Shifts Work

Spot the frames when someone else is speaking or writing

Take ten minutes to get better at noticing the structure which is setting you up to interpret a communication in a particular way. Structure is inevitable: it's how language works. When a structure is embedded into a communication, it is as hard to notice as the bone structure of a human being. You might not think about it consciously, but you notice the shape it gives your thinking and you use it to interpret the details.

This is a simple (but not easy) three step method for getting better at spotting frames in communication that you hear or read. Following this process will make you quicker to see the implications or consequences of buying into what someone is saying and it will give you more choices about how to interpret the information being shaped by the frames.

Photo credit: Les Chatfield, https://www.flickr.com/photos/elsie/

Relief for physical pain

Pain is experienced in your body, but it is created in your brain. When you appreciate that pain is a message designed to help you stay safe and heal, you can release your attention from the pain. At first, you notice the pain, and then you notice the parts of your body that are not experiencing pain. It becomes wonderful and interesting to explore what normal means and what normal allows you to do and to be. The episode takes you through an appreciation of your body's experience and your brain's experience and finally to your commitment to do what your brain and body need so that you can live with more engagement and more satisfaction.

If you're not in pain, listen for the strategy of gently disentangling the attention from being in pain (and therefore surrounded by it), to finding the self that exists around the pain (so that the pain is smaller than you are), to the goal of making choices with your attention and actions so that you are safe and you can be more satisfied.

Restore your focus in less than 10 minutes

This episode is an exercise that will take about 8 minutes to lead you from your current mindset of frustration, confusion or distraction into a clear and useful mindset of focus. We begin by assembling the components of a state that supports focus. In the second step, we open up a focus on the thing you want - your outcome, desired future, goal or task. Finally, we use a familiar NLP pattern to practice moving your focus back to what you want, no matter what distracts you.

An exercise to guide you in coaching yourself from a problem focus to a results focus

This week's episode is 6 1/2 minutes of clear, useful steps that will allow you to coach yourself out of a focus on a problem that has you stuck or frustrated. When all you can see is something you don't want (something you'd like to lose or stop), take a walk or sit down with a journal and work through these five steps. The result will be a new perspective on the problem and fresh energy for getting where you want to go instead.

"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?)

Be Mindful of Your Anxiety

Anxiety is a peculiarly human condition, a worry about something that has not happened and might not ever happen, and yet something that is having an uncomfortable influence on you in the present moment. Since anxiety is a state of worry about something in the future, the only resolutions also seem to be in the future and therefore out of reach.

Yet, paradoxically, you can practice being mindful of being anxious. Begin to build your mindfulness muscles with something relatively minor, something you don't like but don't fear, something that makes you mildly anxious. And as you focus on that experience, allow part of your attention to be guided through focused attention on your experience. 

Listen for less than ten minutes and discover how mindfulness transforms anxiety.

Leading starts with knowing what you want others to do

How do you get other people to do the things you want them to do? Leading begins with your ability to be sure you're asking for the right thing. Use this short exercise (about 6 minutes) to think through something specific that you want a particular person to do. Think systematically about what you are asking, what it will feel like to the person you are influencing, and how your situation and connection will shift when you are successful in getting this person to do this thing.

You don't need a fresh start: you need to make compost

It's the season when fresh starts seems possible. We look at flowers and green buds and think: "that's what I want. A fresh start."

But go for a walk in the woods and you'll come back spattered with mud. Nature doesn't start fresh: she starts with the muck of dead leaves and fallen branches and other things that decompose near the roots of trees. You've got the raw material for emotional compost: the hurt, the frustration, the guilt.  You don't need to make them disappear, you need to let them decompose and be transformed into the stuff that nurtures growth.

You don't have to keep your eyes on the muck: just find the compost pile and stir things up once in a while. The rest of the time, focus on warmth and light and air. You can be sure that chemistry works, and the muck will decompose into something useful.

Mindful limits: How language helps you find the edges of your pain

This exercise takes less than 10 minutes to demonstrate that mindful attention in response to language allows you to find the edge to your experience of pain. As you do, you'll find your breathing settles, your mind clears, and you develop the ability to choose to focus on your pain or to focus on what is on the other side of the edges of your pain.  And if you do focus on your pain, you will find that human focus blurs, so that paying attention to only one thing creates a sense of calm and space, even when what you give your focus is painful at first. And you will notice that on the other side of the edges of your pain, you are calm and centred and you have what you need to move forward.

Small steps to manage stress

In this ten minute podcast episode, Linda Ferguson walks you through a three steps to move you from stressed to energized. You'll learn how matching the intensity and tension of states can allow for small, incremental changes that teach your mind to see stress as part of a process you've experienced successfully in the past.