Integrate!

For more than 20 years, I have been teaching people to do public speaking and here's the most important thing I have learned. School gets it backwards. People need to find their message before they can really find their voice. Most of the college students I teach think they hate public speaking. When we work on it a little, they begin to wonder if they hate speaking about stuff they don't know very well and don't care about very much. After all, most of their assignments ask them to make presentations on concepts and information they didn't know anything about a few weeks before. They tell me, "Miss, I still don't like this course. I still don't like public speaking." I tell them that the only thing worse than speaking in front of a room is having something you want to say and not having a voice. Finding a message is fundamental. It's the driving force that makes it worth having a voice. But it's not sufficient. You still have to work...

Well hello, springtime! Imagine this picture in black and white. It's a collection of bushes in full leaf against some trees with a house in the background. That doesn't offer much of a story. It doesn't call out to you to connect. But in full colour, you know that this is the kind of spring day that makes people smile as they pass you on the sidewalk or the trail. In colour, this picture invites you to stand next to me and marvel with me at the blue of the sky and the exuberant yellow of the forsythia. In colour, you know that this is a picture of promise and potential. When you're communicating, you're probably tempted to either avoid the colour (and tell your stories in black and white, just the facts) or to avoid the story (just describe life as it is). The problem with this is that understanding takes an effort and if you want other people to make that effort, you have to give them something that promises the effort will be worth it. Just the facts, t...

https://www.flickr.com/photos/rosedavies/ Is this a picture of sunrise or sunset? We think we know the difference between a beginning and an ending, but it's hard to tell sometimes. I am writing this on Easter Sunday. It's a day for beginning, but it's not a day for a fresh start. The story tells us that rebirth - like birth itself - is messy and terrifying and painful. Christ rises and the women at the tomb are first confused, then terrified, and then joyful. And then they have to tell a story no one will believe. Christ rises with the the memory and the marks of his life. He does not promise a fresh start. Forgiving is not forgetting. He remembers and so do we. Christ rises and although you may not believe in the story, yet you believe the story itself while you hear it. That's how we understand stories: we believe them long enough to learn what happens, to experience a change, to recognize a pattern. This story is about the glory of starting again. This s...

We're all good at knowing what we don't want. Often our anxiety to avoid problems and pain is so present that it drives our communication. We tell people what we don't want. What changes when we get better at simply defining or describing what we do want? We experiment with this every time we run a program at NLP Canada Training.  We start by asking two questions: What do you want to change because you came to this program? What do you want to be true of the group today? Here are the answers from our recent practitioner retreat. It was a full day gathering to explore rhythm as an aspect of leadership. The words at the top described what they wanted for themselves and the words at the bottom described what they wanted from the day.  You can compare them to the words they used at the end of the day to describe their experience. On the one hand, this is nice feedback on the program we ran. On the other, it's a demonstration of the difference it can...

Once upon a time, there was good coffee and homemade banana bread waiting for you early on a weekend morning. Somehow, although the weekend would be full of travel and challenges, time slowed down as you bit into the fresh, soft goodness. It was good. You were good. That's how our story starts. Whenever we gather for a course or event, I bake banana bread. Even the people who don't eat the banana bread like what it means for their weekends: you're starting from home; someone cares; you do have the energy for what you want to accomplish. It's hard to arrange this for yourself. If you bake your own banana bread, it's doesn't come with that little bit of surprise. If you seek it out at a favourite cafe, you get the treat, but not the same sense that it was made with you in mind, that it's reaching out like a hug. The public space is not often an anchor to home, and the public banana bread is not often exactly what we need to take us home. People take m...