Integrate!

Photo by deadfly.media If you're like me, then 2017 already feels like a long time ago. Your eyes are looking deep into the new year, and you've got more to do than you know how to manage. Your days are crowded with too many tasks and too many commitments. And what you really feel like doing most days is to crawl under a duvet and wait for the weather to warm up. How do you stay on course when you're feeling the stress and the time crunch? You might think it's all about managing your time better. If you just stick to those 15 minute increments in your crammed agenda, you'll get everything done. You've probably got an app for that, or maybe a book or two with different systems for staying on task. But if all that was working for you, you would not be reading this. You're reading this in the hope that one more post will give you one idea that actually works so you can keep your head above water and stick to your plans for the new year. And I'm goin...

Mike Malone Sextet at The Steel City Jazz Festival There are two good reasons that I both sponsor and attend The Steel City Jazz Festival.  One is that my kid runs the festival. It was his dream and he has made it real for the past four years. Hanging out with anyone who has achieved a dream is inspiring. Hanging out with your kid while he makes his dream real is a rare and wonderful opportunity. The second good reason that I like to listen to improvised jazz is that it reminds me that a VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) situation could be really good fun. I took this picture last night while watching a sextet stand in the shoes of giants as they played the music from Miles Davis's Kind of Blue recording. If you're not a jazz fan, here is what that means. For more than an hour they played very famous jazz pieces and they were improvising. Notice that,  in language, this already doesn't make sense. How can you play a well-known piece and improvis...

I met with two business people this week. Both were the kind of people you would want working on your team: professional, committed, interesting. And both of them were engaged in work that had only the fuzziest of purposes. It makes you wonder how much our economic reality would change if we gave everyone the benefit of a clear, compelling purpose for their work. It's hard to be productive when there is no clear criteria for knowing you have done a good job and no real (I mean something you can see!) result for doing the work. No matter how much you want to work, a 'why' makes a big difference. It's my pet peeve with people seeking training. "We are interested in some training in NLP," the voice on the phone says. And my instincts say "run!" Because people who won't commit to a purpose are unlikely to achieve a purpose and 'some training' is not a purpose. I ask them "what will change if this training goes as well as it can possi...

As 2014 approaches, I am aware that I must soon sit down and put together my year end video. It's often a little unnerving to look ahead, especially since by the end of December I am tired and ready to climb into a burrow for some quiet alone time. I think winter brings that out in a lot of people. My job is to tempt people out of their burrows so that they forget to think about being comfortable and think instead about what could engage their full attention in a way that is satisfying and productive. Life is less about being and more about doing and I work to get people very busy being more fully alive. This means that I only get to retreat into a burrow when it is to be very engaged with deep, internal process that will eventually break through to cause more action. I have been reading other people's NLP practitioner manuals and guides, and I still believe that everything I teach is compatible with the best in NLP practice. Not everything is the best, and not everything i...

When you were a kid, there were two situations in which you might be bored. One was at home where there was no structure to long days off and you might complain that 'there's nothing to do.' If you were bored at home, it was your fault. The antidote was clear. You needed to change your actions (go outside and play - at least in the olden days) so that your attitude were change. If you were bored at school, the rules were quite different. If you were bored at school, the consensus was that it was probably your teacher's fault. It was your teacher's job to engage you and interest you and supply you with activities. If you were bored, the teacher wasn't doing enough or wasn't doing the right things or was not supported by the right kind of system. The antidote was for the teacher to change or for you to change schools or systems so that you could be engaged enough to learn what you needed to learn. The system pays teachers to engage students. That seems pre...