Integrate!

© Can Stock Photo / 4774344sean Much of the NLP (neurolinguistic programming) course I teach is about how we pay better attention to get better results. This is most important when your results include cooperation or influence. Whether you want to be a better parent or reach your next career goal, the way you pay attention will make the biggest difference to your success. But what do we mean by paying attention? Our natural attention is fickle: it bounces quickly from what is in front of us to other situations (past and present) to what we want to make happen next. It's hard for us to stay present to what someone else is experiencing because our natural mode is to process what they are expressing in terms of what it might mean for us. This reinforces our beliefs and our current skills at the expense of growing to connect with new information and abilities. It also interferes with our ability to comfort, collaborate or lead. We can't see attention, but we can see sign

© Can Stock Photo / aaronamat All day, every day, you say things that you don't mean. It's not that you are lying. It's that we all use verbal markers while we think. We say "um" or "hmmm" or we say things like "no" when we mean "I haven't thought about it like that before." Our brains move faster than our mouths, and while we are processing, we make sounds that mostly just mean "I'm processing." Why not replace those sounds you make while you are thinking with some form of the word "yes?" Yes is a word that means: "I am listening. I want to connect. I want to agree."  It doesn't mean I necessarily agree with what you just said. Yes is the beginning of the story, not the end. I can follow it with another step. And that step might invite you to go in a new direction.  When I start with "yes," what you hear is a desire to connect safely. That's because your brain (