Don’t Forget About Strengths. It is important not to forget our strengths. Have you had the experience of participating in a performance review to be told in endless detail about all the things you need to fix and do differently, and then, as a passing afterthought, hear a few words about what you do well and...
Owning The Change. “People’s behaviour makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs and motives.” Thomas Mann American (German-born) novelist (1875 – 1955) Have you ever been to your annual performance review only to listen to your boss waxing lyrically about a change you need to make? You may nod...
Soft or Hard-Wired Change. Soft-wired change occurs when we make intellectual shifts about change. We ‘get it’ cerebrally and we comply with the need. It makes intuitive sense, and we go along with it because it is necessary, useful or required. Hard-wired change happens in two parts. The first level is where we ‘get it’...
Leading Change Series: Talking As A Distraction? Some thoughts for a leader coaching to change. Some people don’t really want to change; they just want to talk. This talk or dialogue can be contemplative and useful, or just a ‘chat’. If the latter seems to be the norm, then it would be fair to wonder...
Leading Change: Safety In The Status Quo. “The constancy of the internal milieu is the essential condition to a free life.” Claude Bernard French physiologist, in An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865) The safety of the status quo, in and of itself, has serious temptations. Although the devil you know is not...
The Road Is Paved With Good Intentions. Intention is a step beyond awareness (I am good at or not so good at) … it is about being direct, clear, explicit and highly conscious about what needs to change in a targeted and solution-directed manner. Self-directed processes have been around for centuries. Benjamin Franklin, for example,...
Blind Spots. Blind Spots. We all have them. They are those things in our behaviour that others can observe in us, but of which we are unaware, including their impact. As others observe our behaviour, they usually scoot up their ‘ladders of inference’ to reach all sorts of conclusions about who we are – our...
Self Awareness Can Be Elusive. “Today is not yesterday: we ourselves change; how can our works and thoughts, if they are always to be the fittest, continue always the same? Change, indeed is painful; yet ever needful; and if memory have its force and worth, so also has hope.” Thomas Carlyle Self Awareness. How often...
Change is a Learning Process. “That man is a creature that needs order yet yearns for change is the creative contradiction at the heart of the laws which structure his conformity and define his deviancy.” Freda Adler, American educator and criminal justice specialist (b. 1934) Change is a learning process. It’s a bit like learning...
The Challenge of Change. “To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.” Henry Louis Bergson – French Scientist, philosopher and psychologist (1859 – 1941) “Behaviour change happens mostly by speaking to people’s feelings.” John Kotter – Harvard Business School. Think about how would you...
