Commentary Adjectives and Adverbs is a category of presupposition where in your commentary is in the foreground and what is being presupposed tends to be accepted. Like in the sentence, “Luckily, the coach really understands the zone defense,” it is more likely you’d question how lucky it is that the coach understands the zone defense, rather than whether or not he does actually understand.

Here are some commentary adverbs: fortunately, happily, necessarily, remarkably.

Fortunately, even learning one pattern makes you a better communicator.

Happily, Doug O’Brien’s blog is the place to learn this stuff.

Remarkably, some people reading this sentence won’t have read the previous one.

Here are some commentary adjectives: lucky, fortunate, great, super, painful.

It’s great that when you learn and practice new things, you grow as a human being.

How fortunate we are are to be able to read Doug O’Brien’s blog.

EDITOR’S NOTE: A couple of months ago some one showed me that these language patterns posts were finding their way - without permission or acknowledgement - onto an NLP web site that shall not be named. Since then I’ve added some playful mentions of Doug O’Brien’s Blog in the examples to make them harder to steal. I hope you’ll pardon my doing so.

Just before Spring came the monsoons. It rained like crazy in New York the weekend of March 13th. All across the region there were trees down, basements flooding, power outages… it was extreme.

But inside the TRS suites in Manhattan things were warm and sunny. I was joined by Andrew Austin, author of “The Rainbow Machine - tales from a neurolinguist’s journal,” and Nick Kemp, creator of “Provocative Change Works,” to present Mindscapes - Three Perspectives on Change. This was an exciting experiment to create a dialog between three similar but different approaches to therapeutic change.

Friday night was a three way discussion about how to run a thriving private practice as a professional people helper. We were attempting to reveal some of our secrets to doing just that, and it was quite stimulating to find that, again, there were some things we all did and agreed upon, and some other things we did quite differently. In some ways the real “take away” for many people was that there is not just “one right way” to do things, but that every person can find a way that works for them as an individual. The other major learning  was that taking time to work ON your business and not just IN your business is an essential constant.

Saturday began with another three way discussion with the focus shifted to actually doing work with people. We wanted the seminar to cover some theory and technique, but also to allow a “peak behind the door” of the therapy space and witness what those techniques look like in practice. So we took requests about what issues people wanted to learn about and what some folks in the room actually wanted to work on.

As luck would have it, I drew the short straw and went first. (I love to go first) I elected to demonstrate a Neo-Ericksonian approach to pain management. Fortunately it went well and my brave volunteer responded nicely.

Later, Andy Austin revealed to us what he calls “Metaphors of Movement” and brilliantly taught what is all about while demonstrating how to use it with a participant in the audience. Fantastic stuff.

Nick Kemp deftly showed how his Provocative Change works while - at one point - working with one volunteer at the front of the room and simultaneously working with another participant in the audience. I can honestly say I’ve rarely laughed harder than when Nick was doing therapy. Isn’t therapy supposed to require cathartic weeping?

It was a remarkable weekend and I’m so pleased, honored and excited to be working with these brilliant innovators. I look forward to next year when we do it again in England.

Factive Verbs and Adjectives are really useful. In fact, I use them all the time. You will too, if you don’t already, because when you use factive verbs and adjectives (like “aware, know, realize, regret, believe, pleased”) tied together with what you want to get across, the only question the listener might have is about the factive verb or adjective. Like in the first example below - the listener may ponder whether or not they were aware of how much value is packed into one weekend, but don’t debate whether or not there WAS value in that weekend.

Are you aware how much value is packed into one weekend of NLP training?

I know some of you are beginning to appreciate the usefulness of this presupposition pattern.

I wonder if your realize how much language does our thinking for us?

Pseudo Cleft Sentences are similar in function to cleft sentences, but they are formed with the pronoun “what.” They also have a clause that substitutes a noun phrase and acts as the subject of the whole sentence. What I like about them is how they emphasize selected parts.

What John took Mary to was a concert.

She said that what was great about visiting Doug O’Brien’s blog was how much you learn.

What is important is integrity.

Cleft means divided in two. A cleft sentence, then, is a sentence in which information which could be given in one clause is divided into two parts. This allows the speaker to give added emphasis to certain bits of information. Cleft sentences typically begin with “it” or “it was.”

So the sentence “John took Mary to the concert last week,” could be made into a cleft sentence in a few different ways and each would emphasize different pieces of information.

It was John who took Mary to the concert last week.

It was Mary that John took to the concert last week.

It was to the concert that John took Mary last week.

It was last week that John took Mary to the concert.

As you know from reading previous posts, presuppositions are sentences - or in recent examples, questions - that require the listener to accept certain facts or ways of thinking in order to make sense of the communication. Like if I asked you “what color is the car?”  it would require you to accept that there is a car in the first place.

In today’s category we present “the Spurious Not.” (Don’t you just love that title? Who thinks of these things? Sounds like a novelty rock band.) In this presupposition you toss in a “not” that is opposite to the idea you are attempting to convey. For those of you who grew up in the 20th century, spurious means not true or not from the claimed source.

Aren’t the posts in Doug OBrien’s blog not just wonderful?

Do you really not think it’s wrong to steal other people’s intellectual property without so much as a thank you?

I wonder if you are not already far ahead of the curve?