The main lessons I learned from Tom Hoobyar were:

1. Tom didn’t let his own mistakes or setbacks prevent him from being a leader, teacher, and mentor. I used to think I had screwed up too much to teach or lead. Tom was one of the people who helped me learn that my mistakes and challenges, lived through, become benefits with which I can help other people deal with similar issues more gracefully.
2. Tom created tremendous benefits for others, and grew around himself a community of people who loved him and benefitted from having him in their lives. These are things I have always wanted to do, things I now do to some extent. Tom’s example inspires me to do a lot more.
3. Do the most important things now, because you might not have time later.This is something that I, as a short-term breast cancer survivor, am acutely aware of all the time. It has changed how I live my life. Most of us live like we have a secret guarantee of several more decades to do the important stuff. In reality, none of us ever really knows for sure how long we have. Tom’s recent experience underlines this. If there’s something you love, if there’s something you want to accomplish, if there’s something you passionately want to do with your life… start today, and keep going until you achieve it. Do what you can right now, and however much or little that is, it will open the doors to the next step, and the next.

Tom lived a full life. I’m very, very grateful that among all the billions of people on this Earth, he and I got to meet, and to know each other a little.

Joy

Join Tom’s support community:
http://www.facebook.com/groups/250177441679151/

Make a donation to help the family with Tom’s enormous medical expenses:
http://www.gofundme.com/for-the-love-of-tom

Those of us who know and love Tom can count ourselves blessed to have enjoyed so much time with this wonderful man.

Joy

Updates in the comments:

Tom helped thousands of people in the NLP community. Because of Tom, NLP Cafes became a worldwide phenomenon.

Follow Tom’s story and join his support community:
http://www.facebook.com/groups/250177441679151/

Make a donation to help with Tom’s medical expenses:
http://www.gofundme.com/for-the-love-of-tom

NLPer Maryam Webster posted this on Tom’s Facebook page:

One of the greatest and kindest men alive, Tom Hoobyar an earth angel and benefactor to nearly everyone I know, is down with metastatic pancreatic cancer. Tom’s care is monstrously expensive and draining the family coffers dry. If you DONATE $150 or more BEFORE NOVEMBER 1st, email me & I WILL GIVE YOU a customized Super-Ninja-Skills transformation coaching package valued at $500 on ANY topic, personal or business.

If you want to see Tom before he goes, visit NOW, in the next few days.

Those of us who know and love Tom can count ourselves blessed to have enjoyed so much time with this wonderful man.

Joy

From a recent blog post:

People just don’t understand what love is, so they suffer. Most Westernized people think love is when you can’t live without someone or some object. Any doctor will tell you that actually sounds like a disease.

Atisha, a Buddhist monk in the 10th Century echoed what love really is:

“Love is the wish for others to be happy.”

Love is the wish for others to be happy? I disagree.

Merely wishing others to be happy, without taking tangible action to help them achieve happiness, is not love. It is mental masturbation. And delusional, if a person thinks that intending love makes up for their unloving actions.

I do agree with Erol that an addiction to someone is not love. But I have seen and heard far too many people who are convinced that they “love” someone because they feel loving, or intend good things for the other person, while actually treating that person badly, even abusively.

What you feel and intend matters to you. Other people only experience your actions, not your feelings or intentions.

When you want someone to be happy and you take action to help them achieve happiness, then you love them.

Luckily, you can take action whether or not you feel loving feelings, and whether or not you wish the other person happiness in that moment. That freedom gives you tremendous power to love, even in less-than-ideal circumstances. Loving action is a choice you can make, a habit you can build.

At the end of the evening, an attractive young woman said she is usually shy because she cares too much about what other people think. During some of the workshop exercises, she was able to not care what others thought of her, and found it liberating. She wanted the ability to not care what others think in the rest of her life.

I gently pointed out that while not caring what others think can be liberating, it can also be problematic. Would you really want ignore how your actions affect other people to the point that you hurt or offend them? Or maybe suffer serious consequences, such as getting fired? Probably not.

Do you focus on failure or success, or notice both?

“Caring too much” about what others think often means focusing on what doesn’t work, even if it’s 1% of interactions, and ignoring what does work, even when that’s 99% of what you do.

People in the U.S. are taught that they should be “independent” and “autonomous,” which often means not caring what others think. At the same time, we’re supposed to be nice, caring, kind people, treat others well, and conform to social norms. The result is often oscillation between over-concern with others think, and exaggerated lack of concern.

Rather than thinking in digital, black-and-white, all-or-nothing terms — either focusing obsessively on what others think (strong external reference ), or ignoring their responses (strong internal reference) — it’s often more useful to think in analog terms. How much does it benefit you and others to consider other people’s preferences and responses in situation X? What ratio of attention do you want to give what is working (so you can do more of that) vs. what isn’t working (so you can adjust your behavior, if appropriate)?

Some years ago I shifted my own focus from what others thought of me (or rather, what I imagined they thought of me) to noticing how well what I do is working. That greatly improved my comfort in social situations. My social skills got a lot better, too.

For improving your own and your clients’ responses to other people, I recommend Steve Andreas’s excellent book Transforming Your Self: Becoming Who You Want to Be. Written so non-NLPers can use it, the book is loaded with useful distinctions and exercises. You’ll find detailed instructions for adjusting perceptions in ways that will help you and your clients notice and correct behaviors that cause problems with others, while maintaining a strong and appropriate sense of self.

Tabitha gets trauma flashbacks. She re-experiences events so vividly that they re-traumatize her. Afterward fear, anxiety, depression, and crying jags can debilitate her for days, and affect her mood for weeks.

Emotionally loaded recall is especially common in people with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), a learned trauma response. It’s also common among people with Asperger syndrome. Like Gary, Aspies are prone to obsess over negative emotions and make them worse.

Of course, re-experiencing remembered emotions can be an asset when you recall pleasant memories. But with negative experiences — especially traumas — it’s usually preferable to get the useful life lessons from less-than-positive memories, without getting upset or re-traumatized.

How to help clients who do traumatic recall

Doing NLP processes to remove emotional charge from problem memories is particularly useful when a client has a few traumatic or upsetting memories. What if your client has many problem memories, like Tabitha? What if your client’s recall strategy makes any negative memory into a potential problem, like Gary?

You can dramatically help clients with problem recall strategies by teaching them to:

1. Associate into pleasant memories. (Exceptions: addictions, compulsions, and obsessions.)
2. Disassociate from unpleasant memories.
3. Use partial disassociation to get additional information from unpleasant memories. For instance, the client might associate only into physical sensations (external auditory and visual; tactile and body position K), while remaining disassociated from their past emotional state and thoughts.

Installing an improved recall strategy

1. Determine whether the client knows how to associate and disassociate. Some people associate so automatically and consistently that disassociation is a new experience for them! Teach these clients to disassociate using 3 neutral memories.

A client who is new to disassociation or has trouble disassociating may benefit from Connirae Andreas’s process for Aligning Perceptual Positions before proceeding further.

2. Model how the client recalls neutral, mildly pleasant, and mildly unpleasant memories. Which are associated, which disassociated?

3. Have your client practice associating into 3 or more pleasant memories. Include at least one mildly pleasant memory, so they learn to enjoy recalling small pleasures, and one or more intensely pleasant memories. (If your client consistently associates into pleasant memories already, you can skip this step.)

4. Have your client practice disassociated recall of 3 or more unpleasant memories. Once they can do that,

5. Have your client practice disassociated recall of 3 more intense unpleasant memories. Gradually increase intensity. If your client encounters a memory they can’t disassociate from, use a reverse-time trauma resolution process to remove the emotional charge, then try again.

6. Teach your client partial disassociation. At times a client might need additional information about an unpleasant experience — information that can only be accessed via association. Fortunately, association is analog rather than digital: you can associate into some aspects of a memory (such as tactile sensations, body positions, and smells), while staying disassociated from the most troubling parts of the experience (remembered thoughts and feelings).

I have clients learn partial disassociation using neutral memories. It’s often useful to have the client make a movie screen that shows their emotions and thoughts, or a soundtrack with a neutral observer voice that describes them, so that client knows what is there without associating into that part of the memory.

7. Have your client practice instant disassociation if they accidently associate into the problematic aspects of a memory. I also have them disassociate as soon as they have the information they want. The goal is to create a strategy where the client does the minimum amount of association to retrieve the information they want, then disassociates. This ensures that they won’t get stuck in — or triggered by — a problem memory.

I used to have thousands of traumatic and intensely negative memories. Like Gary and Tabitha, I had an associated recall strategy that often left me upset for hours or days. Doing NLP trauma resolution processes helped some, but I was still left with countless other memories that could trigger emotional upsets. Once I learned to do disassociated recall of negative memories, my life became a lot more pleasant.

In recent years, cognitive scientists have shown that a few simple techniques can reliably improve what matters most: how much a student learns from studying.

The findings can help anyone, from a fourth grader doing long division to a retiree taking on a new language. But they directly contradict much of the common wisdom about good study habits, and they have not caught on.

For instance, instead of sticking to one study location, simply alternating the room where a person studies improves retention. So does studying distinct but related skills or concepts in one sitting, rather than focusing intensely on a single thing.

Read the article on the NY Times website.

I find it interesting that a lot of the findings — such as varying study location, and varying what you study — parallel findings from animal training, as reported in Karen Pryor’s book Don’t Shoot the Dog!: The New Art of Teaching and Training.

Have you read the book Zimbaro mentions, The Geography of Time? (I haven’t.) If so, what do you think of it?