• To effect positive change
• To create a new business
• To provide a service, product, or information conduit than could have a profound positive impact on people’s lives

I’ve been meeting lots of people with solid integrity and a wealth of creative potential who still feel blocked from contributing on the scale they would like.

Perhaps you are one of them? Are you someone with creative solutions that you are not yet implementing or using to full advantage? Are you frustrated at not getting the full power of your work-message-solution out there where it belongs?

If so, there may a couple of missing pieces that you can add fairly easily.

Two missing elements. An integrated approach to successful marketing.

1. The means to get the word out to an audience that can benefit from your message.
2. The means to clarify, sharpen and refine your vision, so that your message comes across loud and clear.

Number one - how to create a fully functioning website, give it visibility, promote it using the array of means that are available, and gather a list of people interested in what you have to offer. Also, how you can use social media to it’s best advantage, and how you can make use of press releases, blogs, videos etc.

Number two – how to create and refine your vision, get out of your own way, develop a viable plan. and obliterate any emotional or logistical obstacles that are in your way. In other words, how to create the mindset to utilize these tools and make it all work. And then to GET DOWN and make it happen!

Regardless of where you are in your career, if your work and skills are as important as you know them to be, how much longer can you afford wait before getting it out there on the scale you know it deserves? Don’t you owe it to yourself and others to make your best talents and perspectives accessible?

Conscious Leadership Training Global looks forward with excitement to the trainings we will be kicking off in Sydney in April and May of 2010 that will specifically address your ability to make your important work available in ways that allow others to take full advantage of it.

Stay tuned for more. Click here

This morning I wrote a list of some of what we cover on the course. Then I realized that although the substance and the language was different, the essence of what I wrote was much the same as something I might write to describe a personal development training, or even a meditation retreat.

Some of my outline was specific, and included elements that would only appear in a course designed for business or organizational leaders; for example  – business needs analysis, comprehensive systems for performance analysis, effective assessment in the hiring process etc.

But it also included the following:

• Secret ingredient #1: developing your intuition. You already see (or would like to see) yourself as a leader. Perhaps you are already in a position of leadership. If so, it is because you have a naturally intuitive capability. Now learn concrete new ways to develop your intuitive capability.
• Secret ingredient #2: Rapport and communication: the Principle of ‘Liking”. People follow you because they know that you understand, appreciate, and like them. This is not something you can fake.  However, you can effect changes within yourself that will echo the internal patterns of some of the greatest and most charismatic leaders, so that people will trust you.
• Secret ingredient #3: What are the things that help you focus best?. This is different for everybody. Knowing what helps you focus best and what supports your best performance, and then by systematically reinforcing that focus, you can enhance everything you do.
• Communication is more about listening, and knowing what to listen for, than it is about getting your point across. Everyone has heard that listen is important, many people have not yet learned how specifically to do so.
• Leadership (as described by Nelson Mandela) is often best done from behind, so that people feel they are leading themselves, as they must, to become leaders in their own right.

I often hear people say that personal development and business development are the same. I wish this was always true. I think only the very best training is fully comprehensive. When it is, there’s another ingredient you can add. There is business, personal, and organizational development. Then the next element that seems to insert itself is something you might call ’spirit’. Of course, spirit is a loaded word, and means different things to different people. You could call it ‘inspiration’, but it’s more than that.

I leave it to you to call it what you like. Suffice to say, that the best training, whatever its ostensible purpose, leads you to greater happiness, greater effectiveness, and greater congruence with your own deepest values – greater ’spirit’. Call it Jung’s Transcendent Function, call it congruence between conscious and unconscious, or call it spirit–we all recognize it when we are living and working effortlessly towards full capacity.

In this context we believe the Art of Conscious Leadership to be one of the very best and most comprehensive trainings of its kind available anywhere.

http://consciousleadershiptraining.com/

It’s always a revelation to see how differently we each respond to crisis. Advocates of global catastrophe compete to find evidence to support their prognosis. While those who say, “there are no real problems, only opportunities to find new solutions,” may find limits to test their optimism. Or not.

What are your values? The ones which form the lens through which you see the world? Is your glass half-empty, or half-full? Is you optimism or pessimism insurmountable?

The particular metaphor of the glass represents something we call a meta-program – meaning that you tend to incline in one direction or the other fairly consistently. The lens may work differently for different areas of your life. For example, you may see the upside when it comes to relationships, and focus on the downside when it comes to money or the global economy. It’s not something that’s set in stone. Whichever way you lean, you can change it – but it takes a little work.

One of the things I notice about people when I first meet them is how they see that glass. Do they focus on the downside or the upside? I also see how quickly people with similar orientations gravitate towards each other.

There’s no intrinsic problem here – unless your particular tendency to see the glass as half-full or half-empty is making you miserable – in which case, as your coach or meditation teacher my job becomes helping you to change it – in whichever direction is going to help your life work best.

This view, this lens, this meta program, transcends ideology. Buddhist thought, religious thinking in general, can lean either way, as can any group or individual.

Do you your glass as half empty or half full?

This meta-program is only one of about 72 that we pay attention to in our work.

The miracle is not so much that we face challenges. It’s that we are each so uniquely different in how we respond to the world and to each other.

See upcoming meditation retreats and trainings for more on meta-programs and personal change.

Question: There are many critics out there of hypnotherapy, a practice you are clinically licensed to facilitate. Much of the criticism surrounds the very real danger of the hypnotist planting “hidden suggestions” in a client’s mind or the possibility of false memories arising. I wonder if you would agree that these are real dangers and if you could describe how a competent hypnotist can steer clear from these entrapments? In addition, what are the benefits of hypnotherapy as you see it?

Caitriona Reed: I have found that those who criticize hypnotherapy usually have very little exposure to, or practical understanding of, what hypnosis is. In my experience “”hidden suggestions” are just as likely to be planted by a charismatic religious teacher (Buddhist or otherwise) as by a hypnotherapist. More so in fact, as the hypnotherapist is likely to have more specific understanding of what they are doing in this context.

My understanding is that both the teaching and practice of the Dharma, as well as the use of trance in a clinical setting, both have as their goals the awakening of personal accountability, personal empowerment, and healing for the student/client. In the words of Milton Erikson, our work is to “transform the trance of disempowerment into a trance of empowerment.”

It may be helpful to understand that both hypnosis and meditation are inductive rather than deductive processes. In other words, they seek to use capacities of the mind that are beyond the reach of the merely rational.

There are of course differences between hypnosis and meditation, though many of those differences may be merely contextual. Without question, for hypnotists, as for Dharma teachers, integrity is an essential requirement. In addition, it is important to understand that “there are many roads to the ocean.”

For information on our training in cutting-edge Hypnosis and NLP techniques
Please Click Here

For the text of the complete interview Please go to Sweeping Zen

One of the great masters of Budo (a physically demanding Japanese dance and performance-art form) didn’t take up the art until after he was seventy.

Thomas Edison went to school for a total of only three months then went on to become the man we consider the most brilliant inventor and engineering innovator of all time. The original business of Richard Branson, which have made him one of the richest men in the world, was named Virgin because everyone in the company, including himself, was completely new to business.

Neurolinguistics (NLP) is based on studying how we make change, internally and externally, and how we make, and can change, the meanings we make of things.

It’s not a religion, or a cult, or a sales technique. Originally it was developed by modeling such luminaries as Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir, Milton Erickson, and Gregory Bateson.

As someone who has been passionately interested in the nature of change for as long as I can remember – as a Buddhist teacher, as a poet, as a clinical hypnotherapist, and as a women of transsexual experience – my passion for Neurolingistics has reawakened because I have come to it as the tool par excellence for implementing effective person change in any area of your life or work, and as the ideal compliment to any personal or spiritual discipline for change.

- I hope you can join us for our ten day training in July http://www.manzanitavillage.org/retreats/nlp/

I became serious enough to spend more than two decades of my life teaching Buddhism and Buddhist meditation, Vipassana and Zen.

Buddhism is more of a process than it is a ‘religion’, a practice more than a set of fixed beliefs.

Or is it?

I am very sensitive to how people can use potentially powerful tools capable of  helping them transform their lives as a way to avoid doing so.

I am still in love with the tender heartedness of Buddhist practice. But I am as likely to give students skills derived from NLP rather than subscribe to the notion that Buddhism trumps everything.

They are all different, and they all tend to reinforce the status quo of  the originators of each model: Freudian analysts, medieval clerics, behaviorist, Gnostics, Rogerians and so on …

The truth is – all the maps work. Quite well.  But they work towards reinforcing the predetermined model.

What if there was a map of maps? A map of the modeling process itself?

Fortunately there is.

Like any other map it can be misused. At it’s best it not a map – more of a process that uses different maps, because it claims no map, no model of either the mind or the universe, can be accurate, let alone absolute.

What is the map? Elements of the Buddhist Psychology of Yogacara and Madhyamika Buddhism, elements of Korzybski’s General semantics, elements of NLP praxis. Soething to do with where those three intersect perhaps. — Because all three are preeminently about Praxis, about putting change into action, taking responsibility for how you live, how you imagine the world…

Why not look at the process rather the thing? And above all, why not look at the process  rather than the map of the thing?

http://www.manzanitavillage.org/retreats/nlp/

From focus and attention come the ability to choose, to create an intention, to generate energy, to effect change – in yourself and others …

Fast forward from the time of the Buddha to an age of plurality, divisiveness, creativity, unprecedented challenges on a global scale, solutions that may or may not meet the problems that threaten the systems that sustain life on the planet.

The static maps that we have used are no longer able to guide us;  and yet there is still nothing more powerful than the simple act of paying attention, coaching yourself through your capacity to sustain mindfulness and focus.

You may not be able to do that. But you can do one simple thing that will always help.

What is it?

.. just stop! Stop! For a moment. For a few. Take a breath. Take three breaths, or five. Check your body, relax any tensions you can find. Close your eyes. Listen to the sounds around you. Let them in. B r e a t h e

It’s obvious right? You know to do this.

And you probably needed the reminder too.

Buddhist Coaching solves three implicit problems:

Caitriona Reed

• Psychiatry and psychology tend to pathologize. In other words, they work from the basis that there’s something in you that needs fixing.
• Traditional Buddhist teaching tend to exist within a context inflexible hierarchies, whether it’s the remnants of old monastic models, or just the idea of “I’m more enlightened than you.”
• Informal situations of spiritual friendship form organic means of support, but often lack the leverage to effect full accountability.

Coaching is an entirely fluid process. It is informed by an idea that is central to Buddhist teaching, to General Semantics, to NLP, and clinical hypnosis practice, which Alfred Korzybski sums up so famously; “The map is not the territory.” Maps are beliefs, unexamined values, decisions, the whole inner world of perception through which we create an image of reality.

Many psychotherapeutic and personal change models would agree that the map is not the territory. This understanding is at the center of Buddhist teaching and practice too.

A problem arises though, when we say, by implication, “Your map is not the territory, use mine!”

Buddhism warns against dogmatism, just as it warns against absolute relativism, or nihilism. The question is; how do we fully question each map, each model, without rejecting them all as being mere constructs? However illusory they are, maps do exist for a reason, and though they are only constructs they can nevertheless be invaluable. So flexibility and fluidity are important.

Fluidity means being open to using any map, and being open to letting go of any map, for the purpose of going deeper, understanding better, and being more effective, functional, and congruent within yourself, and in your life.

Fluidity is not inconsistency, it is a willingness to grow and learn, and to look at your values, and any internal conflicts that may exist within and between them. In other words, it lies in looking very carefully at what you value, including your beliefs and assumptions, and any decisions you may be making about what and who you are.

Buddhist coaching is a powerful modality. It combines the essence of the map we call Buddhism, which is about you evolving congruent values, unencumbered by rigid maps, with skills that help you be effective in the world.

As a Buddhist teacher who has only recently started defining myself as a coach, I am excited to have let go of some old maps, and adopted some new, more fluid ones – Buddhist Coaching, in conjunction with NLP and clinical hypnosis tools, is a peerless modality for helping you move towards your own personal empowerment.