Shifts Work

One Grain of Rice: Mathematics and Emotion

This podcast features a version of a very old story, loosely based on the retelling by Hugh William McKibbon called The Token Gift. It uses this story of exponential growth as a way to think about our feelings about the math we hear as experts explain the probabilities of various outcomes. In a time when math is at the heart of a global crisis, it's important to recognize our emotional reaction to the math so that we can use both math and our emotions better.

Blindspots, Edges and How Systems Help Us Grow

Have you ever wondered how a course or coaching could help you get more out of life? Here's a simple explanation of a complicated reality. Your brain works to stabilize experience by noticing information that confirms what you already think. You have blindspots and edges and you aren't aware of them, because your auto-pilot is to notice only the things within the edges. To make new choices, you need to notice your edges and explore ways to stretch them. 

Systematic thinking brings to mind things you have noticed but would not automatically generate as thoughts. Good training offers a system that makes you aware of edges so that you can make choices about where you want to push them back so you can grow new choices and new opportunities.

Your leadership is solid when you are self aware and grounded

One of the issues that sits just outside NLP is leadership: NLP is concerned with managing one's one state and performance and influencing others, but it is not specifically concerned with questons about what makes a good leader or how to be a leader while figuring out your own state or strategy.

In this ten minute podcast, we start with a simple (not easy) idea: when you focus on the part of you that knows what you want and is aware of your resourcefulness, then the other parts of you tend to move into the background. In the same way, when you show yourself to be strong, centred, and purposeful, other people will rally around you. You might not think of yourself as a leader, but managing your own state and intention will often cause people to follow you.

This gives you a chance to align yourself with leaders who are both effective and ethical. While others try to look effective and ethical, you can simply be aware that you are already these things. That frees up mental energy for generating solutions to tough problems.

Meeting Resistance

We frequently meet resistance from people we live with, work with, want to maintain a relationship with. When we do, our flow is interrupted and we experience a moment of confusion. Then our natural response is to mirror the resistance we are meeting. The result is that our resistance builds their resistance and we both get stuck.

A better strategy is to let the surprise you feel when you meet resistance slingshot you out to a bigger picture, where you can see yourself and the other person in your situation. From way out there, you are less tempted to mirror the resistance and more tempted to explore what just happened. When you notice you are feeling curiosity, you can drop down into the other person's experience to uncover possible motivations that are driving their attention and engagement (not necessarily their resistance). Then you're ready to get back into your own skin and mirror the motivation (not the resistance). This allows you to amplify the desire to get moving (that's what motivation is) and look for new ways forward together.

Photo credit: Pat Loika, Flickr.com

"If I were you" what would change in me?

When we hear someone begin a sentence with "if I were you," our first response is often to think (or say!) "Well, you're not me."  The problem is that people often don't try to understand what it is like to be us: they just imagine themselves in our situation with all of their history, their connections, their skills and their biases.

Here are three ways to check whether you are making a useful attempt to imagine the world as another person is experiencing it:

1. has your physiology shifted to match their posture, gestures and expressions?
2. has your language shifted to take on their choice of words, phrasing, rhythms and sounds?
3. are you seeing yourself in the picture (in the way that they can see you?)