for a bunch of little reasons. I played 16 missions and half ran out of friends that I’m in regular contact with that I could play new missions with. I got swamped by school work, and sometimes fun things get pushed aside for a short while in order to get deliverables finished.

And partly because I noticed a trend amongst friends I had played with. Namely that they didn’t play it forward. Its difficult to stay fully engaged with a game like Akoha when you don’t get to watch the cards continue their journey (and read the future stories). In talking with a close friend we were trying to think of ways to get people to keep cards moving through life. Some of our suggestions are below (note, at a cursory glance/to our best knowledge these features don’t exist at the moment – if they do, well then ignore me!):

• Add the ability to “nudge” friends to remind them that they have a card
• Add the ability to reprint cards, just in case they haven’t been played because they’ve been lost (or in one friend’s case pooped on by their newborn)
• Don’t focus solely on karma points, but also add the ability to track participation in the game by the percentage of friends who have also played the game forward. Basically, reward people for bringing engaged players into the game.

I was a bit bummed that I hadn’t played in a while, but the twitter search feature for Akoha reminded me of how awesome the game is. Excitement feeds excitement and I invited some friends out for drinks next week. Mark that down folks – Mission 17 is in the works!

I spent this evening with friends carving pumpkins and putting together bags of candy to hand out to kids on Friday evening. We also watched Candyman, which seemed significantly less scary then I remember than as a child. Although that might change tonight when I have to look at myself in the mirror. I have trays full of pumpkin seeds to roast tomorrow. Gosh I love Halloween.

ING’s latest savings campaign is based around the tag line “there’s no such thing as saver’s remorse”. North America has moved from a savings- to a consumption-based economy spending more than we make. This is nothing new. Trying to get the public to focus on saving money is a good thing. Its especially good as we enter an economic downturn. ING gets to play the benevolent corporation card because look, look they’re just trying to help us get back on track and weather out this storm. Great. If the campaign is successful then they will see an increase in the number of deposits and so can lend out more money in the form of loans and mortgages.

All that is well and good, but this campaign irritates me because there is such a thing as saver’s remorse. Take an extreme example. Say someone is obsessed with saving for their retirement and is spendthrift to ensure that they can save ‘enough’ money. Assume that they pinch pennies and are able to save 50% of their income (actually put money away, not just pay down their mortgage/debt). Over their lifetime they develop a habit and culture of not spending money. They retire at 65 and they aren’t suddenly going to start taking first class flights and six month vacations to Florida to escape the Canadian winter. When they finally reach retirement they will have a huge amount of money saved relative to how much money they will need to support themselves in retirement.

Saver’s remorse isn’t something that sets in tomorrow. Its something that is felt 40 or 50 years down the road when people realize that they spent so much time focusing on saving money that they can’t enjoy it when they finally have access to it. Life is about balance. Yes, you want to save money. You want to be able to support yourself during your retirement. But, you also want to enjoy your life while you are living it. I know that this is a more detailed point that the majority of the people seeing this advertising campaign will understand, but it still bugs me because saver’s remorse does exist.

Most of the vegans I know have never had Caribbean food. I think that it might be because there aren’t the same sort of Caribbean populations in a lot of the cities in the States as there is in Toronto. Hey, we’re just luckier! Admittedly Caribbean cooking is generally heavily meat based, but there are items like Doubles (or even the vegetarian roti) that should be vegan if they are made traditionally. I’ve started asking around at the different Roti shops I end up and have now confirmed that at least two shops in Toronto have some vegan options. I also assume that most others would as well if I had the time to stop in an ask.

So vegans, rejoice! You can get vegan doubles at Ali’s Roti or the Caribbean Roti Palace.