Own all of you. Value relationships. Explore. Learn how fully engaging all parts of you pays off in power, leadership, and energy.

1. FULLYENGAGED
NLPCANADATRAINING
LINDAFERGUSONTHINKBETTER.LIVEBETTER.LEADBETTER.

2.
HIDDEN,NUMB,DUMB
Imagine yourself on a chair in a
waiting room. You might be at
the office of a dentist or a
doctor or an accountant. The
chair is comfortable, but not too
comfortable. It is designed so
that you can sit and flip through
your phone or a magazine or
glance at a television screen.
Whatever you are waiting for,
it’s probably not going to be
fun. This is not where you live
by choice.
Until you’re scared. You might
be scared of making a mistake,
scared of getting hurt, scared
that nothing makes sense,
scared that there’s a
catastrophe just around the
corner. Fear plants us in a
waiting room, where we try very
hard not to think about what
comes next. After a while, there
is no next, and there is no past.
There’s only a waiting room
where you ward off thoughts
that might lead to pain or
danger.
Used by Creative Commons License. https://www.flickr.com/photos/frances1972

3.
Maybe you hide from your
thoughts. You distract yourself
with inconsequential details as
you flip through a magazine or
surf social media. You keep
yourself busy in the details of
your job so you won’t look up
and out at the bigger picture.
You worry about what’s for
dinner instead of what’s
working (or not) in your
relationship. Your mind is busy,
but you’re not engaging. You’re
hiding.
Or maybe you keep your
thoughts locked in your head,
racing round and round your
brain without ever connecting
with your voice or your body.
Thinking like this is safe
because it never generates
action.
It’s hard to keep your thoughts
out of your body. You probably
have to do a lot of work to keep
your body numb and
unresponsive. Maybe you have
a drink (or two or more) to
settle your nerves so that you
can unwind the connections
between mind and body.
Maybe you work out so hard
that your body is too exhausted
to process your thoughts.
There are many different
strategies for numbing the
body so that what you notice
cannot generate action.
The other option is to think
thoughts so fuzzy that they
cannot get any traction in your
heart, your voice, your actions.
Have you ever noticed what
happens in your voice and your
body when you dumb down a
thought to make it safer?
Dumbing leads to numbing: as
the thought gets safer it
disconnects your thinking from
your willingness to act. This is
also true when you dumb down
your thinking so that you can
avoid the implications of your
behaviour or your situation.
We say we fear paralysis by
analysis. It would be more
accurate to say that fear closes
off our perceptions so that all
we can see is more of the
same. We lose the differences
that drive the thinking that
leads to action and change.
Of course, dumb has another
meaning: we respond to fear
by losing our voices. Our
thoughts cannot be stabilized
in sound or writing because we
are afraid of what they mean.
Without voices, we become
dumb (not smart) because we
can’t identify distinctions or
boundaries. Our thoughts run
in circles, unable to find
release. We are safe, but we
are not sound.

4.
There isn’t a lot of evidence
that human beings can be safe
and sound for any length of
time. There are too many
variables in ourselves, our
relationships and our
environment. Our physiology is
subject to injury and illness and
malfunctions. We love one
another knowing that others
are unpredictable and
unreliable and vulnerable. Our
world offers nurture and
distortion and destruction.
The human mind/brain/body
system functions to seek safety
and well-being. It sets us up for
disappointment and fear
because what we are seeking
is possible only in the moment
or in the very big picture. In
between, our well being varies
wildly from day to day.
Because we seek safety, we
are subject to fear. Because we
fear, we use our brains, but we
don’t let them connect with our
hearts and hands.
The only way out of the
paradox is to embrace it - to
make your thinking big enough
to include both fear and safety,
to let thinking happen in so
many parts of you that the
whole is satisfied even when
parts are hurting. The only way
to find all the best parts of
yourself is to pay attention to
all parts (even the ones you
are sure are not the best). The
only way to find something
better than safety is to think
through your fear and out into a
world worth engaging.
Living fully engaged means
allowing the whole of you to
participate in thought: your
body, your mind, your brain
and neurology, your
imagination. As you are open
to more of the world, choice
becomes both necessary and
possible. You cannot determine
all of what happens. But you
choose your own direction,
your own responses, your own
focus. Thinking enables choice
and choice enables you to use
all of your mind and brain and
body to shape a more
satisfying life.
It begins with understanding
thought as the activation of all
of your potential in interaction
with the world around you. It
begins with knowing that
thought isn’t trapped in your
head: it’s the relationship
between what fires in your
brain, activates in your body
and is reflected in the mind that
tells you who you are.
THINKINGISNOTOPTIONAL

5. EMBODIEDTHOUGHT
Here’s what changes when you
begin to pay attention to how
thinking is happening in every part
of you.
You begin to know yourself as whole
and engaged. You can calm your
fear and make choices about how to
connect with people and situations.
You experience the difference
between waiting for life to happen
and turning on all your faculties to
notice and direct your experience.
Begin by getting out of the waiting
room. This means connecting your
thoughts to language and action. It’s
not good enough to let thoughts
cycle through your mind. You need
to recognize that your actions,
perceptions and choices are your
thoughts. The thoughts that turn up
in your movement and decisions are
strong indicators of the priorities and
possibilities that engage you. As you
take your own behaviour seriously
as a message about your intentions
and internal state, you begin to turn
on more of your processing power.
You become more engaged in
knowing yourself and shaping your
impact.

6.
This is obvious when you think
about managing someone
else’s performance. Imagine
running an organization where
you only allowed some of the
business units to function at
any one time. Obviously, you
want more. You want every
possible resource applied to
maximize productivity. When
you think about managing an
individual, you want them to
use their best instincts, their
best analysis, their best soft
skills and their best energy and
you want all of that at once.
Now think about your own
performance - personal,
professional, social. How can
you put large parts of you on
hold if you are to get the best
from yourself? It’s obvious that
someone else would want your
full engagement. That means
more than thinking rationally: it
means using every possible
resource to interact with the
situation and change elements
of it to produce a desirable
result.
Put simply: your emotions, your
actions and your words are as
important as your analysis in
driving your results. To live fully
engaged is to check out what
your body, senses, intuition
and imagination can bring to
the table to solve problems,
adapt to change, and produce
results. Embodied thought
takes shape in your voice, your
physiology and your
behaviours.
Practice it now. Think of a
situation that has you stuck or
concerned, a situation that
makes you numb or dumb.
Now, instead of thinking
“about” the situation, notice
how you are thinking about it.
Begin with your body. Scan
through your physical well-
being and notice what is
different when you are thinking
about this situation. Where
does tension appear or
disappear? Where is there
energy to move or energy
pulling you into hiding? What
does your body feel like doing
as you think (fidget, run away,
curl into a little ball)? Instead of
dismissing pain, tension or
movement as “just” your body,
accept these messages as part
of the way your fully engaged
self signals what you are
perceiving in you and around
you.
Now play with your thinking. If
this situation were a movie,
what kind of movie would it be
(and which famous and
gorgeous actor would play
you)? What kind of stories or
places or animals come to
mind when you think of this
situation? We all think in
metaphors (we compare
situations to tangible, known
objects, creatures or places).

7.
When we notice the metaphors
instead of dismissing them, we
get more information about our
peripheral awareness. Some
part of your mind/brain/body
system has noticed elements
or patterns in the situation that
your conscious thinking has
missed. Your metaphors are
efforts to pay attention to what
you already know about where
you are and where you need to
go.
Finally, get out and move
through your thinking. Thinking
on a long walk is much
different than thinking in a
waiting room. You won’t know
how it is different (not really)
until you do it. You know what
situation has you preoccupied.
Now walk, run, dance or
exercise through it. This will not
make sense to your rational
mind. It’s been trained that
sitting still is the only way to
think well. But the human body
is much older than the rational
mind (anthropologically this is
true, but it’s also true in every
individual. You’ve always had a
body but your rational brain
isn’t mature until you’re almost
30). Don’t let the know-it-all
little brother or sister run your
show. Go for a walk and see
how movement changes your
thinking.
There’s more you could
explore - your sensory
representation of a situation,
your sense of timing, the
emotions that might bubble to
the surface as you begin to
wonder what they add to your
ability to shape a response.
And of course, this is not a
linear process. As you explore
the neglected elements in your
thinking, your rational analysis
will also surface and adapt.
Embodied thinking owns all of
it as part of a whole response
to a complex situation.
Embodied thinking is the
thinking of full engagement, the
thinking that occupies all of you
in moving to a more satisfying
experience.

8.
How do you define power? For
most people, the answer
includes a combination of
enough energy and strength to
make things happen. For
human beings, power is rarely
about physical strength or
physical energy. It’s more likely
about being able to pull
together physical, emotional,
intellectual and social strength
through a guiding purpose.
When you put all of yourself at
the service of making a
particular change in the world,
you are at your most powerful.
The first effect of fully engaging
all of your thinking is that you
become more present to your
situation. You reflect more on
what is happening in you and
around you. You begin to
notice that changes in you
create changes in the situation.
You begin to count the costs, to
you and to others, of making
those changes. As you
heighten your awareness, you
change the way time flows for
you. Each moment is dense
with perception and
perspective and possibility. To
hold it in your thinking self
(your brain and body and mind)
you become alert; you become
energized. The energy comes
from that fully alert brain that is
firing in so many different parts
at once. The energy comes
from the connection you feel to
your relationships. The energy
comes because waking all the
way up is exciting.
It is, perhaps, a paradox that
when we take a risk we feel
vulnerable and others see us
as courageous and powerful. I
cannot imagine that courage
ever feels good. It only rises
when there is something more
important than fear, and that
means that every person who
is brave is also someone who
is scared. Every person who is
brave is risking pain or failure
in the service of something
important to them. From the
outside, we see someone who
has the power to stand up to
threat, to risk, to loss. From
inside, we have to focus on just
one thing because we are so
close to giving up or giving in.
The one thing we give our
attention is the thing that is
more important to us than fear.
Power comes from knowing
that we value something more
than we fear pain or loss or
embarrassment. What’s the
thing that would make you
brave?
GROWYOURPOWER

9.
What’s the thing you value so
highly that you could give it
your attention even in very
bumpy seas, even hanging by
a very thin thread, even when
you know you will pay a high
price? That’s what purpose is:
it’s the thing that makes it
worth getting out of the waiting
room and doing what has to be
done to move forward.
Will is the power that stands in
the world and finds the voice
and the imagination to choose
purpose whether or not it
seems possible. Will is a force
like mind: we know we have it
but we’re not entirely sure how
it begins. We grow will by
practicing. We act to make
change in ourselves or the
world and when change
happens, our will grows a little.
When we start, we are all will,
but there is not much of us.
Babies are born with a voice
and not much more.
Sometimes they can make
change happen, and often they
cannot. It takes what will they
have to persist until they can
grow more of themselves and
more will.
To know that will is power, you
only have to say the words.
Say to yourself, “I hope good
things will happen this year.”
Say to yourself, “I want good
things to happen this year.”
Say to yourself, “I will make
good things happen this year.”
Notice what changes in your
voice, your body, your
perceptions as you say the
words. The will is so strong that
even if you use it against
yourself, it will be effective (but
don’t will failure or hurt on
yourself). What you will is not
always what happens, but it
always makes a difference; will
always makes change happen.
It’s a virtuous cycle (not a
vicious one). Fully engaged
thinking grows presence and
purpose and will power.
Presence and purpose and will
power engage all of your
senses, your imagination, your
analysis, your physical being.
You might not always get
stronger (life happens) but
once the cycle is set, you will
be determined, connected,and
engaged.

10. LEADERSHIPHAPPENS
You might like to practice thinking
with mind and body and brain. You
might want to know yourself better
and make choices about the
responses you make, the
relationships you build, and the
results you create. For most people,
the benefits of living a fully engaged
life compel them to get out of the
waiting room and take chances.
Once they have power, the power
that comes with living with presence
and purpose and will, something
else begins to happen. They find
that the people around them, the
people who connect with them, are
influenced. They find that whether or
not it was part of their conscious
intention, they have become
leaders.
Human beings are socially wired:
our ability to track the states and
behaviours of the people around us
is a function as automatic as
breathing. We do not choose to
connect: we connect because we
are human. Most of this connection
happens while our thoughts are
occupied with other things.

11.
If someone’s brain is in the
waiting room, cycling through
thoughts that never reach the
voice or generate actions, then
they have lots of brain/body
function left for noticing and
interacting with other people.
Most of what they pick up is
other people’s anxiety and
incongruence. But sometimes,
they attune to someone and
find power and presence and
purpose.
The first act of leadership is to
model power so that the people
around you can become
attuned to the possibly of
engaging their own
resourcefulness and
mindfulness. As you become
more fully engaged, others pick
up that engagement and begin
to respond to it, often before
they are aware of what they
have noticed. “Something is
different,” they think. And then
their minds turn to what they
value, what they want, what
might be possible. They might
never know that you have
changed what is possible for
them by changing what is
possible for you.
Unless leading others is part of
your conscious intention, you
might not even notice that they
are changing in response to
you. You might only be aware
that change is happening
around you and that it is
aligned with your purpose for
your situation. Our conscious
minds are limited: we do not
always see the patterns of
influence in which we move.
But those same patterns would
be clearly defined to the eye of
an observer.
The second act of leadership is
to attune to what is powerful in
the people around you. Many
people try to lead by
connecting with the fear in the
people they want to influence.
The problem with this is that
what we give our attention is
amplified. When we connect
with fear, we feel more fear and
so does the person with whom
we connect.
When we give attention to the
moments when people are
present and purposeful and
powerful, we mirror back their
best. When you fully engage
with the best in people, you
make it easier for them to stay
focused on the purpose that
brings out their best.

12.
The third act of leadership is to
share stories. Stories engage
all of you: your reason, your
emotions,your perceptions,
your physical presence
whether you are listening or
reading or telling. When you
listen to a story, your
imagination and interpretation
completes and directs the
story’s meaning. When you tell
a story, you set others up to
shape some of the story’s
content and meaning. A story is
never complete until it takes
root in a new mind and begins
to grow there.
Does this sound impractical?
What sounds impractical to me
is language so specific and
technical that it lands in only a
few parts of a receiver’s brain.
So much of what we have been
taught about language is
simply wrong. Language is
never a complete
representation of anything. It’s
a suggestion that two or more
people engage with the same
situation at the same time so
that they can make change
happen. Good language wakes
up engagement in your mind
and brain and body so that two
or more fully engaged people
can create something together
they could not create locked
into their own heads.
I love the paradox of that
hypnotic word: suggest. On the
one hand, it holds power.
When a hypnotist makes a
suggestion, it is with the firm
expectation that the suggestion
will be accepted and will
generate action. And yet,
suggestion is not just a more
comfortable word for
command. A suggestion
engages. It leads someone to a
possibility and encourages
connection and creation. When
I make a suggestion, I hope
that you will do more than take
it. You will add your own input
to shape something better out
of my thought.
Stories are the strongest, most
flexible, most effective
suggestions. They hold four
layers of meaning at once: the
teller’s knowledge of the story;
the listener’s imagining of what
is heard; the words of the story
itself; and the situation in which
the story is told. It would be
impossible to track all those
layers consciously as a story is
told. To track them all requires
many parts of your mind/brain/
body system working simul-
taneously and in connection.
LANGUAGEENGAGES

13. All you can track consciously is your own part of
the story as teller or listener or observer.
The most fully engaged person in a story leads.
If the listener is more engaged than the teller, the
teller will respond to non-verbal suggestions,
editing the story as it unfolds to match the
engagement of the listener. If an observer is
more engaged in the situation than in the story
itself, then the teller and listener will be
distracted and become aware of relationships
and interactions as the story is being told. And if
the teller is most fully engaged, then all three will
be drawn into a vivid experience of an alternative
to reality. That such an experience is possible,
that multiple people can share a vivid experience
of something that is not happening, suggests
that the world is open to more change than can
be analyzed or rationalized.
When you are fully engaged, you will tell stories
out of that engagement. Whatever you are
saying will be full of sensory perception, of
emotion, of facts and reason, of movement. That
is what it means to be fully engaged. Language
that corresponds to a fully engaged human
experience will create a fully engaged human
experience. Stories are the form of language that
engages to suggest that movement is necessary
and purpose matters.

14. CHOOSETOENGAGE
Own all of you.
It’s not a competition. You are
one system.
Selling out one part to serve
another is like pulling the battery
out of your car to make more
room for gas.
Explore.
When you love
something outside
yourself, you are curious.
When you are curious
you are motivated and
resilient and active.
Value relationships.
Human beings are wired for
connection.
We only reach full potential when
we are emotionally, practically,
and mentally interacting with
other people.

15.
When was the last time you felt
an adrenaline rush?
Was it prompted by a physical
activity, a situation, a
relationship that was forming or
breaking? There are moments
in our lives that are so intense
time seems to slow down to
hold all of the emotion and
thoughts and perceptions that
are flooding our systems.
Adrenaline creates this
intensity so that you will be
ready to move - quickly! It’s a
short term response to a short
term problem.
Longer term living cannot rely
on adrenaline to boost
engagement. There’s too high
a price to pay for that intensity,
and too many purposes that
cannot be supported by it. Life
is not a sprint. It’s not a
marathon. It’s a very long walk.
Sometimes you will have to
move quickly through a
situation, but mostly you will
have to manage your energy
and attention so that it supports
you for the long haul.
You wouldn’t want to shuffle
through a journey on foot, eyes
down, body numb to challenge.
You don’t want to shuffle
through life as if it were a
waiting room. In the short term,
the waiting room is an option.
In the big picture, it is a
stopping place, not a place to
move, not a place to live.
There are three things you will
need to love to fully engage in
your life. The first is yourself.
You will need to love that you
are complex and surprising and
unknowable and powerful. You
do not need to understand this
to love it.
Understanding it is beyond the
ability of the small part of our
system that analyzes and
understands.
You can understand that all of
you is more capable and more
powerful and more effective
than any part of you working in
isolation. You can study
complex models and analyze
the conditions that drive their
best performance. You can
encourage your analytical,
rational, knowable self to
dance with the parts of you that
are emotional, intuitive and
perceptive.
Or you can just relax into loving
the experience when you allow
yourself to be wide awake and
fully engaged.
FULLYENGAGEDLIVING

16.
The second thing you will need
to love to live fully engaged is
other people. You don’t have to
love all other people all of the
time. You do need to know that
your fully engaged system will
seek out social inputs. Human
beings are wired for
connection. We only reach full
potential when we are
emotionally, practically,
mentally interacting with other
people.
You get to choose how many
people are required for your full
engagement and you get to
choose which people engage
the most of your attention and
energy and potential. You get
to choose whether you are
activated by inspiration or fear
or competition. But you don’t
get to choose whether or not to
let other people be part of how
you fully engage. That’s how
the equipment works.
The third thing you need to
love is having something to
explore. You might think of this
as a physical environment, a
field of study, a business or a
metaphysical reality. You need
to love that you will never know
enough, that the world will
always exist just beyond your
grasp and just beyond your
control.
The reward for this love will be
joy that you could not predict
and power beyond what you
think is possible (not infinite
power, just more than you think
you have). When you love
something outside yourself,
you are curious and when you
are curious you are motivated
and resilient and active.
I use the word love carefully.
Most of our songs about love
are sad or angry. Love hurts.
Love changes. Love is a risk.
Full engagement will often feel
worse than being numb or
dumb or hidden. You can’t trust
any one part of your whole self
to be right more often than any
other part. That means that the
part of you that feels good or
powerful or hurt or helpless is
no more reliable a judge of
what is real than the part of you
that analyzes or the part of you
that builds walls to keep you
safe. They are all incomplete
on their own. Inevitably, they all
fail on their own.

17. What you can trust is that your best results, your
best experiences, and your best influence will
come from accepting that you need all of you:
social, emotional, analytical, physical. This is not
a competition between different needs: you are
an integrated system that requires that every
element be fit for optimal performance. You own
all of yourself. Your attention is shaped by what
you explore and what you love. Shutting off a
part of this makes no more sense than
disconnecting the battery to focus on putting gas
in the tank.
Take this moment. Feel the blood in your veins,
the beat of your heart, the balance of your
weight. Focus on the way your skin wraps
around you and contains you. Then imagine that
you can see yourself as you sit reading this.
Notice yourself in a picture that is bigger than
you. Zoom back until you see your building, your
city, your country and know that all of it is
wrapped around the skin that wraps around you.
Now think of something you want, something
you value. It could be as simple as a cup of
coffee, or as complicated as a hug from
someone you love. Focus. Then walk away and
make something happen.
Living Your Purpose by Linda Ferguson. Available in
hardcover, paperback and e-book at Amazon and Indigo.

18. LEARNMORE
@NLPCANADATRAINING,2016
www.nlpcanada.com