Nancy Love’s Weblog

Hello everyone… or should I say Ciao.  Italy is so far away, physically and yet so close, spiritually.  Italians invented “La Dolce Vite”.  We have a lot to learn from them.

I have really had a good opportunity lately to read and digest Chris McGoff’s book and application for ipad – The Primes.  McGoff is brilliant.  His take on organizational structure and development is refreshing.  It is simple and elegant and provides readers, listeners and watchers information for all of the senses on the universal patterns of behavioral that he has identified.  I absolutely love how explains things with his drawings and his video clips in the app.  and also how it is explained in more detail in the book.  I wish I had thought of it….

Some simple and profound thoughts from The Primes…

4 of 32 – Change vs Transformation – Change fixes the past.  Transformation creates the future.

15 of 32 – Fragmentation – Understanding the natural splintering of intentionality helps address it.

31 of 32 – Trust the Universe – The Universe helps people who live boldly.

I am beginning to incorporate the Primes into my coaching strategies.  Leaders can learn a lot from these simple truths and coaches can help them understand the application to their specific situation.

Find it if you can and let Chris know I sent you.

This ten days traveling with my daughters has been an interesting study in leadership …. Shared leadership. We are easy with each other and are both gentle and honest in the right measure. Even walking through Rome we are like geese in flight. One takes the lead through the crowds for a while and then, without discussion, the other. Although there is a rough plan of action when we leave our hotel room we adapt and move with the circumstance. Everything is negotiated and comfortable. One person signals hunger or thirst and we find food and drink. We all look at the options and agree where to stop and then where to go from there. There is lots of laughter and an easy way of being together. It is so cool. I love these people. Can’t wait for next year’s trip! I wonder where we’ll go? Where ever it is we will decide together.

On the bus back to Florence from Cinque Terre. A beautiful sunny day to visit one of italy’s National Parks. There are no words to describe this unesco site. It defies description. It must be experienced.
This was my second trip. The first was cold and rainy. This one very warm and not a cloud in the sky. The first was a leisurely day between two nights at Monterossa. This one a forced march with a bus full of very nice people all taller and in better shape than me.
I am tired now and happy to have shared this special part of the world with my daughters. Life is good. Make national parks a part of yours.

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.