Integrate!

I was at McMaster last night for a performance of Macbeth . My son was acting, so I am not an impartial reviewer. He has always found me a tough but friendly critic. Last night, I enjoyed watching the way these young minds, mostly men, were interacting with the text. Power is intriguing - always. Power and violence are especially intriguing to young men. Throughout their lives, as they remember them, someone else has had the power. They might have had strength or agility or intelligence, but they have never had power - not the kind of power that exists beyond a very small circle. Now, as they prepare to leave university and enter the world, they look up (especially the young men) and notice that they will one day look very much like the people in power. They will have power. It is not an easy thought. To have power is to become one of "them." To live without power is to be vulnerable and, more importantly, to fail to live up to the potential they know is in them. How can t...

People are either intrigued or vaguely put off when they find out that I run courses in hypnosis. Much of the emotion comes from misconceptions about what hypnosis is and when it is useful. Some people think hypnosis can be used to get people to do things they are not otherwise ready or willing to do. This is true in some ways. Mostly it is untrue. There's just not much evidence that neat hypnotic language patterns sneak in and influence people to do stuff that someone else wants them to do. There's not much evidence that anyone is always good at influence. Other people think that hypnosis is nonsense. It is mostly about getting people to make fools of themselves on a stage. This belief usually includes a reluctance to consider unconscious processes or to consider that people make choices based on anything other than logic (or it's opposite). This is also not true. There is lots of evidence that there is a relationship between what we know (our conscious awareness) and ...

Most people enjoy puzzles - at least the ones that they solve. Put a jigsaw puzzle on a table and most of the people who walk by will find themselves drawn to adding at least one piece to the puzzle. Every newspapers carries crosswords and sudoku puzzles. Puzzles are a way of problem-solving for fun. Another way of problem-solving for fun is to make connections between what you want and the best interests of the people around you. The challenge is not to manipulate others into giving you what you want. The challenge is to find the places where your puzzle and their puzzles overlap - the pieces that belong to all the puzzles. Those are the pieces that create great relationships - and great results. How do you know there is overlap? The joy of jigsaws and crossword puzzles is that we know there is a solution. The same thing is true of riddles: we know we can solve them because we know they have a solution. Can we know that there will be overlap between what we want and what somebody...

Sales is both an art and a science: there are lots of process-driven, metric-driven practices for measuring success in sales. If any of them worked perfectly, there would be fewer of them. No one can say for sure that you will or will not make a sale on any given day. Occasionally, I buy something because I need it NOW. On those occasions, relationships don't matter as much as the availability of the product at a price I am willing to pay. Most of the time, relationship is the only thing that matters. Without some kind of positive connection, I will not be around long enough to know whether or not your product is worth buying. When you connect with me - when you show a) that you are interested in connecting with me and b) that you are at least partly capable of understanding my priorities, then I am willing to think about whether I trust you enough to do business. If I trust you enough, we can talk about the product. Of course, if the relationship is truly engaging, the sale will b...

A friend recently asked me to remember what it was like to be on a winning team. Fair enough. I did win a provincial championship one year (playing soccer). It's reasonable to assume that I was playing on a great team, a winning team. Except that I wasn't. We won sometimes. We lost quite often. We were interested in all the things that interest teenage girls. Sometimes that included soccer. We were not high performing. But. We won. One of the reasons we enjoy sports is that the high performing teams are sometimes out-performed by teams that have just enough heart and just enough luck to win a few games. They frustrate the high performing teams but they give the rest of us a special kind of excitement. I coached a house league team of thirteen year old boys one year. They lost a lot of games. One father who spoke almost no English cornered me after a game we lost 9-1. He kept saying over and over "this not good." No kidding. But. Everyone gets a shot in the p...

I'm currently doing a lot of work on resilience - more than I would like in some ways. Working on resilience means beginning with the presupposition that stuff is going to go wrong. Or recognizing that stuff is going wrong. Either way, resilience is not entirely a desirable gift. Unless you do not have enough of it. We've all been there. The days when we get knocked down and we have no idea how to get up again. The days when we look up and realize we have no idea where we are or where we were going. Those days. On those days, we scrape together whatever resilience we can find - sometimes without worrying much about whether it's enough or where it came from. We take one step, hoping it's the right direction. We look in the mirror and muster some curiosity about what we see there. It can seem that building resilience is like asking for trouble. It can seem like a good plan will get us by without the need for so much resilience. It can seem like we can cut corners. We...

In the midst of an endless to-do list (even on Sunday afternoon), I stopped at the garden centre and bought two pots of tulips and one of hyacinth. Some of the tulips are just starting to bloom. I replaced the dried flowers in the vases in my living room with pussy willows and lavender and roses. They sit under a print of one of our favourite parts of the north shore of Prince Edward Island. Hurry up please. It's time. It's time for spring. It's time for maple sugar and pussy willows and puddle-stomping. It's time for mucky yards and raindrops and grey skies and blue skies. It's time for knowing that life shoots up in us at the least likely moments. Hurry up please. It's time. It's time for vibrant signs that we do not need a new beginning - because what we want has been biding its time and waiting for us and with us. Hurry up please. It's time.

A young man accused me last week (in writing, not in person) of mistaking him for being more intellectual than he is. Than he thinks he is. I am unshaken in my belief that he is clever and enthusiastic and funny and capable. He will find as he gets older that he is not only not smarter than lots of the people he would dismiss today, he is also smarter than he thinks he is. It is rare for me to meet anyone who is open to learning and not like them. When was the last time you looked around and noticed how many people you really like? It goes against our hard-wiring: we are more easily able to notice the people who hurt us, the people who endanger us, the people who make us afraid. We like the people we like without thinking about it. Sometimes we like them without thinking about them. Think about them. Let yourself notice that even though nobody is perfect and there are things you would change, you like lots of people. Just as they are. Just as you are.

I was thinking about seeing and believing this week. It's funny how the concept sticks, even in a world where seeing should not mean believing. Much of what we see - at least what we see on screens - is fabricated. It's an elaborate game of make-believe, often even when it pretends to be true. It's not so much that we believe what we see as it is that we find it hard to trust what we cannot see. And there are at least three categories of things we cannot see. The first is easy: things we cannot see because they have no tangible presence in a physical world. This category includes abstractions - like love or justice - and it also includes everything that is not real or present at a given moment. The second category is more difficult. I was reminded of it this morning listening to a brain scientist describe her experience of a stroke. She said she remembers looking at a business card and seeing only pixels: her eyes picked up the information but her mind refused to m...

I heard a news item today about a possible strike at the TTC. A local news station was doing a survey: “Should the TTC be an essential service?” The consensus seemed to be no. It made me wonder what would make a service essential. People without cars need to get to work - often more than the people who can afford to drive cars. I imagine most of us think that the surgeon is essential to our surgery. We probably even recognize that the nurses and technologists are essential. We want to be confident that life support machines will support our lives when needed. We do not always remember that the janitor is also essential to a successful surgery. We remember only when we hear the statistics on how many people die after successful surgeries because hospitals are not as antiseptic as they should be. Viruses and bacteria spread quickly unless they are cleaned to death. Who kills the germs when the janitor cannot get to work?

Do it. Buy tulips and daffodils - or shiny new golf balls. Treat yourself to a pedicure - as if someone were actually going to see your toes. Walk through a garden centre. March is not spring in Canada. Not usually and certainly not now. No matter. Pretend. It's easy. Drink lemonade or eat a popsicle. If absolutely necessary, find the blender and make a marguerita. Put spring into your step by taking a step toward spring.

What generates enough energy in you that you willingly work late nights and early mornings? Of course sleep is important. There is a limit to how often we can burn the candle at both ends. But sometimes we do. Something gives us the energy. Something keeps us moving. When we are lucky, it's the work itself. Whether someone assigns it to us or we create it, whether we have a deadline or an inspiration, the right work generates energy. Our passion, our attention, our will power is fueled by good work. We know now that the brain gets tired from being underused: when it is stimulated, it produces resources. Eventually you will be tired. You might be really tired. Your body will tell you its time to let unconscious process do its work more quickly than it can while you are awake. But what a rush it is to work late because you love the work.