Дмитрий Коренев

Should you confide in your children? Let them in on the secrets of your private life? Answer questions like "Mum, why did you two quarrel?", "Dad, why did you split up?", "How are the two of you getting along?", "What’s going on in your love life?" The answer:

In this article we take a close look, with examples, at what Sleight of Mouth patterns are and when to use them. They are verbal templates, tactical manoeuvres that let you glide gently onto another subject in an argument or under attack. If you do not like the subject of the conversation, find another one, fast.

Sigmund Freud laid the foundations of modern psychology. Eric Berne's transactional analysis and most of the tenets of neuro-linguistic programming are built on his discoveries. Reading Freud's paper ‘The Unconscious’, I could not shake off a feeling of déjà vu and the suspicion that in the past hundred years psychologists have not come up with anything new. They have merely renamed things, deepened them a little and broadened them. But Freud is no writer of light fiction.

How should you behave under interrogation? It does not have to be at a police station. In a mobbing situation the one doing the “questioning” may be your boss. When someone says, “This is an absolute disgrace, nothing has been tidied up here!”, or you come to your manager and he says, “Irresponsible! You have prepared nothing!” — formally that is just the speaker's personal opinion of the situation, addressed to no one. It is a provocation, an invitation to answer without thinking. The one who answers first is the one who falls for it.