Book Review: Law of Connection by Michael J. Losier

This is a guest post by Allen VanWert, professional musician, author of technical guitar and songwriting books, and student of NLP.

Law of Connection: The Science of Using NLP to Create Ideal Personal and Professional Relationships is from the author Michael J. Losier, the same person who wrote Law of Attraction. He is an NLP practitioner and attempts to simplify verbal communication between humans into four types of speakers/listeners. The neuro linguistic programming (NLP) portions of this book consist of the authors own use of NLP to get you to believe in his system, tell friends about it and get you to “love all of the white space as well as childish illustrations in the book”. He is basically using as many NLP tactics or “tricks” as he can to get you to “buy” his idea and feel like you are in fact part of it. While NLP practitioners are amazing at selling people on ideas or thoughts. I, being a student of NLP, found the tricks contained in this book at first to be quite comical because they are applied in such a blatant fashion, and then quickly off putting. I was hoping the NLP was based around the system itself to gain skill in communication. This however, was not true. The NLP is used as a method to trick you into thinking it will work and that it is based around a valid judgment system for communication.

The only NLP within the system itself is the idea of making a conscious decision to use certain wording to best appeal to a specific audience. The rest of it is common sense that boils down to people liking someone who “mirrors” them verbally. While I can see how this does work, there are some problems with the theory.

Here is an example: Just because someone says “see you tomorrow” Does NOT mean they are a visual type of communicator. They will most likely also often say things like “talk to you soon”, “have a good one” or “we will touch base again soon”. This implies various communicator types at any given moment. Basically, there are very few people who use the indicator statements consistently enough in one “style” that would even allow an accurate judgment on their communicator type.

The second issue I have with this theory is that if you were able to analyze someone and decide what communicator type they are, you would end up being a false representation of yourself just to “get what you want”. This has a bunch of big red flags with the words “malicious, opportunistic, control freak” written all over them to me. Using tricks to make someone else feel at ease with you or tricking them to feel like you are just like them is on the shady side and is why I tend to personally not use NLP or social engineering for the most part.

He gives a very short run through about physical cues and rapport building via mirroring but it lacks the real in depth substance I was expecting.

The book and its ideas are NOT going to make you a better communicator. However, the simple fact that you will have to become more careful in listening to other people and how you word yourself WILL make you a better communicator. If you take time to listen to people in general it will make them like you more anyway, people love to talk about or hear about themselves more than any other topic in the world. When you take more deliberate care in anything you do, including speaking, you will often yield a better result anyway.

The book would be interesting for someone who has no knowledge of neuro linguistic programming. They may “love the white space in the book”, or “tell their friends to also buy it”. I, being someone who already happened to study NLP can see right through the trickery and feel that the content of the book itself is a little shallow and misguided. There are many parts of the short book that are basically copied and pasted over and over and then there were slight modifications to each section for each “communicator type.” There is even a test right after all of the authors own NLP tricks to get you to love his work. This test left me thinking that I may either have a multiple personality disorder or that the authors theory about communication falls flat.

I am led to believe that this work was solely an attempt to generate income and had nothing to do with helping people communicate. It feels rushed, copy-pasted, redundant as a children’s book (see Johnny run, see Johnny play) and above all, the beginning of the book itself being used as one big NLP tactic against the reader was the biggest indicator of greed.

This book could have been summarized in to this short paragraph and would hold the same merit:

Act physically how other people you are communicating with are acting, use the same types of phrases they do, speak at the same speed and really listen to what they are saying before speaking back.

Rating:
Buy the Book!