Integrate!

This is how February feels in Toronto. If you're not from a northern city, remember this picture as you read the rest of the post. Those of you who love #nlp  might have noticed something in the sentence above. I said that the picture could show you how February feels (not how it looks).  As I am writing, February looks like a bright blue sky shining on clean white snow. It's postcard pretty.  But it's not how most people are feeling in February. Here's a short story about how February becomes the month of frustration. It's cold and icy and still quite dark, so people stay inside. They don't get out to see as many people (the people at the mall or the park make a difference even if you don't talk to them). They don't move as much (who wants to go for a walk when the temperature is below zero, the wind is freezing your face, and there is ice underfoot? They are often slightly chilled (building heating is imperfect) and surrounded by people wh...

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...

I have been reading an NLP book. I won't say which one, only that it includes many instructions that include what I would call a false precision. Let me give you an example. Anchoring is a technique that associates a particular physical stimulus with a state, memory or behaviour. In NLP, anchoring is widely used to stabilize, modify or create states that are suitable for particular situations or tasks. Many instructions will tell you to set an anchor just before an experience peaks. This is nonsense. You only know the peak by the descent from it. You cannot set an anchor just before an experience peaks because you do not have access to that level of detail about the future, nor can you read someone else's state so accurately that you notice the difference between at the peak and just past the peak. You can pretend to accuracy, but not achieve it. I know that the people who write this stuff believe they have developed a meaningful level of precision. There is just a lot of...