Integrate!

This weekend, I attended a conference in a self-development model that I quite like.  Sitting in the chairs (instead of standing at the mike) gave me a chance to look at what people liked, what they wanted, and what they engaged with at the conference. What I like about this model is that it encourages people to notice diversity: the big picture is a continual reminder that not everyone in the room thinks like you do and that's okay. What I didn't like about this particular experience was the emphasis on sorting everyone out so that they only really had to engage with people who were most likely to think like them. No one was saying: come to this conference and be safe: no growth or change will happen here. And yet, the structure of the presentations allowed people to sort out some of what was true about themselves without asking them to stretch to accommodate other ways of thinking and without asking them to commit to actions that would create movement and growth.  I atte...

I love to go outside with a camera in the spring. It's a great time to get some perspective on what growth really looks like. Often, people imagine that growth appears fully formed. That's like moving daffodils from the pot to the garden already in bloom. It's real and it's sort of natural, but you're seeing the product, not the growth. Real growth is messier. When you walk in the woods, you see all the dead stuff on the ground with wildflowers poking through the debris. In NLP (neurolinguistic programming) , the period of pushing through the debris is called integration. It's what happens after the course ends and the learning begins to take root. Sometimes it is inconspicuous: it happens in the background while you become really productive in your usual work and life. Sometimes it take more energy. It calls on you to slow down and be patient while all the shifts come into alignment. I've just come through a deep, intense period of learning, throu...