Integrate!

On November 29, NLP Canada Training will hold its 6th annual HOPE symposium. The symposium is a day-long conversation about how to make people believe that good things are possible. This year, the theme is Don't Go with the Flow: Go with Desire! Desire is a faintly naughty word, a word that suggests that there is something you want that is primal and primary. Somewhere deep within you, something resonates and you are willing to cross boundaries and build new connections so you can satisfy that wanting. It means something, although you cannot say what it means, and it brings out the best in you. It's that thing deep inside that pushes teams to championships and individuals to work the extra hour, to take chances, to hang in when there seems to be no chance of success. If you think that either you have "it" or you don't, then you haven't thought hard enough. Everyone has a capacity for desire, for longing, for wanting something out of reach. Even people w...

It's been a rough week for Canadians. We were shocked out of complaints about the stock market and the weather by a gunman who killed a young soldier and then walked into the Parliament buildings and began to shoot. As such things go, we were lucky. It could have been much, much worse. The Canadians on site were calm and caring and clear about doing what needed to be done. The people who represented us in this crisis were chosen (MPs and staff and military and police) and they were random - people who were going about their lives and found themselves in the middle of something terrible and frightening. There are people who say that things will have to change now. I would say that we are doing something very right. Read this article and know that in a crisis, we hold up.   Look at the pictures of our leaders marching back into the House of Commons and hugging. Under all the noise and venom, there's something pretty right going on here when we respond to a crisis this wa...

I know. You don't want to be resilient. You don't want to have courage. You don't even want to have hope. You want to win every time out of the gate. You want the business to grow steadily and the ground you walk on to be covered with fresh rose petals. You want to do the right thing and know the right thing to say and you want to be right. Tough luck. Even if you got all those things today and tomorrow and the next day, you would know that change was coming. And change frequently feels like getting knocked on your fanny. The world is nothing if not tough love. The hardest thing to teach sales people ( and, as Dan Pink says, we are all in sales ) is to put aside their longing to have more control over other people and spend some time learning what they will need to bounce. I know that people come to me hoping that I will teach them magic words and powerful strategies for getting what they want. In fact, I really can show them stuff about themselves that does feel mag...

This is a reframe. For those of you familiar with NLP (neurolinguistic programming) , a reframe is the first step towards a shift. If you're new to NLP, a reframe is a new context for information that allows you to see new choices so that you can get different results. "Just ten minutes" is an excuse about to happen, a reason for not doing anything because you can think of things that would take longer than ten minutes to do well. The reframe is that ten minutes is a unit of time that can hold just one thing. And one thing is about the capacity of the human mind to do well at one time. If you have ten minutes, you have ten full minutes (not just ten). And in ten minutes, you could play a game on your phone, or grab something from the fridge or browse Facebook. Or you could write an email, make a call to connect with someone, or write a blog post. Ten minutes isn't long; it is long enough. It's been a long time now (at least ten years) since I first noticed t...

This is a story about what is different in me now that I have been teaching and studying NLP for more than 10 years. I teach several classes a week at Sheridan College in Mississauga. It's a twenty-minute drive by highway (on good days) or about 35 minutes when avoiding highways (which are not always reliable). My plan on Wednesday was to avoid highways (since my car was going into the shop for new brakes today) and so I knew I would need to leave about 55 minutes to get there in time to pick up a Starbucks and get into my room just as the previous teacher was leaving. About 20 minutes before I needed to leave, I put my keys next to my phone and thought "I'll put my purse here too and I'll be set for a quick getaway."  But my purse wasn't in any of its usual places.  In fact, it quickly became obvious (my house is quite small) that my purse was nowhere to be found. By now, I had to put on my make up and head for the door. Steady hand required. As I reach...