Nancy Love’s Weblog

Today we took the train from Venice to Firenze. We sat with a lovely family from the US who have travelled a lot. It was very interesting to talk with them. There was a call for a doctor to car 4. We were all speculating whether it was the very pregnant lady who had gone into labour.

Once here we were met at the station by a car and taken to our hotel. Then we walked down the street along the Arno to Harry’s Bar for lunch. The Ponte de Vecchio was just one bridge away. It was very hot here today. 36C. Uncomfortable.

This evening we had a drink at the bar at the top of our hotel. It is beautiful up there. You can see all of the landmarks that we will see up close on Saturday. Tomorrow it is a bus tour of Tuscany. I can hardy wait … even though the famous Tuscan sun may be a little over powering again tomorrow.

Italy in July ….. Gotta love it. Relaxing and thought provoking.

It  is lovely here. The weather is great and the old city doesn’t change. There are soany very large cruise ships carrying so many people that the place is teeming. We found a nice quiet street to wander down and have a nice lunch. Now we are off for a tour and a gondola ride.Tomorrow  the Lido. A day at the beach. I do love beaches. Maybe I’ll write.

Soo. I’m waiting outside my St Albert for a ride to the airport. My daughters and I are off to Italy. I’ll try to update daily on our adventures.

I also need to apologize fit not being more prolific these days. I love my job in the ombudsman’s office for Parks Canada. It takes up a lot of my time and is very satisfying work. More about that later too.

I cannot count the number of hours I have spent trying to think about and solve the mysteries of my computers…. especially the infrastructure around keeping in touch with people.  We moved away from microsoft exchange as we right sized our infrastructure to reflect the reality of our small company.  We have worked with Google Chrome so I have a gmail.com address.  I now have an iphone and ipad and a me.com address along with my good old shaw.ca address I have had since I moved to Calgary. and now Shaw is hosting www.pulseinstitute.com and our 10 email addresses that are associated with that.  My head hurts.  So I wanted to simplify and use the cloud…. it works with explorer and outlook and not chrome and gmail so I have had to reinstall outlook but the wrong account went in first and now I cannot get rid of the loven@shaw which I still use in windows mail.  I was trying to be smart and funnel all the addresses to the outlook thing but I can’t get it to do what I need it too no matter what I try.

People are like that too.  Difficult to reprogram.  Connected with some of your other friends but not all. Managing relationships can take up head space just like our interactions with our own identifies be they psychological or technological.  I need help….. just not sure what kind…..

I had the opportunity to pick up a book called Changing Behaviour.  It is written by a nurse educator and has some powerful thoughts and images about how to immediately transform relationships.  It is more like a work book than a text book on communication tools.  It has some ideas that are interesting especially when applied to coaching.

Nothing says a need for coaching skills like a life and death situation where behaviours must change or the alternative is death.  Even so many people, as the book points out, with rather die than switch their behaviour patterns.  The book goes back to the old Pain and Pleasure formula that are powerful motivators and reviews the wisdom of the theories that grew out of the 1980’s shift in consciousness, attributed in the book to “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”.  The TV show worked to create a whole nation of people who now knew what they didn’t have which caused pain.  Gone were the happy days.  Since that time Americans have worked harder and faster to win that prize of joining the moneyed people in their midst.

As a result, disease related to stress is up and Americans are working themselves toward heart attacks, cancer, obesity and many other life threatening conditions.  Changing behaviour takes it back to the relationship and provides researched evidence of how having good relationships trumps even being rich.

For me the most important part of the book was the list of factors that contribute to the potential for change. Three that stood out … intention, skills and abilities and anticipated outcomes.  The author presents a set of Behavioural Engagement skills and an attitude she calls Pure Presence that closely resemble the PULSE Frame and the associated skills of Gentle, Honest, Open, Specific Talk, affirming that PULSE is a discovery of how good conversations occur.  “Changing Behaviour” provides the evidence from research for promoting collaborative conversation for coaching and facilitating especially in health care but also in our daily lives.

Travelling is always invigorating to me even when the getting ready for it is a little rushed and the preparations take more time than you had planned. Isn’t that they way life is too? We prepare and prepare and plan and plan and then we blink and the whole thing is over.

Spring has sprung … There is a silly little poem my dad would always recite in the spring that is running through my head… “The bird is on the wing I heard… but that’s absurd… the wing is on the bird”.  That poem intrigued me and it was that kind of play on words that has always caught my interest.  It is especially interesting when both  phrases are right in their own way.

I was writing something the other day at my new job with Parks Canada and my colleagues read the sentence with the word “work” as a verb and corrected my adjective by adding LY to make it an adverb.  I read it again.  I had intended “work ” as a noun but it could have been either.  Language is so intriguing sometime…  simple and complex.

So I am working (verb) for Parks Canada at the Western and Northern Service Centre in Calgary.  I am an Informal Conflict Management Advisor.  It is a demanding job and will likely become more so as people who need conflict coaching and training and mediation find out that I am there.  This first few weeks have been taken up with settling in and become known to the organization as well as getting to know it.

So far I love it.  The people are great and the work is exciting.  Because I am in a term position, replacing someone on leave for one year I don’t  have the luxury of time to get up to speed. I have had to hit the ground running… 8 hours a day…5 days a week.  This is new and exciting to me, the entrepreneur who has had control of her time for the last 14 years. I plan to enjoy the ride.

My word for the day is vision. Mine is still blurry. Louise Hay would say that there is something I don’t want to see. That is probably true. My eye seems to be recovering very slowly. There is still a significant amount of discomfort and pain so something about my future looks painful to me. Or something about my present is painful to look at. I guess that’s what I need figure out. Once I have my vision for my future clear, I know my vision will respond accordingly. Don’t you love inner work?