Lava or magma?

Landscaping Your Life (LYL) can be used for many different sorts of situations:

• Vision setting
• Strategy development
• Stakeholder engagement 
• Problem solving
• Barrier or hurdle busting 
• Comfort zone expanding
• Confidence building 
• Stress reducing
• Fitness improving 
• and so on

That is LYL work's for any and all situations where there's a component of your mind that's contributing to the current situation. For example when you're confused, angry, unsure, fearful or negative your mind is contributing to how you're feeling, thinking and acting. As a result your mind can be used to change how you're feeling.

The underlying premise with Landscaping Your Life is using a metaphor that describes how the mind is representing the current situation, ie a landscape in nature, and then use that to solve the problem. 

The objective therefore is to: 

1. Identify a representation (Landscape) for the current situation 
2. Identify a representation (Landscape) for the desired outcome 
3. Find a way of focusing your mind's attention on the desired landscape more than the current situation.

All the different LYL tools and techniques just use different ways of undertaking these 3 activities.

There are many reasons why this works -  not least that using metaphor makes it more likely we can bypass the resistance we currently have to finding a solution.  

One such occasion involved someone describing the current situation as lava that had hardened. The antidote was imagining magma. Each of us, even if we had the identical landscapes, would find different ways of moving from the first to the second landscape and might include:

• Spending more time focussing on the desired landscape - in your mind, by watching a video, or even visiting molten lava (some landscapes are easier to visit than others). 
• Simply imagining moving from one landscape to the other - there are a variety of ways of doing this - I've pulled a Pinterest board together to help identify the different means of moving around a landscape (although not this specific landscape) - the building bridges blog also explores this quite well.
• Imagining you're  heating up the hardened lava - there will be a variety of ways of doing this too
• An earthquake that takes the lava back into the earth (this is the option a client chose)

What landscape would best describe your current situation, and how can you change it to become more resourceful?  

Alison Smith

Landscaping Your Life

Inspiring change inside and out