Shifts Work

Learn how attention to strength grows optimism

This exercise takes a little more than 5 minutes to move your attention from wanting a strength to noticing that strength to expecting to find that strength in yourself and others. When you focus on how you experience a strength you would like to grow, you discover many different signs that strength exists in you and others. You also shift your focus from wanting to discovering, which builds the optimism that builds success.

Reframing "I wish I didn't" to make change happen

In this short podcast, Linda Ferguson shares a favourite place to start a coaching session. Many people arrive with something they want to change. If you find yourself saying "I wish I didn't. . . ." you can turn it around by changing the frame. Instead, just say "I wonder why I . . . " And then really wonder, exploring benefits and relationships and contexts. You'll find that you are on the path to change before you know it.

Do you hate selling? Learn to prepare, engage and mobilize

We call our sales course I Hate to Sell. People who love to sell, who find joy and connection and satisfaction in selling don't need a course. They need to sell. 

Everyone else can benefit from conditioning themselves to follow five steps that engage their best selves in the process of selling to others. Take five minutes and feel energized, motivated and ready for your next sales call.

Your best state for top performance

If athletes require focus, movement and breath to perform at high levels, then you and your team need focus, movement and breath to work through challenges or to solve complex problems. When you are relaxed and ready, your equipment works at its best and you have the Aha! moments that make all the difference.

Words for Change: The Big Picture and A Bigger Picture

Have you ever wondered how small changes in language can make a big difference to your ability to make a choice? In this podcast, we look at the difference between making a picture bigger and looking at the big picture when you want to learn to communicate better. Along the way, we'll think about how learning involves both new information and practice and the best way to combine those so that you see real change in your skills.

Go with Desire: The Keynote from HOPE 2014

This is a shorter version of Linda Ferguson's 2014 Keynote at the HOPE Symposium: Go with Desire. It's an exploration of what it means to "want it" enough to endure and excel. Using the tools of NLP, Linda uncovers desire as an unconscious drive that creates different high-performance states and explores the consequences of dampening down desire to make other people more comfortable.

Desire drives action

You can ride the lazy river of other people's expectations and circumstances beyond your control. You can notice that there is much that is already right and valuable in this moment's experience. But if you glance just once beyond the edges of the flow, you will awaken the hope that more is possible - more control of your direction and your momentum, more control of your results. And then hope will awaken desire - the fire in blood and bone and thought that drives you to action.

How will you know your heart's desire? An old story about the power to choose

The stories you hear and remember become your stories. They are anchors to what you believe and what you expect and what difference you think that a choice can make. If you were a storyteller, you would find that some stories stick and some stories slip through your ears and are gone. You would find that the stories that stick, the stories that become your stories, are about you even when they are stories of another time and other people. If you hear a story and remember it, then it is your story. Your brain does not remember without a reason. So listen and notice what sticks and what other stories come to mind to tell you what you believe about finding your heart's desire.

Sharpen Your Axe with NLP

In this episode produced for the 2014 HOPE Symposium, Linda Ferguson engages you in sharpening your axe - preparing the relaxed and ready state that is associated with high performance.

Five minutes to focus on what you want

Take five minutes and build desire - that deep wanting that drives beliefs and behaviours to enrich your experience.