Integrate!

Welcome to our front step. There are other places to have an important conversation, but not better places. Lives change when people sit side by side on this step and look out at the park while they talk. Front steps are portals - spaces that mark a transition between one place and another. That's why this front step is such a good place to reflect on change. The space does not change anything in the situation described. It does change the attitude in which that situation can be considered. It invites you to sit far enough outside your life to see it differently, close enough to be back into the thick of it in a step or two. It's easy to get caught up in what you know and what words you will choose when you want to influence someone else, either to lead them through something or to support them through something. But the research suggests we're putting our focus on the wrong stuff. Most of what we say will be forgotten almost as soon as it is said. But we do remembe...

NLP (neurolinguistic programming) gained fame for two things: the promise that you could achieve anything you could clearly imagine and the promise that you could read people accurately enough to detect deception or perform amazing acts of covert influence.  It seemed like magic, and people flocked to it to find out how to become magicians. When I started in NLP, I was the smart, conventional one and my partner was the one with the magic: he was the one who could freak people out with mind-reading and hypnotic presence. Over the years, as I began to work on my own more often, I learned to do a little quiet magic of my own.  Sometimes now, the magic is less quiet, more - well, more magical. But I am a teacher, not a magician. So I will tell you the one thing I think you need to learn to do magical acts of reading and influencing other people.  The secret is: metaphor. In case you've forgotten your high school English course, here is how Wikipedia defines metaphor: ...