 of WhatsApp make it into the finalised app updates rolled out to the two billion users worldwide who use WhatsApp each month – a surprising number of the leaks prove to be accurate. So, it seems pretty likely that we’ll see these vanishing images and videos make their way into future iOS and Android versions of the app.
That makes a certain amount of sense. After all, Snapchat has gained huge traction with users worldwide thanks to – amongst other things – its ephemeral messaging. Pictures, videos and text sent within the app vanish when the recipient leaves the chat. Images and videos can also be sent with a timer.
Worst still, screenshots taken within Snapchat will send a warning to the sender to let them know that the other person in the chat has tried to make some of the content more permanent. Despite the frenzied panic from some parent groups, Snapchat isn’t solely used for younger smartphone owners to send naked photos to one another without getting caught.
Instead, it’s popularity is more likely a reaction to the ever-expanding catalogue of holiday photos, saccharine status updates about anniversaries and birthdays, not to mention the inspirational quotes layered onto stock images of beaches shared by their parents and extended family which are permanently available to view on Facebook and other social media sites. In stark contrast, Snapchat lets users send pictures of their gurning faces and dinner – without a permanent record being available for every schoolfriend, colleague and friend of the family to trawl through months later at their leisure.
Features like Stories – collections of photos, videos, messages and more available to view for a limited 24-hour period – started on Snapchat, as well as interactive features like filters, lenses and Bitmoji. These have seen been copied by the likes of Instagram, which, like WhatsApp, is owned by Facebook, in an attempt to replicate some of the success.
Un Spring, in the Sugar Camp Creek Watershed, is a 1.83 acre lake that falls in Oneida County. This lake is managed for fishing and swimming and is currently not considered impaired.
Communicating more effectively with NLP
By Sarah Frossell
Published in Rapport Magazine Winter 1997
One of the basic tenets of NLP is that excellent communicators do three things: they know their outcome; they develop sensory acuity; they become behaviourally flexible. In this article we examine an NLP Model of Communication to explore the notion of how learning about internal processing can enhance our communication skills...
Commun -ication - defined variously by my dictionary as 'conversing together familiarly, to give a share of, to transmit' - is commonly agreed to be the biggest single issue facing all of us in our attempts to manage our relationships effectively.
Examine the relationships that currently affect you - and your friends and loved ones. Yes, all of them: those in your private life and those in the business or businesses you work in. What's your verdict? How well do you and your acquaintances generally 'commune with' others? How good are your communication skills? Where would you rate your current performance on a scale of 1 - 10, when 10 represents excellence? Is achieving a high rating on this subjective scale something you really do believe is worth putting some time and effort into now?
If the answer to the last question is, 'Yes!' then indulge me by journeying with me into the future.
'The meaning of a communication is the response it elicits...'
Imagine, if you would, a world in which communicating with yourself and others is something you can do exquisitely and elegantly, a world in which you feel totally at home, a world in which you are able to be congruent and express that congruence in the way in which you build rapport with others, in your body language and through the words you are using to influence them to change their minds.
Stand back and enjoy watching yourself behaving like this. Notice how easily you build and maintain rapport with the people around you. Notice how, from a distance like this, your interaction looks like a fluid dance with people, words, voice intonation and pitch moving in harmonious patterns around you, ebbing and flowing easily and naturally, onnected and yet separate.
Recognise the non-verbal signals that let you know just how successfully you and the other people involved in this scene are listening to and understanding each other now.
Notice that there is a direction to the communication going on here. People are getting what they want and are getting it in a way which ensures that everyone in the process is a winner - and, more importantly, feels like a winner. You know this because the responses that you are getting are the ones you intended to create. They sound, feel and look right; they connect with your outcome and with theirs. Everyone is happy with what is going on here.
Ask yourself: 'Is there anything else that you might care to add that will enhance this future of yours?' If there is, just do it now. Add it in and notice the positive effect it has.
Then step back into this future scenario. Experience it in its totality. Be aware of what you're hearing; the words and the patterns of sound containing those words, the way in which all the players are tuning into one another, the sounds which let you know this is a true meeting of minds.
How does it feel, hearing people talking with you like this? What are you seeing as you look at, speak with and converse with them? Be aware of the physiological changes in them and in yourself as you move forward towards achieving your outcomes - together. Above all notice the ease and flexibility with which you can move and change within this 'dance' to align and re-align yourself in the direction of achieving what you and your partners targeted at the outset of this process.
'The difference that makes the difference...'
Now you've experienced what you want to achieve in your communication with others, let's unpick some of the individual elements which will make, and have already made, that work for you, now.
NLP is all about communication. Bandler and Grinder set out all those years ago to model the strategies of excellent communicators and to detect which specific elements of what they did made the difference that created the real difference.
They extended the traditional models of communicating into an in-depth exploration of what happens to an individual's internal processing when s/he is communicating with others. Their outcome: to study the structure of subjective experience.
'A map is not the territory... '
Take a look at the following model of communication.
It's one that's fairly commonly represented in the NLP community. And it has always seemed to me to be an important one in terms of enhancing understanding about what is actually going on internally when we communicate either with ourselves or with others. It takes us beyond traditional models which simply examine the notions of encoding and decoding messages and the interference, the noise, which can intervene to distort those processes.
In this model we are considering the ways in which we each individually 'filter' the information coming in to us from the outside world to create our own internal'maps' of the territory in which we operate. In a sense this model'maps' our internal noise; those things that interfere with or enhance our communication with others. And it is this map which we, as excellent communicators can learn to listen to and read more effectively - it is interesting to note here, that this is something we already do, more or less well, when we are communicating with others. In the main we do it unconsciously. Bring a little more consciousness to that process now and you will find that you can significantly improve your communicating prowess and, in that state, return it to that area of your experience which we call 'unconscious competence' so that you can use it as elegantly and as appropriately as you will choose to do.
'We can't not communicate... '
Let's explore the model's component elements...
First: all of us experience an on-going stream of information coming to us from the external world.
Second: our bodies and brains are programmed to store it all in different places through a set of in-built processes that filter and sort that information in different ways. Our filters are idiosyncratic, uniquely ours, honed by our experience and, to a great extent, by the experience of the significant others in our lives - our parents, wider family members, role models and so on.
These filters are placed on a continuum ranging from what is conscious to what occurs at an unconscious level. Their functions; generalisation, deletion and distortion; work together to create an effective internal system for operating in the world; the individual 'programming' we NLPers observe.
The more conscious filters are those like our language patterns - according to the philosopher Wittgenstein the language we use'mirrors' our world. As such it necessarily limits or de-limits whole areas of our experience. Much of NLP deals with developing our use of language to ensure that the words we choose match the language patterns of and hence help us to build closer rapport with the person or people with whom we are dealing.
Our attitude to life in general operates as a strong filter. It's the 'glass half full or half empty' syndrome which makes the difference here. Our past decisions and memories of events operate in the same way. If what we are faced with resembles something we have met before then we are likely to have developed response strategies that reflect our original experience - whether that was positive or negative.
Our values and beliefs work at a more unconscious level. They come in very fast at appropriate - and sometimes inappropriate - moments and cause us to make judgements about we will or will not tolerate or take account of.
At the most unconscious level we find