A Paradigm Shift to Unlock Potential | Mary O'Brien | TEDxRosebank

I'm a great believer in science and ovens. So when I sent the flyer 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. 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, it's familiar.' It sounds like positive psychology or 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. 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. As she's in the hall for the assembly to start the school year, she sees some of the grade 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 she finds out, she hears that they are being chosen as house leaders in the school, and their role is to be the liaison between the teachers and the kids. My first assembly, Lucy has absolutely no doubt that when she gets to grade six, that's where she wants to be as well. She wants to be a house leader.

Now if we jump forward and catch up with Lucy a few years later, we meet 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 their 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. Partly that's because the way the school is structured is very different to the original talk we heard from John today, but the way this school is structured is very common. 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, 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 mom goes a different way, which we call wholeless conversations. Wholeless 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. So as her mom had the conversations with her, she helped Lucy to see where that whole bright little light was still there. 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 mom had these wholeless conversations with Lucy, Lucy started to remember who she felt she 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 five 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 in Lucy's life. 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 mom 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. Gary and I were in the US working. We were 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 the 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 counselors, and she's only in her own twenties. And while she had made progress, in her mind she was moving through the trauma of what she'd experienced, she was still very much identified with it, understandably. When we had the wholeless conversation with her, we helped her to recognize 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 who she was. 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 heard. Now this is definitely not to say that the other people she would see hadn't done a good job, but what they'd been doing and who they'd 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 game changer for her, and that she had the best summer that she ever had. 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 wholeless 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. So with the awareness, she was able to make that choice to come back to being and acting and living as who she truly was.

Now the power of a wholeless approach and having wholeless conversations with ourselves with others is perhaps seemingly simple but quite profound. It goes to the understanding of neuroplasticity, which is already in motion today. The fact that our brains are malleable, 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 look down, and just think of somebody you care about who you know is going through a difficult time. 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 that. 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 Lucy 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 light, the essence, the perfection that's still there. And as you see and feel them as that, as you know them as that, notice how you feel, and become curious about what you might say differently to them, how they might respond differently to that kind of conversation.

Wholeless 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 wholeness. So playing with wholeless 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.