Integrate!

When I ask people what they want in their lives, they immediately think about the things they don't have. I have to remind them that much of what is in their lives now, they want to protect and grow in the future. It's hard to build a compelling vision of your future with blocks you've never seen. It's easier to lay a foundation with the things you know you value. It's not just about being grateful. It's about knowing that your best chance to a future that satisfies you is to build on what is already working. Take some time and make a list: there are things and people and experiences and feelings and skills that you have now and want to continue to have in the future. These are your building blocks. Once you know what they are, you can decide how to arrange them and what to add. Then you'll have goals that satisfy you even before you achieve them. © Can Stock Photo / scanrail

When you think of the word "vision," two quite opposite things come to mind. One is physical sight: the ability to see what is in front of you. The other is a more grand and sweeping concept of how the world could be different than it is. Understanding the link between these two apparent opposites is the key to improving the way you walk into your future. It's always a good idea to begin with what we can test. You can play different games to find out how good you are at recognizing what you can see with your physical eyes. We all have been guilty of searching for something that is right in front of us and of walking through a room (or a textbook) and instantly forgetting what we have seen there. Our visual awareness is a bit sketchy. Perhaps we need another word. We distinguish between hearing (which is a physical capacity) and listening (which is something we do with our attention). We don't have the same distinction with our eyes: we see something with our physi...

Living Your Purpose by Linda Ferguson Purpose is an interesting kind of word. It's not a long word and almost everyone has some idea what it means. And yet it is a word that takes up a lot of space. Try this. Think of a situation where you are part of a group that is stuck, busy or at a crossroads. Imagine the response when someone says: "What are we trying to do here?" Now go back to the beginning of that scene and replay it. This time, the person who speaks says: "What's our purpose here?" Do you feel the difference? That's what I mean by taking up space. When we hear the word purpose, we pull back to a really wide perspective as though we are suddenly viewing ourselves from a distance.  The fear is that if we go too far back, we are such tiny creatures that our purpose can't matter very much. If we don't go back far enough, we can't see the purpose through all the complications. Getting it exactly right works better if we le...

The best collaboration gets almost magical results.  Working together, people produce ideas that no one would have generated working alone and everyone discovers that their skills are a fit for one another and for the task. Yet we all have experiences of collaboration that are much less than the sum of the parts, times when we have worked with others and been less inspired and less effective than we would have been on our own.  An NLP approach to the problem is to ask: what's the difference? What makes collaboration work? It may be that focus is the difference that makes the difference. Groups that focus on developing a shared outcome and a shared state might be more effective than groups that focus on the problem they are solving or the task they want to complete. One of the things we know for sure is that states are easily transferred from one group member to another and that the strongest state in the group is the one that is likely to dominate. Groups that focus on w...

I recently gathered some of my best friends and closest associates and asked them to bring as a gift a story of persistence. Persistence is not one of the sexier virtues, and it's one of the hardest to define. What's the difference between doing the same thing and expecting a different result (insanity!) and sticking to your plan long enough for it to work? Are you crazy if you keep hoping for something that isn't happening or are you unfocused if you abandon your goal because you don't get instant success? Here's what my fairy godmothers and godfathers offered me as gifts of persistence: Sometimes life is like knitting: you have to trust the pattern because the early results don't look anything like the end results. If there is work that matters at the top, you take whatever time you need to climb 98 stairs while recovering from pneumonia. You earn your peace with hard, sweaty work. It takes humour and courage to keep trying. Structure and support coun...

Here is a message I wrote to remind myself who I am and what I want to be doing: Decide what I want to do every day and set up work to allow me to succeed every day. I want to teach, to reach for new awareness and understanding, to connect with other people and to build structures, verbal and real, that make it easier for people to express their best selves. My success will be to do what I want, what I believe, with as much of my time as I can manage. To be successful but dissatisfied is not so much a paradox as an error in judgment. My goal is to do things everyday that make me feel good about who I am and who I am becoming. It's a self-renewing goal that can be achieved without being over. My business is to convince all the people with whom I work to push a little harder, to understand a little more and to give shape or expression to their best understanding. I believe in knowledge, creativity, integrity and relationship. All I need to do is to evaluate each day against t...