Integrate!

Have you visited www.freerice.com yet? It is a vocabulary game (you are given a word and four possible meanings and asked to choose the right one) and a charity (for every correct answer, sponsors donate 20 grains of rice (recently increased from 10) to a United Nations agency. It is addictive. The game is addictive because it is very good at calibrating your vocabulary and providing you with words that are just outside your comfort zone. Reports are that this is true for a wide variety of vocabulary levels. My own background means I play the game at high levels (Shakespeare, Anglo Saxon and French all help). What intrigues me is how often I can "guess" the right answer for a word I don't know and have no memory of having ever seen before. It is possibly good practice for my vocabulary. It is definitely good practice for my experience of accessing information at the edge of my awareness. Think about how often you "almost" know the solution to a problem. How u...

Do you ever feel that seasons were carved out of the flow of time by people living entirely different lives than yours? They were, of course, unless you are currently engaged in archaic forms of agriculture and living in the Mediterranean. Either we have too many seasons or too few. Canadians on the whole are less interested in the cycles of agriculture than the cycles of sunshine: we have light months, dark months and bright months. The light months last from May to October. The dark months are November, December, March and usually April. The bright months are not months at all: they are just the few days between November and April when the sun shines down on bright, white snow. They are the days when we like winter. So, as you will have noticed, in Canada we really have two seasons: light and dark. On light days, we feel better. We smile more. We believe the world to be a mostly friendly place. On dark days, gloom creeps into every corner of our thoughts. We are skeptical. We ar...

It is not Thanksgiving in Canada. We cleverly schedule it while the weather still encourages a state of gratitude - while the harvest is all around us and the sun might be shining. Today the sun was shining on the ice. I could live without reminders to shop for Christmas (I might even get the requisite shopping done without the reminders). I could not live well without reminders to be thankful. Without the glorious sense of connection and blessing that comes when I am thankful, my life would be much less. Someone was upset with me this week because he believed a study had proven that prayer doesn't work. The study had proven that prayer doesn't work the way the experimenters thought it might. That did not upset my belief. Prayer works for me. It works in me when I connect my sense of who I am with a sense of what the world might be. It works for me when it carries a group past difference to a point of rich and effective connection. The best prayers are often thankful - espec...

Think about your work. If you had only a few words to describe what you do, what would you say? Your company might have a mission statement; you might have a job description or an elevator pitch. You know what you do. Now think again. If you had only a few words to describe what you want from the work you will do today, what would you say? What shifts when you think about working today in terms of what you want instead of thinking in terms of some higher level purpose? Today, I want the people with whom I connect - readers, students, colleagues - to enjoy feeling more wide awake.

What if you were to listen to your next meeting at work with the same quality of attention you give your favourite music? Imagine yourself at a concert. Even before the music begins, you are absorbing the rhythms of the crowd, getting in sync in dozens of ways. As the music begins, your eyes move across the stage, across the crowd. Your body moves, subtly or more obviously. Your breathing changes. Your mind goes where the music leads you. You hear the words as part of the music, one seamless invitation to become part of the flow. Now imagine yourself at a meeting. Imagine being conscious of the rhythms in the room as people come in and sit down. Imagine noticing that you can pick up the beat that will dominate, or you can select a less dominant beat and join it. Notice the way people look, and then draw back and notice yourself mirroring their gestures, their postures, their expressions. Notice as one person speaks that your attention can move effortlessly between the speaker and the...

Recently, I have been reading Emotional Intelligence (first published 1995) and Social Intelligence (published 2006) by Daniel Goleman. What I find remarkable is how little they add to what we actually teach in our NLP courses. Take, for instance, this quote from Social Intelligence: The more two people unconsciously synchronize their movements and mannerisms during their interaction, the more positively they will feel about their encounter - and about each other. Goleman goes on to say that this doesn't hold true if one person intentionally mimics another. I wonder how long he thinks one can be artificial in matching or mirroring outside the confines of an experiment. I often put rooms of strangers together and watch them go into deep rapport within an evening. They begin with intentional mirroring and within only a few minutes, they are deeply engaged in the natural process that Goleman describes. A better explanation for the experimental results, given Goleman's celebrat...

The pace of life can be crazy, and the distance between Monday morning and Friday evening seems to get shorter all the time. It could be part of the aging process- I know that time speeds up as we slow down - but my kids tell me the same thing. We are all rushing from one project or appointment to the next; we are all caught up in a current that makes it harder to stop than to keep moving. Within the current, it requires enormous strength and effort to change direction or to slow down. The point of rest is the point at which we are able to relax and go with the flow, to exert just enough force to keep our heads above water. The way to go with the flow is typically to take relaxed, regular breaths and to relax all the muscles that are not acting to keep our heads up. The easiest way to change direction, or to rest in one place, is to step out of the current. Since the current that is pushing us forward is the product of our expectations interacting with the world's expectations, we ...

That's what my back told me Friday. Apparently teaching really was back-breaking work last week. I woke up unable to straighten up. It was definitely time to stop moving forward and think. There was a time when I believed thinking involved words and clarity and perhaps writing or charts. There was a time when I would have assumed that what I was reading about was what I was thinking. There was a time when I thought that resting and thinking were different activities. It aint necessarily so. Sometimes I still think in words - lots of them. And sometimes what I am reading makes me sit up straight and take note. On Friday, and through this weekend, thinking meant allowing my body to be still and the voice in my head to chatter. I knew the real work was going on underground - I could feel the current of thought and preparation moving just below the noise I was hearing. When it needed more space, I went to sleep. Sometimes there is top much to do to be busy. Sometimes the fastest way ...

Good moods, while they last, enhance the ability to think flexibly and with more complexity, thus making it easier to find solutions to problems, whether intellectual or personal. This suggests that one way to help someone think through a problem is to tell them a joke. Laughing, like elation, seems to help people think more broadly and associate more freely, noticing relationships that might have eluded them otherwise--a mental skill important not just in creativity, but in recognizing complex relationships and foreseeing the consequences of a given decision. Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence Too often, it seems to me, serious thinkers mistake being serious for thinking seriously. Reading about emotions is almost always discouraging. Psychologists usually maintain a therapeutic predisposition to see the world as a series of disturbances and dysfunctions. In general, they seem sure that human beings are predisposed to a wide variety of miseries relieved by occasional moments of (...

The interesting thing about blindspots is that they are so well camouflaged that we are very seldom aware of them. It's especially hard to notice their edges. You might be aware that you do not have eyes in the back of your head, and so you have quite a large blind spot whenever you are in the middle of something. You might even be aware that your peripheral vision is a bit blurry and your foveal (focused) vision is a bit slow - so that you catch movement best out of the corner of your eye and edges best straight on. So you know that what you see clearly is not even close to the whole picture. You have to make mental adjustments in order to live in a world with nicely defined edges. What you cannot notice - except theoretically - is that you also regularly create visual information to replace information that should be there but is not. There are places (one per eye) in your field of vision that you cannot see because of the way your eye and brain process information. This is n...