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]