Integrate!

We often think that the only way to deal with an intellectual or emotional situation is to be very, very serious. When we are sufficiently tense, we know that we are focused. When we are one hundred percent committed, we know that we are doing everything in our power to come to grips with difficulty. Well, almost everything. I was once a soccer player. Soccer is a contact sport. It's important to be able to take a fair hit and stay on your feet and ready for action. If you are one hundred percent committed and one hundred percent tense, you are likely to end up with one hundred percent of your bum on the ground. If you want to take the hit and keep moving, you need to be relaxed, ready, and flexible.

Lots of people have talked and written enthusiastically - and sometimes even knowledgeably - about strategic thinking. Google the phrase and you'll find almost 1.2 million sites. If you google "disciplined thinking" instead, you'll find less than 30,000 references. Both strategy and discipline are systematic approaches to problem solving and achievement. Why is strategy so much more popular than discipline? Typically, people use the word "strategic" to describe two kinds of activity: 1) activities that do not seem to serve an immediate purpose that are described as having a value that overrides short-term priorities or 2) activities that yield immediate advantage although they are not part of plans or routines. In other words, strategic is a term that often allows one to have the cake and eat it too - it offers both a reason to stay on task and an excuse to be distracted. Discipline is a much tougher word. Discipline means accepting a set of rules and prac...

We learn in two ways: 1) anything that has strong emotional impact is recorded so that we can easily remember it; 2) anything that gets repeated becomes easier to remember. So something with some emotional impact that gets repeated should be relatively easy to learn. Only relatively easy, because most adults have enough experience of life to have developed some cross-wiring (pre-existing connections that make learning some things harder). One habit that has been burned into our learning is the default position "Let me tell you what's wrong." It occurs is so many settings that 'constructive criticism' and 'problem solving' is no longer a way of thinking - it's an instinct that gets engaged automatically. We see someone who is stuck or struggling or slow and we say, "let me tell you what's wrong." Now that you are aware of this tendency, you can have more choice. Try this today. Catch yourself just before you tell someone what is wrong wit...

How do you recognize the story someone else is living? The answer is often to listen "as if" you were considering a play or movie. A play or a movie has a script: everything that is part of the script fits an overall narrative pattern. Particular phrases, characteristic responses and images are not just free-floating bits of information: in a script, each of these has meaning. Listening as if life were a script allows us to notice connections that we would otherwise miss. The first step is to assign part of your mind to follow the conversation as if you were an observer and not an active participant. From this point of view, you can listen for recurring themes, words or images. As you listen, allow yourself to reflect what you notice - to repeat words, phrases or tones that seem to you significant. Do not worry that this influence direction as much as it follows it. There is no such thing as clean language: all language is part of a complicated interweaving of verbal and non...

It's evident that there is a connection between telling a story and being a great leader: business writers frequently describe famous CEOs as master storytellers. Most give only a vague sense of what it means to tell a story (or sell a story) and why it is a key ingredient of leadership. In groups of people, the natural leader is the person with the strongest outcome. Outcomes (goals) are a source of tremendous strength: they provide a clear path for people to follow, and people will follow that path unless they have a compelling reason of their own for choosing a different path. The clearest path is the path of least resistance: it attracts all the flow of energy that is not already moving through a channel. The strongest outcome wins. What is the strongest outcome? It is the outcome that is most fully imagined: the one that includes the most sensory detail, the most complete ecology check, and the best sense that it is possible to get there from here. The form of that imagining ...

If a film crew had been wandering the halls of the college where I am teaching, we would have a record today of the difference between conventional teaching and integrated thinking. In one classroom, a teacher would be very competent as she walked students through the basic structure of presentation making. In another, students are laughing, talking, and using paint programs to customize graphics. Those students are learning by doing, and what they are learning is that presentations tell stories. Those students are using powerpoint to illustrate true life stories from their own experience of being a kid or interacting with kids. At first, they are sure this has nothing to do with business. Later, as they are instructed to draw "morals" from their stories, they come up with the staples of management theory: Listen to your boss - s/he is quite often right Don't walk on thin ice Share ideas so they don't end up splattered all over Don't shoot at hippos (my favouri...

What is business? That's how I open classes on business communication. Even young students are able to answer that business is an exchange of goods or service for the purpose of generating profit. Their minds begin to open when I start asking questions about the implications of profit. Profit means expecting everything to be worth more than you pay for it. If the purpose of business is profit, then it is fair for your boss or client to expect you to generate more value than the fees s/he pays in exchange. At the same time, the profit drive also means that you expect more value in exchange for your labour than that labour is worth. Both parties cannot profit from the same exchange if the pie remains the same size. The pie never remains the same. Sometimes it shrinks and sometimes it grows: it is always changing. That is the nature of the world. Growth is sometimes a good thing and sometimes means that you need to buy new jeans after Christmas. This is also the nature of the world. ...

There is, I think, an interesting disconnect between the way we train our minds and the way we train our bodies. The disconnect begins in our concept of learning. Most of us think that learning means the acquisition of new information or skills. One moment you do not know, the next moment you have learned. You have acquired something. So far so good. If what you have learned involves physical skill, like riding a bike or ice skating, we do not assume that learning is the same as training. You may have learned to skate when you were five years old: if forty years have now passed without you skating, we asume you will be rusty at best. At worst, we would expect to have to learn all over again. If you skated every day for forty years, what would you be doing? Would you be training your muscles? Would you still be learning new things about skating? Most people accept that physical skills require repetition. You do not have to skate everyday to learn to skate; you have to skate frequently...

A client sent me a quotation today because it reminded her of our teaching. The quotation is from Hamlet: "Nothing's either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." I first learned it many years ago, when I was a high school student with a very good English teacher. Like all short quotations, there is much it cannot say - it is true in that all of our experience is ultimately internal - nothing hurts until we think about it. It does not seem to be true if we take it to mean that we have absolute freedom to choose our experience. Some things do not have a bright side, and others cost more than they should. We need to discern differences. What is the difference between a work day and a holiday? My son recently performed in Our Town, a play by Thornton Wilder. In that play, the main character is describing two women in typical middle-class early 20th century households. He notices that they work without break, caring for their families and cooking, and do not consider themsel...

I spent the afternoon at a very nice spa today. It was an important way to connect with people I love, and so I went to the spa although it is not my favourite way to spend either time or money. I do believe that it is hugely important to rest and recharge in order to be in a state I want to maintain. It is just that I believe a spa should do more than polish my nails or clean out my pores. Next weekend, people will work through the first weekend of our practitioner training, our Focus on Strengths weekend. They are likely to leave feeling like they have visited a very nice spa: the knots in the muscles will loosen; they'll breathe a little more easily; and they'll see the world a little more clearly. They will value the rest they have earned. They will experience all these feelings while being completely engaged and active. There are very few times in the training when a participant gets to be worked on by other people - the practitioners guiding the process are collaborator...

Among my current reading is a book called The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius, by Nancy Andreasen. Andreasen separates creativity into two camps: the ordinary creativity possessed by all, and the extraordinary creativity which is sometimes called genius. The distinction, she says, is in the way that people of genius access their unconscious mind - the rich web of associations that links things that have not been linked before until order emerges. Setting goals is a creative act: we focus attention on something that does not yet exist until we bring it into being. To the extent that we treat it like a creative act - an act of reaching into rapid, random unconscious process and allowing order to emerge - we create goals that are compelling and achievable. These goals are quite different than those that are produced by making obvious links between obvious next steps, often under a certain amount of pressure from other people. They are quite different from what the poet Yeats ca...

Look at the title of this post again. Is it my greeting to the new year, or a suggestion that you approach it with the same offer of hospitality you would make to a guest in your home? Language is never as clear as it seems: it offers us choices and we make its meaning together. The new year offers us the same blend of what is given to us and what we contribute to make it meaningful. Some of the conditions of the year are already set: you know something of what waits for you when you go back to work, something of your family circumstances. Some of it may be set in fate: surprises (good and bad) that can neither be predicted nor controlled. The rest of the year waits for you to make your contribution, to shift meaning and context, to add humour or emphasis or effort. 2007 is here, whether you welcome it or not. Each day, another page turns on calendars all over the world - if they can be turned back, we do not yet know how to do it. You have many of the materials out of which this year...