Interesting articles - Understanding regret and two ways to avoid it

Daniel Pink outlines two techniques for helping him to decided on a course of action when he is stuck:

• One he calls the “90-year-old me Test.” – where you imagine you are 90 and looking back at the decision before. What will I want to have done in this situation? In most cases, the 90-year-old me wants today’s me to take an intelligent risk rather than to avoid one — and to act nobly rather than like an ass.

• The other he calls the “Viktor Frankl Test.” In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl advises: “Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now.”

Interesting articles - Leadership, and why small interactions matter

Why small interactions matter

This short HBR article based on an interview with Douglas Conant[1]  looks at how leaders can maximise the value of what may seem to be interruptions : meetings or the ‘I need just a minute’ converstations. 

These interruptions can become ‘touchpoints’

Touchpoints are defined as ‘ everyday encounters in which there's an issue, there's you, and there's another person or another group of people. They are not necessarily planned meetings.’

A research study (Gloria Mark, University of California) ‘found that most people only work for eleven minutes before someone interrupts them. And twice in those eleven minutes, they would interrupt themselves, like thinking, "Maybe I should check on this" or "Maybe I should check on that." So ……. on average, people have four minutes of uninterrupted time at a stretch to work on things. They're always looking for time to do their real work around that because the reality is, if it's four minutes today, it's going to be three and a half minutes tomorrow.’

He points out that ‘small everyday encounters define your impact on your organization and your reputation.’

The key in managing interruptions such that they become touchpoints is your own perspective of them. 

To do this takes good listening skills : listen intently to understand,  frame the isssue to confirm your understanding of it, and find a way to advance the issue, and a mindset of being interested in the person, and their issue, and how you can help. 

 ‘….  go into every interation with a mindset of how you can help.  So after you listen, frame and advance, as yourself  or the other person how that interaction went. Is there anything more you can do for him?  It’s that simple.’

He refers to the four A’s :  You need to be alert, abundant, authentic, and adaptable.  ‘Alert means you pay attention. Abundant means thinking in terms of possibilities, not limitations. To be authentic, you bring your whole self to these interactions. And being adaptable means bringing the necessary skill to the situation to be directive, consultative, or inspiring.’

He concludes the article by pointing out that while touchpoints is not a leadership model, a leadership model can improve the effectiveness of touchpoints.

Ultimately, people have to create their own way of walking in the world, but we think you have to work at that -- it doesn't just magically happen……….  Leadership does take work. And it should. If you aspire to be a leader, you ought to treat leadership as a craft, you ought to become a student of it, and you ought to work at it. And if you're not willing to work at it, well, you get what you give. I would assert that highly effective leaders are made more than they're born.’

---

[1] former CEO of the Campbell Soup Company and author of TouchPoints: Creating Powerful Leadership Connections in the Smallest of Moments

Why? - leading from the inside out

'People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. And if you talk about what you believe, you will attract those who believe what you believe'.

Simon Sinek sets out how great leaders inspire action in his TED TALK.  How we inspire others comes from that inner place in us, what we believe in, what we are truly passionate about.  It is about inner authenticity.

Understanding and tapping into that inner passion regularly comes up in coaching.  

I believe It is at the heart of great coaching, when the coachee goes beyond simply improving skills and behaviours and understands and taps into what it is that fundamentally drives him or her.  It enables leaders to become great leaders, inspiring others to follow them, not because of what they say and the words they use, but because of why they are saying it and their own authenticity.  Without this inner 'why' many leaders and organisations find themselves in the all too common saying / doing gap, with lack of trust and follower dis-engagement.

As the the Overview of the GoodWork Project sets out:
People who work are not always aware of the forces that ultimately matter to them. While focusing on the “how” questions—how to get a job, how to keep the job, how to get ahead—many forget the “why” questions that they began with: Why take this path? Why aim to achieve this objective? Why behave in this way? It is the “why” questions that remind us of our truer aspirations and ambitions. Because everyone, everywhere, wants to live an admirable life, a life of consequence, because we all would like to pass “the tombstone test,” the “why” questions cannot be ignored for long without peril to one‟s personal stability and enduring success. It is like ignoring the rudder on a ship—no matter how much you look after all the other moving parts, you may end up lost at sea.

'We follow those who lead, not for them, but for ourselves. And it's those who start with 'why' that have the ability to inspire those around them or find others who inspire them'. 

Good leaders and good followers both need to be aware of their own 'why' questions.
As Mark Levy says 'meaning is where your power resides.'  Listen to his audio download 'The fascination factor' or reading his e-book on his web site Compelling

The Inner Game of Work

Timothy Gallwey, 2000

This book develops Gallwey ‘s tennis coaching model and applies this to the wider context of work. For Gallwey performance at work, as in sport, is undermined by potential interference.  

P = p – i    Performance = potential less interference. 

Performance can therefore be enhanced, either by growing “p” potential or by decreasing “i,” interference. The goal of the 'Inner Game' is to reduce whatever interferes with the discovery and expression of one’s full potential.

Gallwey’s underlying premise is that we have two ‘selves’.  
Self 2 is the human being itself, embodying all the inherent potential we were born with, including all the capabilities actualized and not yet actualized.  
Self 1 is the critical inner voice, the  ‘know-it-all who (does) not trust Self 2’ but who constantly advises, criticises and effectively undermines the innate abilities to perform that we all have. Self 1 is the influence of all the criticism we have been exposed to in the past, pushing us to adapt to the demands of the outside world. 

He outlines 3 interconnected principles involved in the process of learning to learn and personal change: Awareness - about knowing the present situation with clarity; Choice - about moving in a desired direction in the future; Trust- in one’s own inner resources. (ACT).

Starting points ....... and ends

The quote from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is a good starting point for a coaching conversation.  

Covey in his book on the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People talks of 'Begin with the end in mind' - though I much prefer the Cheshire cat version.  Coaching conversations without a clear objective(s) becomes just a pleasant conversation. Where a client is completely stuck the first session may often become a session on working on clear objectives. 

Alice speaks to the Cheshire Cat

`Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?'

 `That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat.

`I don't much care where--' said Alice.

`Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat.

`--so long as I get somewhere,' Alice added as an explanation.

`Oh, you're sure to do that,' said the Cat, `if you only walk long enough

Transactional Analysis

Transactional Analysis (TA) was developed by Eric Berne in the 1960s and 1970's. 

The philosophical assumptions of TA 

• People are OK – i.e. have worth, value and dignity. I may not always like or approve of your behaviours, what you do, but your essence as a human being is OK with me.
• Everyone has the capacity to think. Therefore it is the responsibility for each of us to decide what he or she wants from life. Each individual will eventually live with the consequences.
• People decide their own destiny, and these decisions can be changed.

Decisional model:

You and are OK. We may sometimes engage in some not-OK behaviour. When we do we are following strategies we decided as young children. These strategies were the best way we could work out as infants to survive.

To realize our full potential as grown ups we need to update the strategies for dealing with life that we decided upon as infants. When we find that these strategies are no longer working we can chose to review them and to act differently. In TA terminology we need to gain autonomy. The TA tools for working to achieve this are awareness, spontaneity and the capacity for intimacy.

For a healthy, balanced personality we need to access all three states: Adult for the here and now problem solving; to fit comfortably into society we need the sets of rule we carry in our Parent; while in our Child we have access to the spontaneity, creativity and intuitive power we enjoyed in our childhood. 

PAC EGO STATE MODEL

An ego state is a set of related behaviours, thoughts and feelings. It is the way in which we manifest a part of our personality at a given time. The model sets out three distinct ego-states:

• Adult - if I am behaving, thinking and reacting in response to what is going on around me here and now and using all the resources available to me as a grown up person I am said to be in my Adult ego state.
• Parent - at times I may behave, think and feel in a way which is a copy of my parents, or of others who are parent figures to me.  If I do I am said to be in my Parent ego-state.
• Child - sometimes I may return to ways of behaving, thinking and feeling which I used when I was a child. Then I am said to be in my Child ego-state. 

Transactions – If I am communicating with you I can chose to do this from any of my three ego states. You in turn can decide to reply from any of your three ego states. This exchange of communication is known as a transaction.

Complementary transactions

Complementary transactional vectors (of stimulus and response) are parallel; the ego state addressed is the one that responds

• Adult :Adult
• Child: Child
• Parent : Parent
• Parent : Child

Crossed transactions

Crossed transactional vectors (of stimulus and response) are not parallel, or in which ego-state addressed is not the one which responds.

• Stimulus: – Adult – Adult
• Response: 
• Parent – Child;  
• or Child - Parent

Ulterior transactions

In ulterior transactions two messages are conveyed the same time.  An overt or social message, plus a covert or psychological message.

Overt: Adult – Adult

Covert: Parent - Child

When I offer you a transactional  stimulus I can never make you go into a particular ego-state. You can choose to respond from whichever ego-state you want.

Childlike not childish – there is no such thing as an ‘immature person’ only someone in whom the Child takes over inappropriately or unproductively.

In the Child resides intuition, creativity and spontaneous drive and enjoyment.

The Adult is necessary for survival. It processes data and computes the probabilities which are essential for dealing effectively with the outside world.

The Parent has two main functions. First it enables the individual to act effectively as the parent of actual children, thus promoting the survival of the human race. Secondly  it makes many responses automatic, which conserves a great deal of time and energy.

Thus all three aspects have a high survival and living value and it is only when one of them disturbs the healthy balance that analysis and reorganization are needed. … each has its legitimate place in a full and productive life.

Life scripts

Berne proposed that life scripts are started at birth, completed in childhood and updated with real characters in adolescence.  Script decisions represent the infant’s best strategy for surviving in a world that seems hostile, even life threatening. Script decisions are made on the basis of a child’s emotions and reality-testing.  Life scripts are classified under three headings:

• Winning  - relative to accomplishing the ‘declared purpose’ I have set myself,  comfortably, happily and smoothly.
• Losing or hamartic (Greek hamrtia ‘basic flaw’) – someone who does not accomplish a declared purpose.
• Losing or banal – ‘middle of the roader

You can determine a winning life script by putting the question - What would you do it you lost?  

• A winner has additional options, that is how he wins. If one thing doesn’t work out, he tries something else until he is successful.
• A loser doesn’t know, all he can talk about is winning – when my horse comes in….
• A non-winner sometimes wins, sometimes loses, but never very big in either direction, he does not take risks.

Most of use decide on scripts which are a mixture of winning, non-winning and losing.   Our personal combination of decisions may be entirely different. What is non-winning to you may be winning to me.

Most important of all to realize is that any script can be changed. By becoming aware of my script I can discover areas in which I made losing decisions, and change them to winning decisions.

As adults we sometimes replay the strategies we decided on as infants: 

• When the here-and-now situations is perceived as stressful. 
• When there is some resemblance between the here-and-now situation and a stressful situation in childhood.

The movement into script is decisional, even though the decision is out of awareness. By being aware of script we are able to take greater stress before moving into scripty behaviour (or via therapy improve my ability to problem solve rather than resorting to scripty behaviour).  We ‘rubberband’ back to a childhood situation, often ‘putting a face on someone’ from my past experiences (parent, sibling)  - Freudian ‘transference.’  One of the goals of TA is to ‘disconnect rubberbands.’

While in script we attempt to meet adult problems by re-playing infant strategies. Necessarily these bring the same results as they brought when we were infants. Without conscious awareness we seek to set up the world so that it appears to justify our early decisions. When we get those uncomfortable results we can say to ourselves in our Child ego-state, yes the world is like I decided it was.  

Our scripts are often ‘magical solutions’ for resolving the basic issue that was unresolved in childhood: how to get unconditional love and acceptance. As adults we have a hard time letting to of that magic and are terrified of what the alternative might be – some terrible, unspeakable disaster that we had build as infants and that our script was crafted to avoid.  For this reason some people continue to follow ways of behaving which, at the same time, they recognize as self-damaging. 

Extracted from TA Today: A New Introduction to Transactional Analysis. Ian Steward & Vann Joines, 1987.


If you are interested in reading more I recommend Dave Spenceley's notes on the TA101 introductory course and his articles and book reviews.  He also offers a 2-day TA 101 workshop in Leeds. 

Commitment

Goethe on Commitment - J. W. von Goethe

"Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative ( and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now".

A key part of the coaching conversation is this question of commitment.  Having identified / clarified the goal, examined the options and decided on the next steps, the question arises - 'How committed are you?'   Without personal commitment to the changes agreed the coaching remains at the level of a comfortable conversation.


As outlined in the recent post on 'procrastination, the coachee may need help from the coach with 'getting specific'

• What do you want to start with first?
• How important is it to you that you do it?
• How are you going to do it?
• When are you going to do it?
• Exactly when?
• Who do you need to help you?
• How realistic is it?
• How committed are you to doing it?
• What do you need to get it on track?
• What do you need to keep it on track?
• What might be lurking around the corner to derail it?
• How can you avoid that?
• What help do you need from me?

but the commitment remains with the coachee.