Attention is an expensive currency
Your brain exists to manage your energy budget. It keeps you alive by monitoring your use of resources so that you always have something left in case of emergency. The unconscious processes driven by the brain do two things: 1) scan for trouble and 2) jump to conclusions. Neither of these are good for paying attention. Attention is expensive (to your brain) and to give it to just one thing at a time is to risk missing something.
Groups Reflect Your Strengths
The same interests that draw people into NLP (neurolinguistic programming) are often the reasons they resist the need for group training. It’s not always obvious why you need to train with a group to develop better self awareness and better self control. It seems obvious that those require time alone with a coach or therapist. […]
Betting on Yourself Means Practice
There’s research on the difference between people who always need the best and people who always need to meet their own criteria. The first group are called maximizers: they are often exhausted by the need to explore all possibilities before making a choice. The others are called satisficers: on the whole, they make choices with […]
Keep Working at It
You probably know a version of the story where you fall in love at first sight with a handsome prince, or the one where you work hard to deserve true love, the story where you travel far to follow your heart or the one where it turns out your true love has been with you […]
Realism Needs to Partner With Dreams
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw Somehow we have come to see realism and dreams as opponents. Most of the time, we talk as though being reasonable and practical are […]
We Go Further When We Build on Each Other’s Efforts
There’s no such thing as individual excellence. Watch your favourite sports star –then watch the coaches, the trainers, the medical staff, and the fans. All of them have a role to play in providing resources, knowledge, support and motivation to the star. And those are just the people that are easy to see. When we […]
Pulled Between Self-Knowledge and Influence
Spring is a time of opposites. Feasts and fasting. Death and rebirth. The longing for green and the sting of allergies. Long weekends and long COVID. How do you feel about being pulled in two directions at once? On the one hand, many NLP practices are about congruence, the alignment of all parts of you […]
When Work Leads to a Dead End, Try Play Instead
People are sometimes puzzled when I say that play is a powerful state. They think of power as requiring work, and play as being something you do if you can find some time. Grown ups will often only play if they see it as part of the work of parenting. And that means they are […]
Are You Willing to Be Silly if It Gets You a Result?
What do you do to prepare for the stuff that takes your best thinking or your best presence? It sometimes seems that conditioning yourself is a grim, disciplined process. But discipline will only take you so far. As I was driving this weekend, I was listening to this podcast. The story started and I thought, […]
It’s Harder to Communicate With the People We Know Well
Why is it so often easier to have a conversation with someone you’ll never see again? At least one study has shown that people who agreed to talk to the person next to them on a commuter train experienced better commutes, even when they said they’d rather sit quietly by themselves. This study is often […]
