Integrate!

There are many sources of information on how to balance life and work, as if being paid for something automatically meant being less alive while you do it.  Work involves effort that gets results, and life involves staying alive, which often involves making money, which means doing work. What you are doing at work - right now, in the job for which you earn money - is your life's work. It's the work you do with your breath and your thought and your time and your effort. It's a big part of who you are and how you are and even how you relate to friends or family.  Your life's work is your work. And despite the best efforts at contracting out and delegating, you can't make more of your life to make up for the life you give to your work. As human beings, we all come with a built in program for our life's work. We are all highly sensitive to our connectedness to other people (whether or not we see that as a benefit). Our life's work is to have influence on the...

I've been thinking about how to communicate value to people. Should I just be saying that if you come to one of my programs, you will get to think in really cool ways? It's true. I create experiences that open people up to new thoughts in a way that feels really good. But that doesn't tell people how I solve problems. I do show people that they can solve problems. And in thinking about the problems they solve or could solve or might want to solve, I've realized that every human day wakes up every morning with just two problems: How will I spend my time? How will I live with other people? These are the two non-negotiable conditions of human life for everyone regardless of location, experience, background, etc. etc. etc.  What will call life is continuous with what we call time: we cannot make more of it. Once we have used it, it is gone. How we spend our time is how we are spending our lives, and time moves regardless of whether we are intentional or ready or int...

I've noticed that we do not often talk about sadness. We talk about depression (it's a disease) sometimes about grief (there's counselling for that). We do not talk about what it's like to be sad or how sadness enriches our lives and perspectives. We do not talk about how sadness slows us down and interrupts our thought patterns and makes a change in us. I'm sad today. There are lots of reasons, good reasons. Some are old reasons, anchored to this time of year. Others are current heartaches. Some are not really my own, but they are close enough. And some are things that have not happened yet (but they will happen one day). One of my most firmly held beliefs in life (and presuppositions in my work in NLP) is that we are here to live our lives, not escape from them. Sadness has a place in my life because I have (almost always) stopped trying to outthink my life or work around it. So today, I am agreeing to feel the tightness and tenderness around my heart, to be...

If you are not a geek, it's possible you either haven't heard of Doctor Who or have only a vague sense of a campy sort of show that features time travel. If you've tried to sample just one episode, you might have found it quite confusing and decided to watch something else that required less research to make sense of the action. Two years ago, my son gave me Series 1 as a Christmas gift, and we watched the episodes mostly while on summer holiday. I liked it quite well, but I wasn't quite hooked. Last year, I started watching episodes on television or on the computer shortly after they aired. I liked it better, but I wasn't quite hooked. This winter, I had a cough that lasted forever and I decided I needed to take a break each day. That's when I got hooked. I have to rematch the episodes I had already seen, but I have worked my way through most of series 1 through 7. That's why I finally understood the nature of the blue box that carries the Doctor t...