Integrate!

How many times a day do you hear what someone says and wish you understood what they meant. Vocabulary is one kind of language barrier: if you don't understand the words being said, it's hard to grasp an overall meaning. But sometimes language itself is the barrier: you understand all the words and yet they don't add up to understanding what is being said. You are focused on the words and losing the message. There's a better way to listen so that you understand. Before you get caught up in what the words mean, pay attention to the experience of the communicator. Notice changes in their emotions or attitudes as they speak. Where are they more tense or more relaxed? What changes do their words trigger in them? These changes carry as much of the message as the dictionary meaning of the words. The best listeners don't worry about the meaning of the words until they have a good idea how those words are changing the speaker. Here's an exercise. With people we know...

I've been at the beach. As you can see, it's not a metaphorical beach. This picture was taken in the national park on the north shore of Prince Edward Island. The bird in the foreground is a real seagull. This beach is a metaphor. It tells me exactly what I want in my experience as I encounter the clouds and the sunshine, the wind and the sand and the waves of life. It speaks to a paradoxical balance of elements, a balance of focus and soft edges, a balance of ground and flight. If you asked me to describe what I want REALLY, I would stumble and hesitate. I would contradict myself and backtrack. I would have commitment issues. If you asked me to tell you about this beach, you would know exactly what I choose as my experience and who I am choosing to be as I move forward. This is my desired future. But my desired future is not to stay on vacation - it's to bring this paradox into the clutter and contradiction and productivity that is my work and my life and my...

What do you see when you look at this picture?  I took it on the road between Pacific Rim National Park and Port Alberni. It's a twisting, turning drive that reminds you how hard it is even now to make one's way through the mountains. The beauty combined with the twists and turns can put a passenger into a kind of trance. The camera interrupts the flow. It reminds me to look at something instead of everything. I'm just starting to experiment with a camera, to move beyond "spray and pray" with a point and click and work at seeing through the camera. The point is not to take pretty pictures (although that helps with social media posts). The point is to understand how what we see is a composition - an interaction between what is there and how we choose to frame it. When you look at this picture, you can see that the camera saw the young maple at the front in sharpest detail. That seems to make it the point of the picture. And yet the point of that drive is thos...

We had a storm in Toronto yesterday. Not a storm like they're having in Buffalo this week, but enough snow to turn a one hour commute into a four hour commute. We all expected a little light snow. What came was more than that, and many drivers hit a little ice and everyone else was suddenly trapped in a car that had nowhere to go. That happens in life, too. Out of the blue, there's a storm.  And little girls all over the world are celebrating those storms because of one Disney princess.   She causes a storm by exploring the full nature of her power. I watch my 3 year old niece singing "Let it Go" and I know she gets it - there's energy and there is also joy in finding out what you can do. It would be cool (pun intended) to follow Elsa's lead and sing "The cold never bothered me anyway." The cold is the price that comes with letting go and risking the consequences of finding your own power. I'm running a conference on November 29 on the th...