Shifts Work

What you pay attention to will grow

It's the kernel of truth at the core of the law of attraction. Whatever you give your attention becomes more available as a pattern to use while interpreting situations. What you give your attention to will grow. It doesn't mean to expect goals without work. It means you can prime yourself to notice opportunity.

Get Stronger with Every Struggle

Hang in there, people say. You'll get through it. But I want you to do more than get through: I want you to struggle hard enough to get stronger. Struggle is a part of life but holding on until you find the gift in struggle is a choice. Learn more in my new book, Resilience: Grow Stronger in a Time of Crisis.

 

3 Tips for Growing Stronger in Difficult Times

Here are 3 tips from my new book: Resilience: Grow Stronger in a Time of Crisis, available in paperback or ebook from Amazon or Chapters/Indigo:  1) Walk 2) Connect with your memories of people you respect for particular strengths and 3) use experiences of work and play as a template to shape the future you want.

Resilience: Grow Stronger in a Time of Crisis

My new book is now available for pre-order on Amazon!  Here's a teaser of the three main ways to find the resilience you need to keep going and keep growing in uncertain times.

What do you value and how can values keep you moving forward in uncertain times?

Take a few moments to explore a value you hold and how it can make a difference as you face the challenges ahead. We often think of values as things we "should" live up to. It's more useful to think of them as a way of shaping useful goals when we have only a little information about what the future might hold.

Take a few minutes to gain a better perspective

The problem with stress is that it closes up your focus so all you can see is the thing that is hard. It's difficult to access your best strengths or your best perspective from within tunnel vision. Use this exercise to open up better choices.

Other people see strengths in us that we might doubt in ourselves

Use this exercise to get at more of what you need to overcome a challenge or solve a problem. Remember yourself through the eyes of someone who knew you when you were younger, someone who resisted you or competed with you, and someone who loves you. Image by Henrik Nordell from Pixabay

Breathe to Connect

This is a short exercise we have been doing at NLP Canada Training to improve our connection when we are on phone or video calls or meetings. It was inspired by Patsy Rodenberg's work in The Second Circle.  Try this one before your next web meeting and feel a more direct, human connection with the people on the other side of the screen.

Create an anchor to look and feel more confident

Confidence is . . .
Begin by thinking of a situation or a specific challenge that requires that you have confidence. Instead of saying, “I want to have more confidence when I’’m with clients,” pick one part of the process that regularly makes you wish you could speak and act with more confidence. Write that on a postcard.

As we hear the different situations where this team wants to act with more confidence, we understand that confidence involves a lot of different skill sets. It’s no wonder that it’s hard to feel confident before you’ve developed skill and experience. To speed up the process of building confidence, we need to understand how confidence shows up in our experience.
Here’s an NLP approach to confidence. Confidence is a state. A state is a word that describes how you experience the world and it includes: your physiology, your thoughts and beliefs, and your perceptions.

Confidence is
•a physical feeling of strength combined with
•a focus on something you want to be or to achieve combined with
•a heightened awareness of cues in your situation that will help you achieve what you want to achieve.

We can create a working model of confidence by remembering times when you have had each of these three experiences, and using a single anchor to trigger all three memories at once.
You can use a marble or other small object as an anchor for all three components of confidence.

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.