Integrate!

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...

What difference does it make if work is just a little bit fun?  Logically, fun is a distraction and there's no particular reason that a day with a little fun in it would be more productive than a day of focused, serious work.  Practically, we all know that we're more likely to be productive if we're having a little fun mingled into our task focus.  How does that work exactly? First, it helps us remember that people are not computers and they don't work the way computers do. Our thinking is a complex weaving of reason and memory and sensory awareness and emotion. Fun can involve three of those, and that means that it's actually quite a rich form of thinking. A little fun is likely to be using a lot of your brain, and that wakes up more resources for applying to your work. Next, it's useful to think about the patterns in your thought and work. Patterns work the same way over and over.  Real productivity involves doing more than repeating the same patterns: it ...

We often talk about passion as though it inevitably flares up and disappears.  I wonder if passion is really fleeting. While romance certainly changes over time, there are other things that inspire passion in us. Yesterday I had coffee with friends from my days as an undergraduate at Trent University.  We last saw each other thirty years ago. (Yes - thirty years.  It freaked all of us out a little). The meeting happened because we connected on Linked In. It was a case of social media doing actual good. What I discovered through the meeting was that we have had widely diverse experiences since Trent and we are still so strongly committed to the ideas and ideals that inspired us that our conversation was deep and wide and much too short.  Apparently we did know what we liked and what was important thirty years ago, because those same things seem to be important to us now.  The world has shifted and we have changed (not as much as we might have feared), but we ...

There are lots of sexy gifts that we wish we had: wisdom, charisma, strength or acuity.  They are characteristics of the successful and powerful, the characteristics we associate with being better and doing better.  Persistence is not sexy. Courage is sexier than persistence. We admire courage although if we are wise and honest, we hope that we won't need courage very much or very often. Courage is a gift that means you're in big trouble and it will probably hurt before it gets better. Courage is sometimes so like persistence that they might be twins. Persistence is the quiet twin, the one who knows how to make herself inconspicuous when the company arrives. She is often found with her equally undesirable cousin, Patience.  The two are hard to notice and yet, when we look we find them both wherever people are able to maintain success. You might be lucky once, but if you are lucky repeatedly, it's because you have made room for persistence. I think if I were a fairy ...

Bad stuff happens to good, smart people. There are lots of good ways to think about life, but there is no way to out-think life.  Stuff happens. In my life right now, stuff is happening in my back. I've had significant back pain for two full months now, and I have to say that pain sucks. Given the choice, I would definitely wake up tomorrow pain free and able to move comfortably. I have tried rest, pills, chiropractic care, massage, nlp, hypnosis and EFT.  I still experience pain whenever I try to move: getting up or down or walking or standing. All hurt. So, you might wonder, what's the good of NLP if it first allowed me to make the choices that got me here and second has not fixed me yet? 1) Reframing.  I am not happy about what is happening and I recognize that I have an opportunity to understand differently and make new choices.  Going back to the patterns that got me here is literally not an option at the moment, and that's a good thing. 2) Relating. I k...

Coaches are people who get paid to believe that you have what you need to be more successful at work or at life. They can do lots of good work, but there is always a sliver of an out: they believe in you because it's their job to believe. That leaves just a little room for doubt. Friends are people who just believe that you have what you need to be more successful. There's no wiggle room.  They don't get a payoff for believing: they just do. This is why people who want to be depressed have to hide from their friends.  Friends would look at them and see possibility and hope and strength.  Accepting their belief would take so much attention and energy that there would be none left for being depressed. It's also hard to give up, quit, or walk away if you hang out with people who look at you and see strength and skill and resilience.  You might change direction or you might change activities but you would have to be very strong to overcome their belief in you and jus...

Silence is an interesting phenomenon in a conversation. It's a sort of keystone: everything else leans on the silence and changes according to its quality.  We teach people something of how to talk and sometimes even something of how to listen, but there is no teaching on how to be silent together. Silence is either the most excruciatingly awkward thing that can happen to a conversation or the sign that the conversation is deep and wide and wonderful. And we shy away from both. We shy away from the wonderful conversations because we are not sure what can measure up to the moments of full, rich silence or because we are afraid that the silence will ring so clear that we will reveal something, somehow, that we didn't mean to reveal. We are afraid because change happens in the silence. And yet, it's the fear at the top of the roller coaster, the fear of taking the first step onto stage, the fear before the whistle blows and the game begins. The fear that is also a hope tha...