Cognitive Psychology

David J. Parnell’s Series on How To Give Effective Group Presentations | Part 2 of 3 | Attention & Positive Affect

In this post we will be dealing with the second and third components of the CAPA model, which are attention and positive affect. As you can imagine, if your message is going to be persuasive, it needs to gain their attention first. Think about it for a second… Which audience do you think would be more palatable: One that is hanging on your every word, or one that is yawning and looking at their watches. Now your content and subject matter is a constant. Although you can indeed make changes in the ways in which it is presented, it “is [...]


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Communication Strategy

Negotiating Successfully – 10 Tips to Help You Win

I don’t care where you are, or what type of interaction you are involved in, you are always negotiating. Every day, in some way shape or form, you are vying for a top spot, offering some compromise or otherwise working to get something from someone else. Your spouse wants to go out for Chinese, you want to go for steaks… Your kid wants to play PlayStation and you want them to take out the trash… Your mother needs you to paint her porch and you want to play golf… All of them, negotiations. Many people find this task intimidating, but [...]


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Effective Communication

David J. Parnell’s Series on How To Give Effective Group Presentations | Part 1 of 3 | Credibility

The CAPA Model and Effective Presentations Inc. magazine interviewed me last week as part of an article about improving presentation skills. As a part of my preparation for the meeting, I put together a quick outline to help my interviewer better understand the content I wanted to review. As a loyal reader of my blog, I thought/think that you deserve to benefit from this just as much as the Inc. readers. Likewise, it is unrealistic to think that they will place all of this information in the article. As such, the Inc. readers that have found their way over can [...]


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Evolutionary Psychology

David J. Parnell’s Crash Course on Cognitive Rule Set’s | Part 1 of 2 | How A Decision Is Made

Communication Expertise with Cognitive Rule Sets. Decision making has been an inherently interesting subject for the field of psychology. In understanding the process by which people make decisions, it is significantly easier to predict and direct their behavior… For us to move further in our discussion, the term “decision” is important to define and understand first… Now when I say “decision”, many people are only envisioning a buying decision which is fair enough. What most people really don’t realize though is that decisions are not only involved, but are the life blood of literally every single turn in our life. [...]


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Cognitive Psychology

David J. Parnell’s Series on How To Give Effective Group Presentations | Part 2 of 3 | Attention & Positive Affect

In this post we will be dealing with the second and third components of the CAPA model, which are attention and positive affect. As you can imagine, if your message is going to be persuasive, it needs to gain their attention first. Think about it for a second… Which audience do you think would be more palatable: One that is hanging on your every word, or one that is yawning and looking at their watches. Now your content and subject matter is a constant. Although you can indeed make changes in the ways in which it is presented, it “is [...]

Read more …

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Communication Strategy

Negotiation Tips

Negotiating Successfully – 10 Tips to Help You Win

I don’t care where you are, or what type of interaction you are involved in, you are always negotiating. Every day, in some way shape or form, you are vying for a top spot, offering some compromise or otherwise working to get something from someone else. Your spouse wants to go out for Chinese, you want to go for steaks… Your kid wants to play PlayStation and you want them to take out the trash… Your mother needs you to paint her porch and you want to play golf… All of them, negotiations. Many people find this task intimidating, but [...]

Read more …

More from Communication Strategy:

David J. Parnell’s Crash Course on Cognitive Rule Set’s | Part 1 of 2 | How A Decision Is Made

Communication Expertise with Cognitive Rule Sets. Decision making has been an inherently interesting subject for the field of psychology. In understanding the process by which people make decisions, it is significantly easier to predict and direct their behavior… For us to move further in our discussion, the term “decision” is important to define and understand first… Now when I say “decision”, many people are only envisioning a buying decision which is fair enough. What most people really don’t realize though is that decisions are not only involved, but are the life blood of literally every single turn in our life. [...]

Read more …

David J. Parnell’s Professional Series on Hypnotic Language | Part 4 of 4 | Hypnotic Language Patterns In Everyday Life

In our final post we are going to talk about some specific examples of hypnotic language patterns and how they can be used in real life. As I stated before, hypnotic language patterns can be broken up into two fundamental categories based on the processes that they create and/or work with within the mind of the recipient. 1.    Cognitive Dissonance / Certainty – These types of patterns either create confusion in the mind with ambiguity or overtly reinforce preexisting rules to “grease” the acceptance of certain information. The wonderful side effect of that confusion is that as the subconscious mind [...]

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David J. Parnell’s Professional Series on Hypnotic Language | Part 3 of 4 | The Categorization of Hypnotic Language

From a functionality standpoint, Hypnotic Language can be broken up into two overlying categories based on exactly how each is working with your brain’s natural function. Traditionally hypnotic language has been solely grouped into and classified as what is termed the “Milton Model”. Although hypnosis dates back to the 1700’s with Franz Mesmer drawing people into a trance through the rhythmic movement of objects such as his hands, its practical usage was really developed by Milton Erickson. Milton was an American psychiatrist and developed the language patterns, unknowingly, while working with his own patients. Milton is actually a pretty fascinating [...]

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David J. Parnell’s Professional Series on Hypnotic Language | Part 2 of 4 | The Psychology of Hypnosis

I want to make something very clear at the outset… When I talk about hypnotic language, I am referring to the process of utilizing verbiage and phraseology that simply bypasses our critical thinking to gently and smoothly float right into the subconscious workings of our communication recipient’s brain. This is PRACTICAL, REAL LIFE USAGE OF HYPNOTIC LANGUAGE. If we are going to create the skill set of a Communication Expert, we really need to let go of the urban legend-esque stories and look at the psychology and science of this to truly understand the unbelievable power behind it. The most [...]

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David J. Parnell’s Professional Series on Hypnotic Language | Part 1 of 4 | The Neurology of Hypnosis

So what exactly is “Hypnosis”? The majority of the world knows hypnosis as the theatrical fireworks that happen in traveling side shows or on TV. The subject is forced into an unbreakable trance and made to cluck like a chicken or kiss a dog… You know the bit. At the end of the day, those displays are indeed ONLY theatrics. No one can be forced into a trance. Also, once they are in one, they cannot be forced to do something that they wouldn’t normally do. It doesn’t give you super human strength or irrevocably change any mental wiring. That [...]

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Quantum Linguistics & Cartesian Logic | Part 2 of 2 | Cartesian Questioning Model

Becoming a Communication Expert with Cartesian Linguistics Part 2. During any effective communication, a communication expert will seek to understand fully and multidimensionally what their communication partner is saying. When I use the term multidimensional, this simply means that there are many different directions by which to look at and evaluate subject matter. The concept of multidimensionality comes from the field of quantum linguistics which I define a bit more thoroughly in part 1 of this series and my post on Sleight of Mouth Patterns. In referencing yesterday’s post, we talked about seeking out boundary conditions when communicating with someone [...]

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