A Paradigm Shift to Unlock Potential

i’m a great believer in

science and ovens so when i sent the

fly for today through my nickname

yesterday

and saw what i was on after a band

called artemis

balls of my anniversary

that one so yeah we’ll just go with it

so

what i want to share with you today is

some information

that gary and i are using

and it’s a really powerful paradigm that

you can add to any kind of change

approach that you take and you can also

use it on its own

i might be able to listen to this from a

place of curiosity because some of it

might go oh i know this is familiar it

sounds like a positive positive

psychology or it’s

strength-based change processes and it

might have elements of those but there’s

actually a piece of people you can find

to be

pretty mobile that can allow for really

partnerships in your own

so i’d like to introduce you to a young

friend of mine

called lucy

and we meet lucy at five years old it’s

her first day of school

and she is beyond excited she’s been

waiting for this for eight years

she’s got the new uniform and her

little bit shoes a little bit tarnished

because she’s been in focus all summer

but she just feels really pumped for

this new adventure

in her life and as she’s in the hall

the assembly to start the school year

she sees some of the grades six kids on

the stage with the teachers

and she’s really curious why they’re up

there not sitting in the hall with

everybody else

so when she asks the question the way it

finds out she hears that they aren’t

being chosen

as house leaders in the school

and their role is to be the liaison

between the

teachers and the kids so my first

assembly

lucy has absolutely no doubt that when

she gets to grow at six that’s where she

wants to be as well

she wants to be a hospital

now if we jump forward and catch up with

lucy a few years later

we need a very different little child

she’s 10 and she’s much less confident

she was

she’s become much more quiet

and that dream of standing in front of

the school has

gone she wouldn’t even consider it

now nothing terrible has happened along

the way she’s had some teachers

that were perhaps a little bit harsher

than they could have been and she’s had

jostling with friends as they’ve been

working out they’re thinking all over

and that social stuff that

i don’t know i went through maybe

someone else anyone else yeah

so it’s just you know she’s just been

living really

but all of those experiences have

gradually whittled away her confidence

and her belief in herself

and partly that’s because the way that

the school is structured and very

different to the original talk we heard

from john today

but the way this school is structured is

very common and it’s that focus on

what aren’t you doing well so you can do

better what isn’t working so we can fix

that and improve that so that we can

and then it just started to diminish her

and how she felt about herself

now the approach the school takes is not

a typical

lesson for it because

evolutionary survival our brains have

developed to identify a danger

so we need to notice when there are

things that aren’t right when things are

dangerous and not working because that

helps us to survive

now there are still times in life where

that’s appropriate the downside

is most of the time living through life

particularly as a five or 10 year old at

school

she didn’t need this kind of brain to be

activated

but it was now lucy’s really lucky

because her mum

goes different way which we call

homeless conversations

and homeless conversations are the

conversations you have with people when

you see them in their wholeness

in their fullest expression who they

truly

are not the self that’s been taught but

the true self

and so as her mom had the conversations

with her she helped lucy to see

where that whole bright little light was

still there

and lucy felt that because when she was

with animals

or in nature or during her art that’s

who she still was so she hadn’t actually

gone anywhere

it was just in that context of school

with friends it had started to

fade so as her mum had these homeless

conversations with lucy

lucy started to remember who she felt

was

and she started to go back into school

into the environment that had previously

made her feel small

with the strength of who she truly was

inside

so a few weeks ago was grade six

where do you think she was on that first

day

she was in the front of the room she was

on the stage with the others

because by the time interview grade 5

had come

she was confident enough in herself to

put her name forward

as a house leader and her teacher and

her friends

voted her in now imagine the change this

is making allison’s life and this is a

true story pictures obviously aren’t and

the magazine

but this is a true story with regulars

it’s a powerful shift

her mum could have taken the approach to

say okay so you’re not very confident

you’re not making eye contact let’s

practice making eye contact

best practice making you confident with

people

and while that would have worked it

would have just kept reinforcing what

she wasn’t doing well

instead the shift was to see who was the

lucy that was still

there that she was suddenly

another story which really illustrates

this beautifully was

about eight or nine years ago and gary

and i were in the us

working we’re running a workshop and as

always

the work we do is always about how do

you unlock people’s potential how do you

help them to step into their light of

who they truly are

a young woman came up during the

workshop and it was a group

conversation session and she shared with

us that she’d

had many many many years of abuse

physical emotional sexual and she’d also

spent many years

going to therapists and counsellors and

she’s only in her own twenties

and while she had made progress in her

mind she was you know

moving through the trauma of what she’d

experienced

she was still very much identified with

it understandably

when we had the homeless conversation

with her

we helped her to recognise that even in

those darkest most

horrible times there’d been a part of

her

that knew she wasn’t the experience

she’s had

that knew that this wasn’t actually

meant to be happening to her this wasn’t

running wasn’t who she was

and so through the conversation she

suddenly was reintroduced

to that part of her

at the end of the conversation and

literally was only 10 minutes

she said it was the first time that she

felt that she’d actually been seen

and moved now this is definitely not to

say that the other

people she would see hadn’t done a good

job but what they’ve been

doing and who they’ve been talking to

was

the abuse survivor that self was very

well known

very well recognized very well heard but

the true essence of her the whole self

hadn’t really been present in those

conversations very much

so when she said she felt seen and heard

for the first time

what she meant was who she truly was

now a few months later we received an

email from her

and she said that that night had been a

complete man changer

for her and that she had the best summer

that she ever had

that she was going to her friendships

differently in her relationship

she was seeing herself making different

choices from that place of her wholeness

because she was now having a homeless

conversation with herself

when she started to be identified with

the self that had been through that

terrible trauma of abuse

she remembered that that other true self

the whole self was also there

and so with the awareness she was able

to make that choice to come back to

being an acting and living as who she

truly was

now the power of a homeless approach and

having homeless conversations with

ourselves with others

is perhaps seemingly simple but

quite profound and it goes to

the understanding of neuroplasticity

which is already emotion today the fact

that our brains

are marryable our brains change

so if we keep having conversations with

ourselves as

a survivor of whatever it might be or in

lucy’s case as someone who isn’t very

good or isn’t very confident

what you do in those situations is you

keep reinforcing and strengthening

the neural pathways of that identity of

that way of responding emotionally or

mentally to a particular event when we

start to see ourselves differently and

have different wholeness conversations

with us

when we interact and act from our

wholeness as much as we can

we start to have different neurological

pathways created

we change who we are not just in our

thinking

but in our very physiology and that

creates a foundation for all sorts of

magic to unfold

so i’d like to give you just a quick way

to experience this because it’s

something if you want to play with it

today if you’re comfortable close your

eyes otherwise just you look

down and just think of somebody you care

about

who you know is going through a

difficult time

and see them as the difficulty they’re

experiencing the trouble they’re having

whatever it might be

and think about having a conversation

with them as dash

what might you say

how might you feel in the conversation

and how do you think they might be

feeling

and now make the shift that the girl who

married her loosely end

see them in their wholeness

see the aspect of them that isn’t being

affected by whatever it is that they’re

experiencing

that true life the essence

the perfection that’s still there

and as you see and feel them as that as

you know

them as dash notice how you feel

and become curious about what you might

say differently to you

how they might respond differently to

that kind of conversation

homeless conversations happen at all

sorts of levels

people feel it when we see them in their

wholeness

we feel who we truly are when we see

ourselves in our homes

so playing with homeless conversations

playing with seeing yourself

in your wholeness and just be curious

about what becomes possible what you

notice changes in your world

thanks so much

[Applause]

[Music]