Celebrating What’s New!

I’m looking forward to this weekend: on Saturday it will be an opportunity to meet up with old and new friends because it will be our third 25^th Anniversary Celebration Day.

One of the things I’ve been spending time on these past couple of years is the very idea of innovation and how to be innovative. A lot of people want to innovate but don’t necessarily know how to. It is true that innovation is the life blood of commercial success, but it’s also the basis of personal well-being. (If you’re in any doubt about that just ask someone whose relationship has gone stale).

Being able to innovate then is very important - which is why I began to work with Professor John Bessant who’s background is innovation in organisations. We got together because John had got to the point where he was very clear that the next stage was not organisations but what happens inside people that makes it possible for them to be innovative. We met when he came to take the Practitioner with me. Many of the NLP techniques are potentially useable to foster that overall capacity to be innovative. This is not the same as being creative: you could be creative and not really do anything. To be innovative you need more than an idea: you have to follow through and do. Something has to actually happen.

John is going to be joining me this weekend and we will be sharing some of the tools that we have in our new programme that will be starting in the Autumn.         

I also want to spend some of the time looking at the long and winding road that is a person’s life. Having a way of making sense of where you are on the journey, knowing how to take charge and go in a direction that is meaningful to you is crucial. So often what I hear from people who have taken trainings with me is that what they found most valuable was how it helped them re-orientate in their own life. They have a new awareness of what they are about and where they want to be going.

I am very pleased that Lawrence Kershen QC,  who took his Practitioner with me in 1990, will be joining me on Saturday. Lawrence’s journey can tell us a lot about how to engage with our inner calling. It has immediate relevance for anyone wanting to be true to themselves. More of that on the day.

When you start thinking about the journey that is your life, being able to just keep going is also a crucial part of the art of succeeding. So the other thing that I really want to focus on are those secrets of perseverance.

Winston Churchill’s adage of “never, never, never give up” is really to the point here. After having guided ITS through 25 years of ups and downs I think there are some things I can usefully say about how to ensure that you do not just survive but you actually thrive.

It is going to be a jam-packed day and, hey, here comes summer!

Also listen to Ian's blog here:

listen to ‘Celebrating what's new!’ on Audioboo

How Neuroscience Can Help Trigger Innovation

Well this past week has been one of those wonderful times when some of the themes that I’m particularly passionate about have been coming together in ways that I thought would probably happen but I didn’t quite know when.

So earlier in the week I was talking with Professor John Bessant with whom I’m preparing some material on innovation and how to be innovative. He is somebody who has spent many many years at the forefront of exploring innovation in organisations and we first met because John was just interested in what he considered to be the missing piece - namely how to be innovative at an individual level; what can you do and what can you give people that can enable them to be more so. That has been the focus of our attention. We’re in fact going to be doing some work later in the year showing people exactly how to do this and as team leaders how they can enable others to be more effective too.

A few days ago I was also talking with Professor Patricia Riddell about neuroplasticity and the ability of the brain to essentially reinvent itself and the extraordinary potential possibilities that this throws open. Of course this started with a re-understanding of the field of neuroscience of just what was possible. Initially it was assumed that the brain was the brain and there you go: you got what you got. However, what has been so clear in the last ten years is that essentially the brain can re-invent itself, not just to any degree at all but beyond our wildest previous imaginings and we really don’t know the limits.

Now, when you put these two things together; innovation and what is called neuroplasticity do you think they might just have anything to do with each other? Well of course, because what we’re taking about with neuroplasticity is not just people having a new idea once in a while, it is about the brain literally changing itself at the bio-electrical and chemical level. When you have, for instance, new insights, you are changing the organic structure of your brain. It is not just a nice idea, there is something going on internally laying down new neural pathways.

This has got amazing implications. People recovering from traumatic injuries? Well clearly this will be good news because much more may be possible than we thought. In addition, just in ordinary everyday life, pretty much anybody can learn to become more able to do things that they previously thought they couldn’t. If that is true for an individual then it is also going to be true for a group of individuals who might just be known as a team. Or for many teams who might just be known as an organisation.

Now think about this, what would it be like if we started looking at teams and organisations as able – or not - to encourage more people to be more innovative, that is to say, to be become more capable of demonstrating their own brain’s neuroplasticity. Or are we working in organisations where there’s an extraordinary kind of rigidity? As in, it must be this way because it has always been this way. It is not that we don’t want procedures, it is not that we don’t find protocols useful as they have an enormous role to play in making sure we don’t wake up every morning and re-invent the wheel. But if you want to stay stuck make sure you don’t believe that change is possible, that you don’t believe that your own brain can deliver an extraordinary rate of change that you can barely imagine - and make sure that you don’t think other people can do it either. Well who on earth would want to do that?

And of course that is why bringing these different worlds together is so potentially rewarding and for me incredibly exciting.

We are actually going to be having a Celebration Day on 1st June and John’s going to be joining us on that day. He and I will be exploring some of the dimensions of innovation and how to be innovative as an individual. But before then Trish and I will be exploring the promise of neuroscience as it relates specifically to this new quality of being able to achieve greater plasticity - and thus greater flexibility and greater creativity.

Our whole world opens up if we just understand what is possible for our brain. That’s why I’m looking forward to this coming weekend on neuroplasticity. So, until the next time.

Also listen to Ian's blog here:

listen to ‘How Neuroscience can help trigger Innovation’ on Audiobo

A Confident Future - New Possibilities

Well this past weekend, snow notwithstanding, we had our second ITS 25th anniversary Celebration Day and I was really struck with how celebration is also about moving forward in time and celebrating possibilities for the future. One of the themes of the day was very much about confidence and how important it is to understand what kind is needed, where and when, and how there are different kinds. I’m particularly struck by this because later next month I’m going to be talking to about 400 independent financial advisors who have a one day conference put on by MDRT (Million Dollar Round Table) which is an organisation specifically for financial advisors. 

The theme of the day is ‘A Confident Future’ and in the present economic circumstances it is a particularly interesting theme because it is of course rather important to know how to boost confidence, whether it is your own, or indeed clients’ confidence in you. Arguably it is one of the most important business skills you will ever develop and the interesting thing is that by using some of the more recent discoveries in the neurosciences, harnessing those with some of the techniques developed with NLP it is perfectly possible to say that whether you want to boost your own confidence or clients’ confidence in you this is now a learnable skill there is no two ways about it. But actually that wouldn’t be enough because if you want to enjoy a confident future you will also need to know what to do when things don’t quite go the way you'd imagined and this is a time when people experience a loss of confidence or even a crisis of confidence. So I think in a funny sort of way the real test of confidence is when it is in some way challenged.

Nobody is just confident all the time. Part of the art of being able to have that resilience, that capacity to bounce back is recognising how important innovation is to being able to be confident about the future; your own and others. This shows up in a mind-set, it is not just about trying very hard but it is a way of thinking. Again, it is learnable. 

Here is an example, there are so many I use when I am talking but here is one: Pretty much everyone I know uses a microwave and you take it for granted but a microwave has a very curious history. It actually came out of the Second World War not by design at all, it was the direct result of one man having an understanding of possibilities. Specifically what happened was there was a man called Percy LeBaron Spencer and he was involved in designing combat radar equipment. At the time, the heart of radar equipment was a magnetron which was a huge piece of equipment, very precision made and consequently very few were made in any given working day which was a bit of a problem for the allies. For instance, in 1941 the production line was about 17 a day and by the end of that year the US had entered the war and a different way of doing it had developed so it went up to 100 a day but that is still very little. By 1945 they had figured out a way of generating 2800 of these a day. While all of that is going on at the same time in 1945, Spencer just happens to be standing in front of one of these operating magnetrons and he has got a bar of chocolate in his pocket and blow me down he finds that it has melted. For a lot of people that would just be a source of aggravation, but of course what happened for him was he became curious and begin to think about possibilities. He went to get a bag of popcorn, puts is close to magnetron and low and behold a few moments later it begins popping. He then goes to get a pale of water, an egg and starts boiling this egg which dually explodes and splats itself all over one of his colleagues. So then he realises this huge potential here and he focuses on how this could be used for cooking. No one had thought of this. The first microwave ovens based on this principle were six feet tall weighing 350 kilograms, so huge they had to be cooled with water and it was not until 1955 that the first domestic microwaves pop up.

But you see there is a mind-set, a way of thinking. It is innovative, it is confident and it creates new  possibilities and that is so much of what we need. That is partly what I’ll be doing with these independent financial advisors but it is also what we’re going to be doing with ITS throughout this coming year. New possibilities, I’ll tell you more soon.

Also listen to Ian's blog here:

listen to ‘A Confident Future - New Possibilities’ on Audioboo

New Year…Some Truly New Possibilities!

Here we are at the start of a new year. Already half way through January. How are those new year’s resolutions by the way? It is around this time that many of them seem to evaporate or don’t quite happen in the way that you imagined. I hope that yours are still with you  because I know that for most people when they make them they are real aspirations, they are things that would make a big difference if you can make them happen. If you’re wanting some assistance to be able to achieve this then this Sunday is a special time for me because it will be a time of real celebration as we start the second 25^th anniversary celebration day for ITS and one of the things we will be doing is looking at what neuroscience can do to help us make resolutions that actually work. Gosh, what a concept. I think I said in the last update, that this was the year of neuroscience and it most certainly is because I am delighted to say that we now have got  to a point where Professor Patricia Riddell and myself have been able to draw together the many strands that comprise the field of research that is neuroscience and apply it to ways of working that are going to be useful to people in ordinary everyday life. We have a certificate in Applied Neuroscience which will be happening later in the year, but before that just a happy day together with people, some of whom I have not seen for years and I gather loads of people are coming this Sunday.

We are actually going to kick off with what I think is one of the most important topics in pretty much anybody’s life, namely confidence and how to have it and experience it. I had not really appreciated how important it was until I wrote the book on it and it became a really fundamental insight for me as it is so pervasive to be able to have confidence. I have just recently been asked by MDRT (Million Dollar Round table) which is an organisation for financial advisors if I would speak in their very prestigious  London conference in February  called ‘A Confident Future’. I shall be talking about the business of confidence because I think it is so important for each of us in our own personal lives but also in our business lives. That will, therefore, be part of what I want to share by way of a thank you during the celebration day. I have some very particular tools I want to offer people because I think confidence is something people really don’t understand, they often think they want a lot of it or more of it but in fact we are already confident in some areas and not in others. Understanding the difference and how we can build on what we’ve got and supplement where it’s needed is a skill and it is easy to learn.

I also want to start the year, not just focusing on neuroscience but also discussing how can people build their own dreams which is why I shall be working with Adrian Baker who has much experience in working with people to help bring things into being, be they full-scale businesses or aspirations that could potentially change people’s lives. They may involve generating revenue, they may not but together we’ve been speaking about this for years and we are now ready to roll with it so I see this as an excellent opportunity to make new dreams possible. It is absolutely independent of whatever the economic circumstances of the larger nation’s state may be and we’ve done this in different ways at different times. So all in all I’m really looking forward to a day of celebrating by giving new things to whoever chooses to be there and there will be lots of people from very varied backgrounds.

If you’re interested in how to have those resolutions come to fruition and be part of your life in an on-going way then I shall I be delighted to tell you the basics of success and we will also have a look at the neuroscience that supports it and gives a new understanding for how some things work much better than others. That is all to come, but in the meantime the year is well under-way, it seems to be racing along already and I trust that yours will be a fulfilling and rewarding one in which you will not just be successful but also enjoy the experience of being happy. I look forward to assisting you in that should you be interested. 

Also listen to Ian's blog here:

listen to ‘New Year...some truly new possibilities!’ on Audioboo