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...

© Can Stock Photo / Violka08 HURRY UP  PLEASE ITS TIME (The Wasteland, T. S. Eliot). It's the time of year when you can feel the clock ticking right down to the bone. The end of the year. A time for preparations (for the holidays, for the new year) and accounting (for whatever needs to be done before the year ends). A time for hurrying. I am feeling the pressure more than I usually do, because my work schedule is unusual this year and I won't get the time for reflection and connection that I value in December. If I am to reflect and connect, I will have to do it on purpose, with plans and perhaps with less sleep than I would like. Hurry up, please. By the time we realize that things are changing, they are often changed. Relationships, habits, and situations are always shifting, and often they do it just outside of awareness. As the year ends, we look around  and do the math. When was the last time you saw that friend? How does your progress compare to peop...

Could you use a little quiet forest time today? There's evidence that trees are good for people , but you probably don't need a study to tell you that walking in the woods can help you calm the noise in your head and begin to find space to move and to breathe. Language is funny. Running and stuck seem to be opposites. In life, they are more like team-mates. Running holds you down while stuck jumps on you. The faster you move the smaller the intervals in which change is possible. The solution is not to stop. Stopping is terrifying when you are already stuck. It sets off alarm bells that make it hard to think. The solution is to set yourself up for slowing down. That means walking instead of driving so that your muscles and your breath adjust. It means finding some trees and allowing them into your consciousness just enough to make space between the thoughts. All of your time belongs to you. You may choose to give it to something or to rent it to something else. But you s...

The beautiful building where we train at NLP Canada Training  is currently covered with scaffolding. The roof is being repaired and replaced, and it will be a slow job. In the meantime, our warm brick is covered with a metal skeleton. It's not pretty, but it is useful. Think about this scaffolding when you have to repair or replace the way your audience understands the thing you want to communicate. Be especially careful when that understanding is keeping them safe from the elements in an unpredictable environment. For instance, people frequently come to me with a version of "I don't like this thing that happened to me in the past and the way it has me stuck now." Their understanding of the current situation is like a roof: it both limits how far they can see and gives them a measure of predictability in an unpredictable world. It's a trade-off: to protect themselves from a world where bad things might happen, they focus on a bad thing that has already hap...

I've been thinking about how to communicate value to people. Should I just be saying that if you come to one of my programs, you will get to think in really cool ways? It's true. I create experiences that open people up to new thoughts in a way that feels really good. But that doesn't tell people how I solve problems. I do show people that they can solve problems. And in thinking about the problems they solve or could solve or might want to solve, I've realized that every human day wakes up every morning with just two problems: How will I spend my time? How will I live with other people? These are the two non-negotiable conditions of human life for everyone regardless of location, experience, background, etc. etc. etc.  What will call life is continuous with what we call time: we cannot make more of it. Once we have used it, it is gone. How we spend our time is how we are spending our lives, and time moves regardless of whether we are intentional or ready or int...