News from NLP Canada Training

July 2011

NLP Canada Training Inc. Newsletter

Come for a Visit!

Greetings!

We have had a summer of long, hot days. How can each one linger so long but the summer go by so fast? When the sun shines so brightly day after day, it seems like the whole world is saying "Pay attention! There's good stuff everywhere."

Of course, we also pay attention to the brown lawns and the humidity. It's human nature. We automatically notice the things that make us uncomfortable. We have to pay attention to notice the things that support us in feeling good.

There are several events coming up at NLP Canada Training that are designed to help you notice the resources that are already helping you feel better and do better. Whoever you are, whatever your state, the world around you is offering something more than you are experiencing right now.

When I look around, I notice the people of NLP Canada Training - the ones who show up at just the right moment with just the right words. The ones who make me smile.
And I feel great - and grateful.

Linda

Coming Up Next at NLP Canada Training

Call 416-928-2394 to save spots for you and a friend. We wouldn't want to run out of chocolate

Thursday, August 4, 7:30 pm to 9:30 pm
NLP and Mindfulness
Trainer: John Dafos

Mindfulness is often defined as moment to moment awareness of one's experience in the present moment. It has been around for thousands of years and offers a simple way of centering yourself in the midst of stress, overwhelm, and any of life's challenges.

In this evening course, you will learn how the practices of mindfulness and NLP overlap each other, and how you can harness them to handle every aspect of life with greater congruence, rapport, and focus. You will learn how powerful focused, sustained awareness can be in helping you achieve your goals, in being more creative, and in handling daily stress. Call Carole at 416-928-2394 and register today.

Final FREE Summer Evening Event!

Saturday, August 27, 10am to 5pm
Prepare to Succeed: An Introduction to NLP
Trainer: Andrew Freund, with Linda Ferguson

This one day course will do two remarkable things:
1) It will introduce the core practices of NLP and allow participants to learn how NLP works
2) It will give even accomplished practitioners of NLP a chance to focus on what they want and set themselves up for success as we approach the Fall

What is NLP and how could it change the results you achieve? Find out in a fun, fast-paced, interactive course. We'll explore core practices of NLP for paying better attention to yourself, to situations and to other people. You'll notice more about key connections between how you feel, how you perform and how you communicate. And you'll discover that being relaxed and focused allows you to achieve more while feeling terrific.

Register by calling Carole at 416-928-2394.

SUMMER SPECIAL! Save more than $50

$125 + HST for one person or
$140 + HST for two people who register together

Saturday, September 17, 9:30am to 6:00 pm
The HOPE Symposium 2011
Emmanuel College, University of Toronto

This is our biggest event of the year and we hope you'll be able to join the conversation. A symposium is a chance to talk about interesting things. This year, 17 speakers (all NLP Practitioners and Master Practitioners trained at NLP) will be thinking about how to balance truth and hope as leaders in Wellness, Business and Community resources.

Full details and online registration are available at www.hopesymposium.com

Saturday, September 24, 10am to 5pm
Motivating All Types: An Introduction to Using the Enneagram
Glendon College (room to be confirmed)

In just one day, Barb Luedecke will teach you a system that makes it easier to identify the motivations driving people's behaviours. You will learn so well that on Monday morning you will begin to see behaviour differently. As you understand and work with motivation, you will be more curious and less frustrated. You'll find the leverage points where you can connect and motivate. You might even find that you learn something about yourself that makes it easier to get started or to get finished.

Click here for details.

$175 +HST

MIndfulness and NLP
by John Dafos

"Does studying mindfulness mean that I have to become a monk?" I remember that question being asked at a mindfulness-based stress reduction program I did years ago. It was meant to be rhetorical, of course, and somewhat humourous because many of the other participants started to laugh. It was a knowing laugh. It's the laugh that comes when someone in class asks that stupid elephant of a question nobody else wants to ask because nobody wants to admit that they have had the thought cross their mind at least once. TST Front Door

Thoughts crossing the mind...it's a metaphor that is apt here. Because in any type of
changework we engage in, as coaches, as leaders, and as participants, we want to be able to help others (and ourselves) change our limiting thoughts (by thoughts, I'm also clumping in feelings because the two are so tightly connected). We want to get from a limiting belief to a more empowering belief. We want to get from a feeling of stuckness to a feeling of liberation.

What has made NLP so influential in the area of personal development is that it presents a series of processes that allow individuals to get to their desired outcomes extremely quickly and without getting drawn into subtexts and deeper meanings of why they are stuck in the first place. No need to fuse with the stories we have attached to our limitations; just reframe our relationship to the limitation and adjust some part of its structure, and tremendous positive shifts occur. In the years I've spent studying and practicing NLP, I've experienced first-hand the benefits of NLP.

In NLP, as in mindfulness practice, we study our thoughts and our feelings (and our stories about these), and our stories about ourselves. NLP looks at thoughts in a defused, unattached manner and goes about changing the structure of our limiting thoughts so that they no longer have the same hold on us as before. Mindfulness practice also looks at thoughts in a defused,unattached manner. But unlike NLP, in mindfulness, we don't go about changing our thoughts per se. The thought or feeling that arise within us are a part of our experience and so we slow ourselves down enough to watch our thoughts and feelings in a defused, unattached manner.
This is a form of self-acceptance, of kindness to ourselves.

This morning I woke up with a feeling of anxiety in my stomach. I don't remember coming out of any foreboding dream. My first impulse was to do something to change it, to engage with the feeling with questions like "Why am I feeling this way? What's wrong with me? I don't like this feeling, how do I get rid of it?" Instead, I connected with my breathing which anchored me into the present moment, into my experience of the present moment. I felt the anxiety, observed where exactly it was located (my stomach), what qualities it had (dull, throbbing), what thoughts
seemed to surround it (I've got to do a good job training this Thursday night). I observed all these things occurring in my experience, in a non-judgmental, compassionate, open way. I opened up to my sensory experience without attaching to it. And the more I watched the feeling of anxiety, the more it faded. It came on its own and it left on its own.

Much of NLP is devoted to state management and the practice of mindfulness is a gentle, effective way of attaining it by opening up a wide basin for experiencing your present moment without being drawn into it, all by anchoring your attention to your breath. When thoughts and feelings cross your mind that are not helpful, that in some way denigrate your experience, settling into your own breathing and opening up to whatever comes up is a way of honouring yourself, of being kind to yourself, and practicing genuine self-acceptance.

Helping When Hope is Difficult

Therapists and health care providers often must communicate difficult truths to people. Whether that truth is that pain will persist or that they will never regain an important relationship, people often come for help precisely because the truth is too hard to take on its own. The role of the practitioner is, on the one hand, to ensure that the truth is accepted and, on the other, to uncover hope in a situation that seems hopeless, a situation that is not going to support a desirable outcome.

The success of an intervention in these cases often depends on three factors. The first is the ability of the practitioner to consider the truth without flinching. The second is the rock solid belief that hope is possible, that the client is capable of uncovering new strengths and moving toward a more satisfying future. And finally, success depends on the practitioner being able to invite the client into a space where hope is possible.

What is hope? I like to start with defining hope as a belief that good things are possible. That doesn't mean that it will be possible to get what you want. It doesn't even mean that good things will definitely happen. It just means that in a situation where the truth is difficult, it is possible to find a way to make something good happen. Many different methods and systems are grounded in the idea that one counter example is enough to open up the possibility for change. Hope is the search for one counter example.

The first requirement is not that the practitioner hold on to hope, but that s/he takes a strong position in facing the truth in a difficult situation. It is not useful to the client for the practitioner to be overwhelmed or fearful in the face of terribly difficult circumstances. The practitioner must be able to look with steady eyes on terrible things and, often, to put them into words to acknowledge them and to limit them. Every client knows the difference between the practitioner who acknowledges the truth of their situation and the practitioner who merely marks it out to move quickly to places where progress might be possible. It doesn't take long to look with unflinching eyes, but it requires that you pay attention to very uncomfortable things. Your client is living them.

The second step is to believe that hope is possible. You must know how to nurture hope within yourself before you can nurture it in others. This doesn't mean that you will always feel hopeful about your own life. It does mean that you will believe, within the space you create with your clients, that they are capable of taking steps that will lead to more satisfying lives. Some of your clients will make this easier than others. That is why it is important to discipline yourself to use language that states the truth clearly and cleanly and then moves to a clear, clean discussion of a truth that allows for some hope, however small. Holding a belief that hope is possible is not so much holding a bright emotional light as it is slogging through a research process to discover a truth that could support something better.

The first two conditions explain why people are often helped to deal with difficult situations by people who are cold, unkind and very busy. You do not have to be emotionally connected to help someone stabilize the limits of a bad situation or to uncover a possibility for something to get better. The process doesn't have to feel good to you or to the client to work. At some point, however, the client will need emotion to counter the strong emotions evoked by the difficult truth. The third step for a practitioner is to invite the client to step into a place where hope is possible.

There is no room in a short article to explain the mechanisms, behaviours and forces that are at play when one person invites another into a space where hope is possible. The dance of rapport in these situations is a complex moving in-and-out which allows the practitioner to meet the client outside the space and then draw him/her into it in a series of fits-and-starts. This is not a one-time event; it's a process that requires sometimes connecting emotionally, sometimes detaching to pay cool, unflustered attention, and sometimes staying very still and allowing the client to come to you.

The situations where we most need help to hope are often the situations that offer the least reason to hope. The art of helping begins in knowing that the space where the client starts is not the only space s/he can occupy. A better space will incorporate difficult truths and move through them. Any movement implies expansion, detachment and the possibility that something around the next curve will be better.

6 States You Might Find Useful in a Challenge

Your state is the sum total of everything in your experience at a given moment in time. It includes your physiology, your sensory experience, your memories, thoughts, beliefs and emotions.

Go back to a specific time and place when you have experienced each of the states listed here. As you think about that time, allow yourself to build the experience as an actor playing you might build the experience - noticing what you are seeing, hearing, feeling physically, feeling emotionally and thinking. You'll be surprised how much detail you can retrieve or create as you think about a specific memory.

Playful
Brave
Creative
Strong
Challenged
Excited