Integrate!

Today is the day after a very full weekend of NLP training. In the world of NLP and self development, lots of people will tell you to "trust your gut," as if we all know all the right answers but somehow fail to listen to ourselves. © Can Stock Photo / lkeskinen My training is a little different. I teach people to respect their gut. Your gut is a good teacher. Good teachers expect you to listen to what they say (it's based on expertise developed over time) and then to question it. A good teacher expects you to test what they teach. Your "gut" will sometimes provide you with good counsel, and sometimes it will mislead you because the experience that has shaped your 'gut' reaction is not typical of the situation you're in now.  Your gut can be wrong. You know this. There are times in all our lives when we listened to our gut and really wish we had thought things through instead. Most of the processing power of your mind/brain/body system is ...

We have two illusions about solving problems. The first illusion is that smart people think best when they are alone. We imagine people hunched over computers or pacing in front of whiteboards until they have an AHA moment  and solve the problem using their solitary genius. The other illusion is that we only learn from experts.  We expect therapists to help us with emotional problems and subject matter experts to help us with everything else. After years of conditioning in schools, we think that the people who make us smarter are people who know more than we do. The result of these illusions is often that we stay stuck for much longer than is necessary. We wait for access to an expert. We beat ourselves up for not being smart enough or competent enough or confident enough to think it through all alone. But it's all based on a faulty premise: we believe that smart people think best on their own. Take a closer look at what really smart people are doing. They are hanging ...