 July 2012
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| Wide Awake for Summer 2012 |
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Greetings!
What are your expectations about summer and growth? We often talk about holidays as though they meant going dormant, taking a break from making an effort. Surprisingly, that kind of break is not the best way to enjoy yourself.
We are happiest (according to expert Dan Gilbert and others) when we are fully engaged and present. This is the same state in which we grow best. We learn, we grow, and we are happy when we are enthusiastically aware of where we are, who we are with, and what we are doing.
NLP allows you to be happier because it gives you a toolkit for heightened sensory awareness, better connections with other people, and stronger recognition of the patterns that lead to good results. It's not magic: it's just the way your mind works when you are at your very best.
We are looking for people who are wiling to invest in their own ability to be happy and to influence others in positive ways. If you're already a practitioner, consider our freshly updated master practitioner course. If you're not a practitioner yet, maybe this is the time for you to train to become more alert, more connected and more effective.
Summer is a terrific time to be fully awake, aware and engaged. Enjoy the sunshine,
Linda Ferguson, Ph.D.
Senior Partner
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Summer 2012 Events
All events take place at 47 Queen's Park Cres. E., Toronto, ON. All events require registration by calling Carole at 416-928-2394.
By donation to Trails. Please call 416-928-2394 to reserve.
Linda Ferguson, Andrew Freund and Ron Vereggen will all be on hand for a panel discussion of how NLP (neurolinguistic programming) works in coaching, how NLP sessions differ from other coaching sessions and how to choose a coach.
July 9-14 inclusive August 5-10 inclusive Wednesday, August 15, 7:30pm to 9:30pmBy donation to Trails. Please call 416-928-2394 to reserve. Whether you are developing a cure for cancer, managing a key board meeting or planning a family vacation, you will do it better if you are relaxed and ready. This fun evening will show you simple techniques for identifying how you feel when you are relaxed and ready, and how to enjoy that state more often Learn a basic model for setting and achieving goals while making real-time progress on a goal that matters to you. NLP is training as a process that leads to tangible results. Here's what you'll get: - five step process that takes you from goal setting through achievement
- introduction to NLP concepts of congruence, rapport, outcome formation and personal edits
- "retreat" that gives you space, clarity and support to focus on what you want and how to get it.
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Heightened Awareness Through NLP
A summer story
Did you enjoy the long weekend? I hope so. It's the beginning of summer vacation season. In NLP terms, it's the anchor that fires all of our deep expectations of what summer means, the weekend that sends us back to childhood and hot, endless days to discover and to play.
My weekend started in Toronto on Thursday evening, listening to Esperanza Spalding and her band make smart, gorgeous jazz in a tent in Nathan Phillips Square.  A tent in the city demonstrates how frames and anchors are sometimes the same. It's an anchor if you've actually experienced tents in the city, if it brings back specific times and events and people. If you don't have specific memories, a tent in a city is a frame. It sets up expectations of festivals and circuses that arrive and enliven and disappear again. A concert in a tent is different than a concert in a concert hall. What it sacrifices in the quality of sound, it gains from the anticipation that something joyful is about to happen.
On Friday morning, my son and I boarded a train to Montreal. "Boarding" is an interesting word - we only use it for traveling with a group of strangers. We board trains and buses and airplanes, but not cars. That makes boarding a train a great metaphor for forces that create change for a large group of unrelated people simultaneously. Metaphors, of course, are used in NLP to suggest patterns of change without meeting resistance. A metaphor isn't the same as a suggestion, much less as a demand - but it can achieve the same result. Because once you're on the train, you are heading where the train is heading even if you're sitting facing backwards.
We arrived in Montreal in what seemed to be an underground mall. Later we found out that it was at street level for one street but street level shifts quite quickly in a city built on a mountain. Yes - that's another metaphor. We walked to our hotel, where we were given a room on the 30th floor. It's interesting to me that we talk about "mountaintop" experiences but we don't talk about the view from a skyscraper in the same way.
 From the 30th floor of our hotel, we could see rooftop gardens that would be invisible from the the ground. While walking the city, it seemed to be entirely pavement and heat, but from the room we could see lots of green. It's helpful if you want to explore a city to have seen some of it from far above. The general lay of the land is apparent. Even though our room faced the opposite direction from the part of the city we wanted to explore, it helped us to locate the space between the water and the mountain.
Thirty stories is too far away to notice people: from that high, you might notice cars moving on a highway and you would notice buildings and roads and trees, but people are too tiny to be of interest. Yet in a city (even one built on a mountain) everything you see is a sign of the people who built it and moved in it (even the trees are there by design).
A skyscraper view is not a mountaintop view, even if there's a mountain under the city. When we think of mountaintop views, we think of a view that stretches over space but also over time. Mountains are so much older than anything we can really imagine. Cities are sometimes interesting because we can imagine, because we know that people imagined every building before they made it real, because all that imagining still created patterns of buildings and roads that no one mind would have imagined. The view is so big and so diverse that it takes all parts of our mind to hold it at once. And we have to trust that the windows are really walls and that we are safe in our nest thirty stories high.
We were in Montreal for more jazz, and jazz is an art form that is most at home in a city, where lots of differences exist side by side and one on top of the other. Jazz sometimes seems to be about the minimum elements it takes to have a pattern while exploring difference: as soloists do their thing, you might wonder if they're still playing the same piece, yet somehow the piece ends and everyone feels that it was the same piece after all. In business school, organizations seem to be constructed like classical music, with clear lines and structures. In life, they are often more like jazz, all movement and distraction and exploration - but somehow still all about one thing. For me, jazz is a reminder that freedom comes not from the absence of lines, but from drawing them and then having the choice to stay inside them sometimes and to move outside them at others.
If I told you a man was 79 years old, what assumptions would you begin to make? Would you imagine him on stage in a large theatre for 90 minutes of non-stop intensity culminating in long, enthusiastic applause? Wayne Shorter is 79 years old. We heard his quartet on Friday evening. Remarkable. How many more years do you have to find your groove? We talk as though age were a barrier. What if age is an opportunity to go deeper in some directions, higher in others?
You may be finding this disruptive; you may be waiting for me to give a clear list of benefits or an explanation of an NLP technique. But the model you need may not be found in clear explanations. It may be found as you walk through the Place des Arts during the jazz festival, overwhelmed by scale, by movement, by visual stimulation and by sound. In every way, you might be thinking, this is too much. Yet this is what it's like to walk through every day of life with heightened acuity. We are always in the middle of too much information in a very big world where we are very small. The disruption you feel reading this is the disruption you feel whenever life is outside your understanding and control.
Life is outside your understanding and control. Even you are are outside your understanding and control. I do not practice NLP for control: I practice it so I can move through the chaos with intention and with satisfaction and, when I am lucky, with joy.
In the past five minutes, I have offered you a frame you probably didn't notice (frames are hard to notice). I have been showing you the world through NLP eyes (and ears), a journey lived through the senses and through patterns and through an awareness of meaning. NLP is not about closed rooms and closed structures. It's not about techniques that have to be applied in a certain way under certain conditions. It's about a wide-awake appreciation for both the details and the meaning that emerges from them.
And, sometimes, it's about noticing that the long weekend in July is the weekend of heightened anticipation, the weekend when the child in you remembers the space when one grade is over and the next has not yet begun. My yoga teacher calls it the space between thoughts. I wonder what remarkable possibilities that space will hold for you in the summer of 2012.
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HOPE 2012: Influence through Integrity
On Saturday, September 29, 2012, NLP Canada Training will host the 4th Annual HOPE Symposium. HOPE is a celebration of our community of NLP practitioners and master practitioners. This year, we'll be exploring our model of integrity as the driving force of influence.
If you've trained with us, HOPE is an opportunity to reconnect with friends, network with new connections, and take your mind back into a focus on resourcefulness, connection, and good goals. If you're new to NLP Canada Training, HOPE is an opportunity to hear from some of the terrific people who are active in our community, pick up new practices and perspectives, and discover how good it feels to spend several hours with people committed to fostering well-founded hope in themselves and the people around them.
Mark your calendars for this event on September 29. Registration will open August 1.
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