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Careers After Covid

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It was great to share some job hunting and career development tips on Naga Munchetty’s BBC5 Live show this week with Louise O’Shea, CEO of Confused.com.


Even more fabulous was that my wonderful network kicked in with their top tips that we didn’t get time to share on the show.

Credit to Lisa Dunks, Customer Training Manager at S4 Labour who was first off the blocks (as she usually is!) and gave me the idea of curating the ideas into a quick blog:

“Motivation is so tough – especially when unemployed. Building resilience is important. Setting a couple of hours each day to focus on set targets – such as applying for 1 job a day or researching 1 topic a day will give a great sense of achievement. Also there are loads of great courses which are free for job seekers. Signing up for LinkedIn learning will also help with motivation and standing out from the crowd.”

Wise words. Here is a quick 2 page handout with some other invaluable advice from people who really know their onions when it comes to recruiting great people and developing talent across different levels and in many different sectors. Thanks everyone!

Download Careers After Covid


The Big 6

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Growing Young Leaders

Most of us have read articles about the work generation gap – Generation X and Baby Boomer leaders trying to manage the expectation of Gen Y and Millenial co-workers. Given my experience of recruiting and developing graduates over the past 15 years, I have seen at first hand some of the challenges. However, with any challenge comes opportunity. I’m exceptionally proud that in the FTSE 250 company where I led the team responsible for graduate recruitment and development, if you fast forward 15 years, many of the wonderfully enthusiastic, (slightly naïve!) 20 somethings that I met are now MDs or CEOs in their own right. Some of that success is down to education and career moves, but there is something to be said for how I helped those young people to “navigate” through their early career years – helping them to step back from career limiting conversations they were thinking about having or providing a safe place for them to explore how they feel.

Sometimes you don’t realise what you did, until you see the results many years later! Thus it is only with the benefit of hindsight that I have done some extensive research into integrating young people into work so that we can all make more of the potential opportunities for the generations to work fabulously together – and get the business results that this can bring, faster.

We often tell our young people that the key to future success is to “…work hard…get your grades at school/University.” So this they dutifully do… However, the world of work is very different and the rules of engagement differ from employer to employer. I’m often asked to help organisations who want to undertake cultural change or establish their vision and values. In those sessions, it can actually be quite difficult for adults who have experienced different organisational cultures to pin-point exactly what it is that makes their organisation tick and why some people succeed in it where other individuals (who might be equally talented on paper), don’t. How do people get on around here? Sounds like a really easy question to ask. But in most organisations I have experienced, it is actually quite difficult and nuanced to answer.

Your values or your competency frameworks might be written in black and white, but there’s likely to be a lot of grey in between. Perhaps you have some people who were promoted before the framework and values were introduced because they were technically very able and whilst they are OK as team leaders, they are a long way from modelling the behaviours that you now actively recruit? Or maybe you have a senior leader whose behaviour is sometimes very out of sync with what you have written on the wall, but this is tolerated because they have significant experience the business can’t live without.

Through our education, we train our young people to think “Yes, but…” a lot. They are taught first to understand a logic or a factual argument and then to explore what their own eyes tell them, and to back that up with evidence. Therefore we should not be surprised that using that same model in the workplace takes some practise because applying those techniques to matrix organisations with complicated cultures, employment histories and some quirky characters to boot is actually really difficult.

If it is hard for experienced adults to describe, imagine what it is like for a 20 year old with the limited work-experience that comes alongside studying hard to understand what work and career progression is actually like in real life. I have met many young people who struggle to express themselves well at work to start with – they don’t do their future selves any favours. Sometimes the values and competencies don’t help them. Let’s assume that “Honesty” is a core value and that “Straight Talking” is a core competency. I have many examples in similar circumstance of helping new graduates to understand that there is a significant and and important difference between expressing strong opinions that shows they are driven and ambitious versus expressing emotionally charged “honest” frustrations that their careers are not moving in line with their rapid but essentially unrealistic expectations to anyone who will listen.

So what can you actually do? Well, here is the result of my own research – some scientific and some based on my experience of working with young people who have subsequently gone all the way. I’ve focused on the GAP between what the organisation wants and what the young person has to offer. Equally the opposite GAP – what the young person wants and what the organisation has to offer. My work is about bridging that gap by:

1) Helping young people to understand “the grey” – how to prepare and present themselves so they can navigate their organisation. Helping them to develop the resilience and self awareness so that they channel their drive and focus appropriately, enabling their potential on paper to be recognised sooner.

2) Helping experienced leaders to understand the power and implications of their behaviour . Well-intentioned interventions can actually inhibit the development of the young person – or at least slow down the time it will take for them to become the highly productive team member they can absolutely become. Small, simple, personal actions can make an exponential difference.

In a 2016 study, Deloitte found that 70 % of millennials were planning to leave their employer in the next 5 years, citing a lack of leadership development development as the primary reason. Thus taking the time to develop your most talented millennials makes sense in order to develop retention. However, given the gaps highlighted above, it makes sense for development activities to focus on both helping the young leaders develop skills the organisation wants AND asking the current more senior experienced leaders to support that development so that they increase their understanding of the millennial mindset. Deloitte found a direct correlation between building a solid foundation of trust and integrity and millennial employee retention.

We use the 6 key criteria that the Young Foundation reference in their research paper “Ready for Work” to highlight the specific areas forming the GAP. This work highlights the criteria that young people needed to develop to get and keep their first jobs. This was not created with graduates in mind, but we have found in our own work that the principles absolutely apply. We refer to these elements as The Big Six in our development programmes:

• Self Aware – Taking responsibility, not shifting blame and controlling emotions.
• Receptive – Accepting feedback with humility and respect to address weaker areas.
• Driven – Focusing on the right things. A positive attitude, punctual, organised and persistent.
• Self-Assured – Asking questions, Impact of body language and self esteem on growing trust.
• Resilient – Coping with setbacks, rejection, obstacles and mistakes. Managing uncertainty.
• Informed – Understanding workplace, cultural etiquette, presentation and customer service.

Each of our programme modules focuses on 1 or 2 of the Big Six. However the approach is iterative and we build upon the previous module inputs in order to increase the efficacy of the later modules. For example self awareness using a very simplistic form of MBTI/Jungian type based on colours is used on Day 1, but we use these colour behavioural preferences as a was to understand what might get in their way of asking for feedback or staying focused and positive on Days 2 and 3.

We encourage the young people to feedback to one another on every session about how they come across to one another in relation to each of the Big Six. This regular feedback cycle helps to both develop their understanding (in order to feedback to someone else, they have to understand the criteria in more depth) and to enable them to get comfortable more quickly with giving and receiving feedback – a key part of the “Receptive” quality in itself.

There is no “pecking order” for the Big Six, but in our experience, building resilience gives easier access and better success with the other Five. Thus understanding and building resilience is a “golden thread” that is woven throughout our programmes.

There are commonly known to be 6 Domains or predictive factors of Resilience – Collaboration, Vision, Reasoning, Composure, Health and Tenacity. Given that 6 unrelated words are quite hard to remember, we map these 6 into our THRIVE acronym. We have found that this simple adaption makes retention easier and in no way detracts from the validity of the 6 Domains.

Tenacity remains – Learning perseverance and some skills to grow mental toughness are required in order to increase your speed of “bounce back”
Health remains – Exercise, nutrition and sleep have well known practical effects on our ability to cope.
Reasoning remains – Accepting that resistance to change is the human norm, but learning to accept change as inevitable helps to increase resourcefulness, problem solving and self-reliance.
Integration replaces the more usual Collaboration – Strong social support and integrating with people in your community and family is statistically shown to increase resilience and even reduce disease mortality rates.
Vision remains – To be resilient in adversity, your brain needs a reason to go on, a purpose.
Emotional Control replaces Composure. Developing the ability to choose a positive/optimistic mindset, practising self control and mindful self-awareness are all key to noticing where our resilience is low and deliberately taking control of emotions in order to re-charge it.

We use science and research to make the building of resilience a “no-brainer” for the young people and include specific sessions on individual aspects such as developing an optimistic mindset using Seligman’s (live longer and earn more money, anyone?!) and David Rock’s recent neuroscience on the effect of feeling threatened on our ability to think reasonably about change using his SCARF model (have up to 80% of your cognitive function disabled before you respond to a challenge, anyone?!)

We also do a simple, repeated activity in every session to connect the group with the wide variety of research on the topic. We ask delegates to do a internet review using their phones at every session to find a Top Tip for building resilience. They are not constrained. Their Top Tip can be about building resilience generally or specifically about sleep, exercise or mindfulness. Repeating this activity throughout the programme enables them to try out their own tips or those found by other team members and report back on their progress.

We describe that the Big Six Qualities can be Emerging, Developing or Established. We encourage the young people to think about where they would rate themselves and to actively seek feedback from other people in the organisation and their family and friends. Interestingly our experience is that the delegates over-rate themselves to begin with, but become much more critical as the programme progresses. We hope that this is the beginning of their development of a “growth” mindset that we regularly refer to on our programmes; that actually they see “Developing” in each of the Big Six as an end it itself – almost a permanent state – rather than rushing to tick the box to become “Established”as they tend to do in the beginning.

In terms of established leaders we encourage informal and proactive support for the programme. We have undertaken “pre-sessions” for the line managers of leaders where we walk them through the programme. We let the established leaders know more about what young people really want from work and therefore specific things that they can do that will be actively helpful in both embedding the learning AND demonstrating the qualities that the young person is likely to value highly. Examples include proactively asking their young leader to share their learning with the team; offering 2 way feedback sessions and reading supplied blogs about the science underpinning the programme.

We also help the established leaders to understand some of the accidentally unhelpful things that they might do unless well prepared. Examples include forgetting the young leader is going on the session and not asking about it, seeing 121 reviews as nice to do and modelling exercise, sleep, holiday and relationship resilience good habits by ensuring their own work:life balance is managed. We discuss the importance of the “Authority Matrix” – that young people will repeat what they see you do if you are in a position of importance – not what you say and so mixed messages are important. We encourage the established leaders to think about their own habits that might accidentally advertise micromanagement and over-working as a “good” leadership quality by sending emails on holiday or regularly working on days off.

We usually also have sessions entitled Leading by Example and Company Values on these days. We use storytelling to explore the importance of congruency for young leaders between what they hear about your business via the Values, Competencies or their Induction and their first experiences of dealing with the leaders in the business. So on their first day your young leader might read your Values on your company literature. The values might include Lead by Example. Stands to reason that they go, “OK so I can expect everyone here to get on by Leading by Example”. Then let’s imagine it’s their first meeting with a senior mentor they have been allocated. Maybe the mentor had to postpone their first meeting because a really significant business issue came up and their board director wanted an essential piece of information. Then perhaps at that re-arranged meeting the mentor apologises profusely for running a bit late and starts the conversation with “Tell me a bit about you,” whilst trying to find their CV. We help the more senior leaders to reflect on habits they might have which might undermine or confuse a young person for whom transparency and clarity about the culture are virtually important. We usually refer to a 2010 Deloitte study, that unlike their generation, younger employees are generally less motivated by bonus, benefits or pensions. Instead they look for flexibility, company culture, training, the opportunities to use their creativity, transparency and real time feedback.

Another study we refer to comes from Cornell University.
Their research found that young people require:

 Highly productive environments
 To feel valued and be able to voice opinions
 To be taught new skills, to be reviewed on how well they apply them and to be given feedback.
 To be given career development opportunities
 Managers who allow autonomy and flexibility

Practical activities that we ask the senior group to consider are how they could better seek opinions and ideas from the individuals in the group – or from the group as a whole. Ideas from those groups have included sharing blogs, message boards, shared social media and more regular succession planning.

With some clients we have also set up reverse mentoring schemes with senior executives and invited members of the senior and executive teams to be trained in the Big Six by the young leaders as part of a final activity on the day of their “graduation” from the programme.

Hopefully this insight into our research based approach not only summarises some of the science and research about how to develop young people, but enables you to better understand some simple things that your learning teams, individual line manager and your organisation could actually do in order to increase the efficacy of your graduate development. We’d love to help!

WOW! Coach as you Lead

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Anyone who has ever heard of coaching has usually heard of GROW. A simple model, created by Sir John Whitmore, an English motor racing driver turned performance coaching expert.

Anyone who has ever done any training at work probably also knows how hard it is to translate training in a classroom to real life practice. This is usually not about intention – it is because we are brilliantly, imperfectly human!

What we know from reasonably recent neuroscience is that however great the training was, we are wired to carry on as before when we get back to real life.

There are four key neuro-scientific reasons why, actually, we are wired to forget training – however good the material or trainer. These brain-tricks that hold us back, also interestingly kick-in regardless of whether the techniques trained would drive increased business performance if we used them. Good training which would deliver a sound ROI can still fail because we are actually wired to stay as we are, rather than to integrate our learnings into real life and to change. Here in a nutshell is why:

  1. The clever bit of our brains (the pre-frontal cortex) can only think about one thing at once. You can’t make a decision about a complicated problem and remember a model you learnt in a training session at the same time, if that new model isn’t so wired in that you can remember it without thinking. The only way around this is to make a training or business model automatic – so you can remember it and use it without really thinking about it.
  2. In the heat of the moment, where the learning would probably help us the most, if our heart is racing with nerves or we get excited about a new idea, our physiology means that our brains are starved of oxygen momentarily to power those reactions elsewhere in our bodies – so the technique we learnt in the classroom becomes even harder to dredge up out of our brains!
  3. Our brains are pattern machines. Because we can only do one thing at once and that is really energy intensive (ever noticed how tired you get after learning something new?). Our brains create patterns so that once something is learnt, it can go into a different bit of the brain that does things automatically, so that the clever bit doesn’t have to keep rethinking about it and spending energy on it.

    This is why once you pick up a habit or learn a new skill, it is really hard to unlearn the skill or break the habit. You will know full well how often you have failed in keeping a New Year’s resolution, so imagine how hard it would be to forget to know how to swim or drive? But the problem for leadership development is that whilst a new technique learnt in a classroom might evidentially drive a really successful new behaviour, your brain actually wants to repeat the pattern it already has – and stick with managing in a way it knows has worked OK in the past – even if that management practice is now outdated or recent science has proven it to be less effective.
  4. In order to make it feel like the right grown-up choice to keep doing what you are doing (even when you were nodding in wild agreement last week in the training session that modifying what you do is proven to be much more effective) you will lie to yourself. That’s right. Because your brain wants to conserve energy and not expend energy in remembering your training from last week, you will tell yourself “I don’t have time” or “this is not a moment to use coaching.” And you will convince yourself that you are absolutely right. Even if you are dead wrong.

    So this “pattern” wiring is so powerful that even if in reality the new thing could work even better, or even where a behaviour is unhelpful or out-dated because managerial life has moved on, our brain will find “evidence” that behaving as we always have is the right choice. Again the only way around this is to practise a new behaviour over and over – so that it too becomes a habit.

    Practise makes perfect right? Easy to say – but to understand how hard that actually is, re-read points one and two!

So back to GROW. When it comes to training leaders to coach, because everyone knows about GROW, to start with, I don’t use anything more complicated – whilst I have created some models I’m quite proud of, I don’t start with them. I start with GROW. Partly because it does the job pretty well but mostly because it is easy to recall and for many people it is semi-automatic already. This means that the brain of a business leader has more than half a chance to recall it at the very moment when it could be of most use. They can use it to help them to enhance performance in real life – even when the heat is on or they are super-busy with a tired brain but still pushing themselves to make decision, after decision, after decision.

When I am training coaching as a skill that enhances general leadership performance, I also train the importance of not seeing coaching as the must-do intervention for every circumstance. Bad coaching training has a lot to answer for and I have had leaders trying to coach anyone with any issue in any circumstances. You can sometimes hear an audible sigh of relief when I tell them that TELL is not a dirty word! I don’t apologise for continuing to use TELL. As a Mum to 5 teenagers, there are some occasions where I am the person with the most expertise and I want something doing my way because I am the person paying the bills!

The skill in coaching on the job and integrating it into your general management style is knowing when to TELL and when to COACH instead (or when to SELL, TEST, CONSULT or CO-CREATE in between).

When I was still working in full-time corporate life and looking at established models to help leaders to learn to coach as part of their day to day jobs – so not just coaching in a performance review or a 1:2:1 career conversation, but using their coaching skills to power up a two minute conversation or to facilitate a heated meeting – none of the models quite fitted my purpose.

Some were clever but many were over-long or complex. I realised that even the most simple ones weren’t going to be easy for a busy manager to recall and use on the job, on the floor, because of our imperfect wiring (see 1, 2, 3 and 4 above!) I realised that even if someone remembered the first part of a super-clever 4 letter acronym, they probably wouldn’t remember the whole thing – and thus would find a good excuse to do nothing different – as opposed to trying something new. And back we go in a perfect vicious circle to points 3 (You are a pattern machine, remember!) and 4 (You are a liar!).

So I went back to GROW. I had already created a concept of “State G” or “Skip G” when the Goal is not up for grabs. See blog here: https://www.toprightthinking.com/2016/02/12/different-ways-to-use-grow/

I wanted to see if I could also construct a variant of GROW that would help people to remember what they intended to do in my “Leaders who Coach” training sessions – to use their coaching skill in the moment.

And that is how WOW! was born. It’s an acronym (no surprise there) but “Wow” is also the hoped for consequence of using the acronym. The WOW consequence is twofold – for the Leader themselves:

“Wow, that worked?! I wasn’t sure it would, but I’ve just proved to myself that coaching can be quick and easy…and it seems that person has gone away with the confidence to do something themselves rather than me having to make a decision for them and add their problem to my list…”

And their colleague:

“Wow, OK that was interesting…I went to ask for help, but instead I have realised I don’t need help…I’ve got this…”

You can see how in the case of the leader, experiencing this WOW moment, could help you to battle your inner liar – once we start to create times where doing things the new way does work in real life, we have equally powerful “evidence” that they know the new way works too, that we didn’t lose face by trying it and that it was quick and easy. Practise does make perfect, but we might have to crow-bar those first few practices in as soon as possible after we have learnt them! !

And to make it so easy to remember to WOW (sic) our teams with our new skill, that it is a bit of a no-brainer (sic again!)

The beauty of WOW as an acronym is that managers already generally know the O and the W – from GROW. So for some leaders, this is already in the autopilot bit of their brain.

O is about asking what the Options are:
“So what could you do?“
or
”What are your Options?”

W is the Will – so asking about what comes next and whether the person will actually do it:
“So what will you do?”
or
“What could get in your way of getting that done?”

So knowing O and W already, the beauty of W is there is only one thing to remember in the moment!

The first W simply acts as a reminder of what you, as the leader might not remember to do because you have a brilliant but imperfect human brain. If you don’t WAIT and take a minute to WATCH the person and to think about the context. And then to WONDER whether this person really would benefit from you telling them what to do? And if you don’t tell or answer their question directly WHAT question could you ask them instead? WHAT question would help you to understand if they did indeed lack the skill or knowledge and they needed to be told what to do, or that they were looking for reassurance or confidence in taking a next step?

There you have it WOW – The W part of the acronym simply stands for the things you can do as a leader to get a grip of your brain before you go into autopilot on TELL mode. You WAIT, WATCH, WONDER and think about WHAT question could tell you more here about whether a lack of Skill or whether a lack of Will is behind their question.

If a person lacking Skill or ‘know how’ asks you a question, it can be perfectly OK to give advice or tell them the answer. But if a person is lacking Will – so the confidence or insight to see that they have a transferable skill that could help them to answer that question for themselves – you have just blown it. As someone once fed back to me…

“Unfortunately Dulcie, in trying to be helpful and giving them your answer, you just stole an opportunity for them to learn…”

WOW helps you to get a grip of your brain before you answer a question – and gives you a fighting chance when someone asks you something when you are busy, or in the heat of the moment. It better enables us (as imperfect but brilliant human beings), to use the coaching skills we might already have in a different context to add even more value.

In adapting GROW, we are using what your brain probably already remembers, so that when you are on autopilot, you are not asking your brain to remember something completely new.

Remember the usual default position for a successful leader with experience is that when someone asks you a question that you could answer in your sleep, your brain looks for the lowest energy option possible, something that has served you well in the past and that you have an established pattern for. For most leaders that is to give a quick, sharp answer – To TELL.

WOW, simply helps you to consider your options before you open your mouth.

Even if you don’t remember the 4 W’s (and why would you – four is a hard number of things to remember at the best of times!), you might remember just to WAIT. Or you might from somewhere think, “Hang on, WHAT QUESTION could I try here…” remembering all 4 Ws is not the point of the model. The point is to remember something that gives you pause.

WOW works because it is so simple and many leaders know 2/3rds of the acronym already! It works because it helps leaders to vaguely remember at that point of being asked a question that TELL isn’t always the best option – and the W’s – whether you remember just 1 of them or 3 of them gives you options of your own. You can of course choose to tell at that point, but usually, something rather clever happens instead…

Just as we are about to be foiled by our brilliant but very imperfect brains – to lie and tell ourselves that tell is perfectly alright because “we don’t have time” or “they should know this without asking me, I can’t be bothered coaching them!” or “this one is important and they will mess it up if I’m not directive” …We get a quick short shock of our own.

“Oh God…It’s that WOW moment thing…”

I have found from experience that simply recalling WOW, in and of itself, as the most simple word possible, is often (and usually) enough to get the coaching cogs going.

I have been training managers and leaders to coach on the job for many years now. I always insist with clients that there must be a follow up session – where we can explore what leaders did and didn’t do with the learning once they got into real life so that we can really get a return on the investment.

My favourite story about WOW from one of these sessions is when one of my leaders, who, shall we politely say was a “Raving Fan of TELL because it is quicker and I’m the boss approach” came back and told the group:

I have turned WOW into a way to think about myself now. When I manage to stop myself and WAIT I find myself saying to myself afterwards – a reflective statement – “WOW – I nearly got caught out by my pattern machine brain then and nearly did a TELL when actually that would have stolen the opportunity for somebody to learn something…”

My shocked response? -(Yes, he was that much of an “old-dog”!)
Well there was only one word for it.

Wow!

Lose the Guilt…The Dangers of Lockdown Projects…

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There have been many articles circulating about the best way to deal with lockdown, furloughing and long weekends. Learn a new language? Get your house-hold jobs done? Volunteer? Catch up on the Box-Sets?

The best one that I read, by a psychologist, suggested that because there was no precedent for these strange times that one size doesn’t fit all. Whilst some people might feel the need to fill the time with purposeful activities, others will feel they want to do the opposite and literally let the days flow by with no plans whatsoever. The recommendation from the article that stayed with was the concept of “radical acceptance” – that whatever you notice about yourself in these unusual weeks – simply accept you are as you are. Notice your thoughts and behaviours but do so without judgement, guilt or giving yourself a hard time about not having “your perfect lockdown”.

Developing high levels self awareness, managing your internal voice and practising the art of observing without prejudice is a pre-requisite for the job I do. One thing I have come to know about myself is that I am appalling at relaxing by doing very little. Lockdown has been no different. I’ve been compelled to find activities or projects. However, I’m not a fan of the articles I have read that suggest everyone should get busy and feel guilty if they don’t. It sounds obvious, but sources of relaxation and pleasure are very different for different people. I have come to know that just because I relax better via activity, I should be cautious about doing anything to signal subliminally or overtly that those who relax by not being busy would be “better off” joining me. Not only can it be plain irritating, but when we influence others as a parent, boss or coach, we can accidentally make people feel that they are not “doing enough”. I hope that more often than not these days I signal to my laid back friends that taking a whole day to just “be” is something I envy their ability to do, rather than something I am comparing unfavourably with my list of “achievements” over a weekend.

I read a while ago that how we relax can be related to our personality preferences and our innate wiring. Certainly my lockdown has been very “Red” and full of Extraverted Thought. I’ve been taking action and doing things that “make sense” because they look to make practical advantage of the situation we are in. I have other friends more “Yellow” friends who have whole-heartedly entered the world of video socialising with a gusto, that I personally would find exhausting, but they are exhilarated by. My “plenty of Blue” energy husband, working 12 hour days from home, is already seeing this period as “business as usual”. He is resolving problems that seem quite complex to me with minimal fuss or debate so he can focus on the long term strategic plan.

Whatever is working for you, one thing I have been a bit disturbed by are the tweets and articles that suggest that if you don’t come out of lockdown with a new skill or a stronger than ever network, that you have somehow “failed” the lockdown challenge.

What this perspective fails to note is that for much of the population, this will be a time where people will feel the need to reflect, not act. We can sometimes forget that actually taking pleasure in just “being” is exceptionally good for our brains and one of the great luxuries of first world living. Thus, rather than being critical of my more “Green” friends using the time to reflect on how the world is and might be and “producing” very little who feel a bit guilty about it, I’m reassuring them reflecting much and “achieving” little is something more of us would benefit from doing and actively a great thing – and to positively ignore those who would seek to criticise their coping mechanisms and sources of strength and pleasure.

I’d be really interested to know what you have been doing and whether you think it related to your innate wiring. Have you surprised yourself? Or actually done things that are “so you” that it makes you smile?

Let me confess to what I have been up to and in reading the above, please be reassured that I am smiling at myself needing to stay busy with practical things and am in no way suggesting you should find a project, just because I needed one! And I use the word “confess” because as ever, with so many of my projects, some friends and colleagues will admire my drive and creativity…whilst some (2/5th of my teenagers included) will think I am just a little bit mad…

I created a deck of playing cards…

Normal Playing Cards – with extra learning sneaked in…

As ever, there’s a story…

Those of you who have attended Tea Break Training sessions (currently closed but hopefully opening soon) will know that I always bring 2 things.

  1. Reassurance about the benefits of experiencing “incompetence”. I share how I deliberately take on a challenge every couple years to remind myself about how it feels to be utterly incompetence at something – and to prove to myself and others that staying “incompetent” can be a choice. When your brain tells you “I’ve never been able to and you can’t teach an old dog new tricks…” or “I’d love to do that but would never have the time…” those phrases are likely to be personalised and terrific sounding “lies” – a trick that your brain plays so that you won’t feel the shame of any incompetence, or invest the time in doing something about it. All very well if the new skill doesn’t really matter, but actually quite important in personal development if the world is moving on and you aren’t keeping up. I help people to understand that our brains are very good at inventing very grown up sounding responses involving how busy we are or how we can manage perfectly well without a skill, to make it the sensible choice not to do anything about it.
  2. Lots of post-its…

So my point 1) includes a story I tell that as a child, I had tried and failed to play several instruments and thus told myself “I can’t play a musical instrument…so as 40+ adult I have learnt to play the guitar (and to sing along, but the teenagers would disagree with the verb “sing).

I can now surf (even the teenagers need to admit that one is true.)

The hidden incompetence I had been meaning to getting around to fix for a while is that I’m rubbish at History. There we go, I said it out-loud. It’s been fairly well hidden because I did an English degree, so I’d always been able to bluff my way through a game of Trivial Pursuit or a pub quiz by pausing to “let other people have a go” when a question about who was on the throne at a certain time or which composer wrote…But the truth was, having not even chosen History at GCSE, I hadn’t a clue. I was a bit embarrassed by it so I’d decided I’d embrace my incompetence and I had an idea how.

It involved my 2) – Lots of Post Its.

I decided to do a home version of the classic history classroom where timeline that you get near the ceiling like an educational wallpaper border, I would get some colour co-ordinated gaffer tape to match my decor and create one myself by chronologically writing the dates of the Kings and Queens of the UK around the wall. Then I would write a novel, a poem I loved, a play I’d enjoyed and some of the key things in history that were of particular interest to me on a post it. And I would stick them up on the time-line. That way if I was watching a quiz on TV and a question came up about history and could zip to the right part of the timeline and know the answer. In time, after a few months of it being there, I could take the timeline down and I would still know what went where or I could at least work it out because I would know that Shakespeare was to the left of the big light and quite a long way from Mozart who was closer to the picture of the Tyne Bridge.

Genius right?

Well I thought so. I bought the kit. Calligraphy Pens. Chalk Markers. Got excited. This was going to be a GREAT lock down project.

Fabulous Materials

Well NOT as it turns out. Definitely NOT Genius according to the teenagers. When I excitedly told them about my plan it didn’t go down so well. Imagine telling your kids you had cancelled all Birthday and Christmas presents this year due to Covid 19 and you were going to raise money by doing a live acoustic guitar and you wanted them to publicise it on their Instagram accounts.

Yes that positive.

Amid the shouts about getting the step-ladder out to take the time-line down the moment it went up, my husband calmly brought the project to a halt. “You won’t need the step-ladder guys, I’m tall enough to reach.”

Resigned to remaining historically ignorant, I went off to sulk with a glass of wine and a bit of online shopping. I’d fancied a really nice set of playing cards for ages. I’d initially asked for a set for my birthday and Mother’s Day but with lockdown I’d changed my mind and asked for IOU’s for restaurants instead. It was then that the various thoughts coincided in my left-field, connective, noisy brain. Why not create a deck of cards that had the same information as the timeline that wouldn’t embarrass anyone. I could just play my patience and learn my facts all by myself…

It didn’t take much to send my brain into a much more positive over-thinking state…

If all the hearts were writers and you were playing a game and got a “run”, you would get to know your writers and who came where, almost by accident, just by playing a game of cards.

If all the Spades were the corresponding Kings and Queens of the time that matched the writer on the Heart card, and all the Diamonds were composers, then if you were playing a game where you collected all the 7’s you would know that Jane Austen was writing, when George III was on the throne and Mozart and Beethoven were around…

Given I’ve written a couple of books with pictures and I’ve produced some card games for training, I knew I’d be able to turn the idea into something real. Never one to let the practical realities like the expense get in the way of imagination, I thought I’d crack on. I started a spreadsheet to do the research and happily distracted myself when I started to worry about things I couldn’t control.

Just like I recommend to my clients, whenever I started to veer outside my sphere of influence or control and worry about global death tolls, my vulnerable relatives or the plight of some of the wonderful businesses I know and love, I instead looked up who was composing music when Shakespeare was writing plays. Or when Edward proposed to Mrs Simpson, what would people have been reading or listening to.

Fast forward 3 weeks and this small project has turned into something quite lovely. My friend Sarah Walden who runs Noodle Fuel – a publishing and production company specialising in children’s reading and education – loved the idea and thought they had potential. The wonderfully talented Mark Bennington who does my Rocket Science illustrations (and is cool enough to have worked on The Beano for many years) was also in lockdown had some free time and some great ideas. Sarah recognised that the economics scaled up a bit with a local printer could mean this was an opportunity not to provide myself with one super-expensive set of cards to play Patience with, but a way to do something philanthropic and sell them with a donation to charity.

We contacted The Big Issue Foundation, a charity I have grown to love over the past few months and here we are. My lockdown cards will be available from next Wednesday. The Big Issue Foundation will make £1 per pack sold. I’ve had hours where the weight of the world wasn’t on my shoulders. And the teenagers are talking to me again – and actually said they will play some cards with me when they arrive…because “actually Mum, they are an alright idea to say they came from your head.” I’ll take that.

So do or don’t do a project. Please yourself. I did. And I’m really happy I did. But when they arrive, I’m going to try to develop another area of incompetence – probably for me, the hardest of all…Doing nothing for a few days. Other than perhaps playing cards…

Top Right Questions – Learn From Lock-down For The Individual

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Any new situation provides us with the opportunity to learn something – if we ask ourselves the right questions.

We call good questions “Top Right” Questions – they are high support and high challenge – designed to make you think, but not to judge. Designed to make you question yourself, but not to be too hard on the fact that you (and everyone else) may err because we are human.

We have devised a series of questions that you can use for yourself, for your team, your business or your suppliers. We hope they help you to learn something different. Something that perhaps unlocks ways to come out of lockdown with a revised sense of purpose or additional useful knowledge.

If it would help to have some individual or team coaching so that someone independent puts these questions to you, then please do get in touch. Otherwise, we hope they help.

Download now

Self Employed – Sphere of Influence

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Before you tell yourself, “I don’t have a choice…I have to go out and work right now…” or “There’s nothing I can do…” take a breath and pause.

Just telling yourself those words makes it less likely that you can create some choices for yourself – and heaven forbid you might live to regret them.

Self employment normally attracts creative people who are independent thinkers and not afraid to take up the challenge of going it alone. Don’t let the challenges of this difficult time take away your capacity to think.

When your brain hears the words “nothing” it will look for evidence that is true. So “nothing you can do” becomes more true because you say it out loud. Saying “I don’t have a choice” can actually limit your ability to create different choices.

I have heard the government are going to announce something by Friday about self-employment. So please be as patient as you humanly can. I know it is really hard as I am one of you. My paid work dried up entirely a week ago. But any day where we go out to work, because we don’t have anything concrete yet about what support we might be offered from the government, could be a day where we cost someone their life. Tough choices. These are tough times.

First to cash. Do a quick financial plan at home. I saved a few £100 in a couple of hours. I called Sky TV and changed my plan, amended some savings plans, cancelled a mobile phone direct debit I had totally forgotten about on upgrading at Christmas. I dug out some vouchers I’d been given for John Lewis and spent them on groceries at Waitrose. I even found a bit of a slush fund in my Pay Pal account. I decided to use part of that to pay for a 3 month subscription to The Big Issue. I might be about to experience some challenging times, but imagine being homeless right now.

There is plenty of advice on the internet and social media about how to work from home or use technology to do your job remotely. I’ve not repeated them here. I’ve focused on some other ideas to keep you busy, adapt your business, maybe save you some money, keep you sane in the short term and potentially create you some good business opportunities in the long term.

Firstly have a look at this.

https://www.toprightthinking.com/top-right-people/

I thought it would be a good idea to collect together people in my network who are self employed and small business owners who are happy to use their skills in this lull to provide you with some support on your skills, life and business so that you can use this time you might not be able to spend at work, productively and positively. Using this time to get healthier might get you way more years on your life to enjoy your work. Reviewing your finances might mean you don’t need to earn as much in the next 6 months. Finally publishing that book could be life changing. Being forced could mean that you take one step towards a new career that gives you more stability.

Let me know if you’d like to see any other skills on the list of Top Right People and I will get the network moving to find some additional really good contacts.

Here are some other things to think about in relation to your business:

  • Diversify
    You will have seen manufacturers changing what they make to produce ventilators. Is there something that you could do as a sole trader or independent that people will genuinely need or value? 
  • Communicate
    Talk to anyone self-employed that you pay directly – your cleaners, child-minders, painter or decorator, your usual taxi-person. What could you do to bridge their earning gap?

    Some of your suppliers might really surprise you – one of mine was happy to pay in advance for a training session we had to cancel and reschedule for 2021 to help me out. You might find that where you have offered genuine help and been flexible that they can now offer you some flexibility in return.

    Your suppliers and customers can give you ideas too. Ask for feedback – what would they value right now that you could provide? One brilliant idea for what I could do, came from a client who I had called just to say hello to. I wasn’t looking for business, I had called just to check in with them as a person.

  • Adapt 
    Think about your current product. Could you do it differently. I’m doing video training – even though the tech will be a challenge. My personal trainer is self employed and he is moving online (I can vouch for this working – I’ve been doing it for 6 months regardless of lock down) .

    Think about what you can do – try not to dwell on what you can’t influence.

  • Be Helpful for free
    People will remember those people who helped because they could. Many of the businesses I work with are closed. But their people still need help to stay sane and think about their business after this. I can help with that. I need to be paid but without businesses to work with in the future, charging will be for short term gain.

    We might look back and judge harshly those who sought to profiteer. Put Customer Service before Profit. Go back to the service profit chain and live it at the sharp end.

    What could you do to just use your skills for the national effort?
  • Use your profile for good. 
    Solving the self-employment question is really complicated. Rather than chase the government for answers they just don’t have yet, use your twitter profile or FB page to raise money for charity. My creative friend Mark Andrew is being productive by setting up a gofundme to provide NHS workers with shopping and toiletries direct to work and home so they can just go home after shift. 

    https://www.gofundme.com/f/This-campaign-is-to-provide-much-needed-supplies?utm_source=customer&utm_medium=copy_link-tip&utm_campaign=p_cp+share-sheet
  • Move job temporarily to add value  
    One heart-warming story of how the networks can help. Someone I know had a job offer which was withdrawn on the eve of his Day 1. He’s now working temporarily in a warehouse supplying NHS supplies thanks to help and contacts on Linked in and over 203k views later. I know of several people who have moved from hospitality to retail temporarily.

    If you are self employed, see if you can do the same. If you really need to work, channel your energies into something the country really needs where there are already likely to be safeguarding measures in place to stop you passing the virus on.

  • Don’t be UNHELPFUL
    Getting out and about and busy because you are bored is not helping. Nor is selling people things they don’t want. If you really have nothing to do and it is bothering you, be patient. Take up online training, learn a language with an app, write a book, get your finances sorted, shop around for energy deals. Check out our TOP RIGHT PEOPLE for ideas on something you could do that is productive. Equally if you have nothing to do and actually you are quite enjoying it, great! Don’t feel guilty and take the time to smell the coffee and rest your brain.

    https://www.toprightthinking.com
  • Take the Opportunity to Think

    Use the pause – and the unprecedented nature of things as an opportunity to stop, think, review and potentially thrive.

    Thinking about your customers, value proposition, suppliers, demand and so on could reveal some really interesting answers .

    Ask yourself some TOP RIGHT QUESTIONS so that your business can come out stronger. Try these questions to get you started.

    https://www.toprightthinking.com/profitably-engaged/profitably-engaged-blog/
  • Stay well.
    Work helps us to contribute and to be sociable. All really important for mental health, so challenge yourself to stay fit and well – mentally and physically. I’ve written a blog on how to train your brain to think so that you send positive hormones and chemicals around your body and don’t catatrophise. Find yourself a new exercise regime you can do from home. Relax and take time out mindfully. Eat well. Learn something new at a slower pace. Get some of those jobs you have been avoiding done…You can’t tell yourself you don’t have time…!

    https://www.toprightthinking.com/2020/03/18/coronavirus-keep-your-brain-well/

Coronavirus – Keep Your Brain Well

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With the upheaval and challenge we are all experiencing, our brains will be doing things that will both help and hinder our mood and our well-being. If we take a minute to notice our emotions and our thoughts, there are some things we can do to help make our thinking more productive – things that are scientifically proved to not only make us feel better, but also give us a chance at recovering more quickly economically and physically.

However hard it is to imagine right now, everything does pass. We might not ever be quite the same people in quite the same landscape. However, there will be a future where we look back and reflect on “What I did when Coronavirus happened…” and today is history and not reality. It’s time to start thinking now, not just about what you will do practically, but what you can do to protect your mental health and your capacity to think straight. Taking time to think about your thinking will mean you are more able to come out of these weeks, ready to face the challenges ahead and embrace the new opportunities that will exist.

Stopping to reflect is also a chance for you to think about the behaviours you want to be remembered for. What did you do to be your best self when the chips were really down?

Here are six pieces of science/research that might help. I have also attached the take-away postcard that we use in Tea Break Training to help people to remember the concepts.

  1. People are generally well intentioned – even if their actions are unhelpful

We are all different and we all react to stress, panic and change in different ways. Before you jump down the throat of an older family member or friend who tells you about something they have done which seems absolutely unacceptable – “I’m still going for my haircut, regardless of my cold” or “I sneaked a Calpol into my handbag because I could only buy one” – ask yourself how they could have done that with a positive intention.

We can all act weirdly when we experience extreme threats. Asking open questions to genuinely understand their intentions, rather than vowing to avoid them forever for being selfish will be a challenge. However most of us will only admit to ourselves that something we did was a bit stupid if we really trust them. Feeling that we trust someone implicitly, means that we are better able to hear and respond to the challenges they put to us.

Make it safe for people to tell you the truth about how they are feeling – even if it led to some ugly (but well intentioned) actions.

Take a breath. Outright confrontation usually makes our human brains find more evidence that our random act of selfishness was totally justified. We need to educate and influence, not alienate one another. Asking open questions in a calm voice is more likely to mean that someone is honest and open about the root cause so that you can understand the intention and the action.

2. Accept that you might not be telling yourself the truth or seeing things as they actually are

Life has already monumentally changed for us all. Change is always difficult and our brains particularly don’t like changes that we didn’t plan for. Your brain is a pattern machine. Its job is to simplify life for you. To store and create patterns so that you don’t have to live everyday like it is your first day on earth. In doing so, your brain looks for information to back up patterns it already has. 

Your brain, like you, is well intentioned, but in making life easier it also deliberately deletes new bits of information that don’t fit the pattern or adapts them to be more palatable to an existing belief. This is true even if the information is scientific and accurate. Your brain will still try to distort things if you don’t already believe them to be true. You might have heard an older or at-risk relative telling you they are going to carry on regardless and that the virus won’t affect them. Not true, but their brains will find convincing reasons based on their “evidence” for it to feel true. 

In these last few weeks, we have all been asked to change our patterns. Even if we are physically able to, our brains will resist. If you have found yourself saying “I don’t need to change because…” look again at the scientific evidence before you listen to your own research of one. You might tell yourself “Well I don’t know anyone with the virus so I don’t need to do X Y or Z…” It’s not true – but your brain might try and really, strongly convince you that it is. Pause and reflect. Give people permission to challenge you if they hear you telling yourself “lies.” 

3. Count your blessings 

Even when we absolutely think life can’t get worse, bizarrely it can help us to remember that they could. We release powerful chemicals when we find things to be grateful for – even if we think we are really scraping the bottom of the barrel! I reminded myself of this piece of science when on top of 48 of the most difficult hours in my professional life and the personal challenges most of us are facing, I was in A&E with a daughter with concussion… 

Plan B by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant is a good place to go for more information. Think what you like about her or her company but no one can fail to feel sympathy that her husband died suddenly on holiday whilst in a gym. The story of how she coped and parented her children through this is helpful, because she did so with the help of Grant, a psychologist from Wharton who speaks scientific sense about loss and grief. 

There are many studies that show that writing down grateful thoughts has scientific benefits. Thinking those thoughts has been shown to release Dopamine into our bodies (Class A drugs like cocaine also causes dopamine to be released so respect its power). Serotonin is then also released if we write them down. Serotonin release and uptake is the basis of many prescription anti-depressants. This powerful combination can help us to experience physical effects like better sleep or less pain and psychological effects like feeling happier and having more willpower and optimism.

You might not feel that anything will make you feel any better – but the science says otherwise. Even if the situation doesn’t change, you have the chance to send chemicals around your body that will make you feel better about everything being as it is. Feeling better is not something to be avoided. It is something you can do to stay well and think more clearly. 

Take 5 minutes out to reflect and write down 3 things that you are grateful for a couple of times a week for the next 12 weeks. It has strong proven scientific benefits. Bizarrely, do it particularly if you don’t feel like doing it and are telling yourself things couldn’t get any worse and it will be a total waste of time.

4. Actively remind yourself to think optimistically

Either by yourself or with your friends’ help, deliberately look for positives every day and in every conversation you have with yourself or someone else.

Seligman is the man to google if you want more information or need convincing about the power of positive psychology. His research, subsequently emphasised beyond doubt by others, has found that people with optimistic thought patterns live longer and earn more money.

This period will pass. Science suggests that people who train themselves to have an optimistic mindset during this downturn will emerge healthier and more prepared to take advantages of the opportunities that will be there in the new world reality, than those who practise pessimistic thinking and don’t notice them.

When things happen, good and bad, we can either see them as affecting everything and as being long lasting (Seligman refers to these as Universal and Permanent) or being short term and relevant to just the point at hand or to this one thing at this one time (Seligman uses Temporary and Specific to describe these). 

When good things happen, people with optimistic mindsets look for ways in which the changes could be made Permanent and Universal. When bad things happen, optimistic mindset people remind themselves that the incident is Temporary and Specific – this means their brains are less likely to start looking for “evidence” why the bad “luck” will continue. 

People with pessimistic mindsets do the opposite. When good things happen they tell themselves it won’t last and is just a one off – they see good things as Temporary and Specific. When bad things happen, people with pessimistic mindset say things like “Things always go wrong for me. This is typical, just my luck.”

Check out “always” and “typical” – these type of words provide “evidence” to your brain, and to the brains of others, that the bad things are Universal and Permanent. 

These mindsets have a huge difference not just on how we feel (optimism releases the chemicals mentioned in 3) above), but also on what actually happens next in terms of events.  

Brains of optimistic thinkers are primed to look for opportunities and connections with other areas of their lives where they could be an upside. Remember point 2) above – your brain looks for evidence that things are true? You have more chance of finding opportunities to be “lucky” if you are looking out for them. This creates a positive cycle where, because you are looking, you can find other good things and opportunities.

If you are looking for evidence that things won’t get better you will find that evidence and your brain will start to miss or distort opportunities because they don’t fit the pattern that everything is going to be bad forever. There is no such thing as good luck or bad luck. It is all about perception. 

Most of us are in the lucky 99% who can and will have a life after the virus has been eradicated. You do have a significant amount of power about what that life looks like – even if it doesn’t feel that way right now. What are you learning about yourself, your customers, your suppliers or your business in general that could be useful to you in the future?

5. Ask yourself whether you are spending precious brain energy on something you simply can’t control or influence

One of our most popular Tea Break Training bite-size sessions is called Sphere of Influence. Our brain energy is not infinite. We think we can power on and keep going but we can’t. To think well, we need a supply of glucose and when it is gone, the quality of our thinking diminishes until we get more glucose produced by our bodies (or get a quick hit by a sugary cup of tea in my case)

It’s not just about brain fuel. Once a moment is gone, it is gone forever. When I started to think about my thinking and to log and reflect where I was spending my energy, initially I was horrified. The amount of time I spent dwelling, raging or worrying about things that were outside my control was frightening. What if I spent that time doing something productive instead? What could I achieve?

Quite a lot as it turned out. I tried the tricks and I wrote 2 books. Whatever you think of them, they are a darn sight better for me than sending large amounts of cortisol round my body would have been! 

I have attached one of the activities from Its Not Bloody Rocket Science – The Journal, to see if thinking about your thinking in this way could help you.

It is a really simple trick. At any point in the day, stop to notice whether your brain is occupied in doing or thinking about something that is in your direct control. That’s great. Keep doing it. 

However, if you notice instead that it is spending time on thinking about something you can’t control but can only influence, just pause and check. Is the amount and intensity of your thinking time invested in “The Thing” commensurate with the amount of time you are spending on it and the worth of “The Thing” to you. If you have spent hours on something that you have only a little control over and it’s not really that big a deal, maybe focus on something else instead. 

If you notice that you have just wasted an hour dwelling on something that is past and you can’t do anything about it now or something that is entirely outside your sphere of influence or control, then stop. Don’t waste another hour. It is not a productive use of your energy and it is unlikely to be doing you any good mental health wise. I recommend doing something instead that you are not good at so that you have no option but to concentrate on it. I love reading and films but because my mind can wander, they are not always a great distraction for me when I am at my worrying worst. Knowing about this science however has enabled me to learn to play the guitar and sing at the same time…(I won’t, I promise…)

Pick something you can’t do currently that you would like to learn to do. If you can’t find a guitar shop open, how about learning a language via an app, knitting, cooking something complicated from scratch. Every time in the next 12 weeks that you find yourself thinking unproductively, spend five minutes doing the thing you would like to learn to do instead. It creates a “break” from unproductive thinking which means you don’t dwell for as long. You might just be able to speak French when the country is open again for business...

  • 6. Feeling a sense of panic or not being able to think straight are normal

Most people have heard of the “fight or flight” reaction that we experience when we feel threatened by something. This response is evolutionary. Put simply, the chances of us all being here as individuals in this crisis are tiny. Every person in your ancestral chain had to stay alive and met another specific person who also happened to be alive, or you would not exist at all.

There is a lot about odds in the news at the moment. However think about these odds. It’s mind blowing to think that the odds of me and you as individuals being here to experience these strange days at all is way more than a trillion to one.

Go and buy a Richard Dawkins book from an online independent bookshop to get your head around this. For now, in my simple and far less beautiful prose terms, we are here because our ancestors had the chemicals and brain wiring that kept them alive when they needed to fight off a bear, run from a fire or hide from the cold or the elements.

As a result of their survival, they have passed down particular evolutionary brain wiring to us. The fight or flight reaction is one of them. However, most of us are not running from bears every day and given you are reading this online we are both lucky enough to have a warm home and a computer (count your blessings from point 3 and just imagine what it is like to be homeless right now…)

This “old” wiring is alive and well and does the same things to our bodies (makes our heart beat faster, makes the blood run to our feet, give us a flush to the face), but the things that bring on these reactions aren’t bears or the need to find shelter from extreme cold. The things that trigger these “old” reactions in us can be modern – and less obvious. 

At a basic physiological level, your fight or flight reactions are powered by blood and oxygen. Not just the obvious reactions like increased heartbeat but also the sweaty palms and butterflies in your tummy.  Not many people are aware of the implications of your fight or flight reaction on your thinking power and simply knowing about this has helped some of my clients immensely. The blood and oxygen required to power your fight or flight reactions has to come from somewhere – we don’t carry round oxygen tanks and blood transfusion monitors in daily life and our body has finite amounts. There is a simple, physiological reason that you can’t think straight when you are threatened – the blood and oxygen required to power the physical reaction in your heart, feet or face is coming from the specific part of your brain that deals with conscious decision making and rational thought.

Thus it’s entirely normal not to think of a great riposte until after the argument or to not be able to find the right words in a situation where you feel deeply hurt or that something is really unfair – because the blood and oxygen required to come up with your best responses is no longer powering the part of your brain that does that – they are simply elsewhere.

David Rock knows his neuroscience and you can find him talking about a model I love that simplifies all of this called SCARF on the internet everywhere. SCARF is an acronym and it helps us understand the modern day threats that can trigger the SCARF or “fight or flight” reaction. These are threats to our S – Status, our C – Certainty, our A – Autonomy, our R – our Relatedness or Relationships with one another and our F – our sense of Fairness. 

The viral outbreak is likely to have triggered not just one of these reactions in most of us but all 5. You might have previously been the breadwinner in your family or the captain of your football team. Suddenly you might not be either. That is your Status trigger switched.

Certainty? Wow, that went last week for all of us.

Autonomy? There is lots of debate about what the state should or shouldn’t do to restrict our freedoms but we can’t choose to fly or holiday and some of us can’t even leave the house.

Relatedness. Absolutely – we are all feeling increasingly isolated, even if we are surrounded by people. Bet you have some friends and family that we talked about in 1). Social media is full of people getting angry.

Fairness. You bet. The views on what is “fair” right now and sending us into our own paroxysms of righteous indignation are wide ranging and sometimes extreme. It gets us angry and we feel it unfair that some people will lose their lives, jobs or livelihoods.

Emma Barnett’s show is my go-to place to keep me sane, informed and entertained and there was a great section on the morning I wrote this (18th March to listen back). It was about whether people thought it unfair or reasonable that their friends were still out for dinner or socialising. My 12 year-old posed a question over dinner – “Mum it feels really unfair that literally the whole world is being punished because one person ate a bat.”  

It doesn’t matter to your blood, oxygen and brain whether your sense of “unfairness” is triggered by something logical or rational. You could be totally misguided and still feel angry about something being unfair, meaning that you experience the inability not to think clearly (and then, as a result, say something you don’t really mean or something insensitive or unfair in return…) 

This takes us neatly back to point 1) Be kind. Even if your most wise friend seems to have lost their sense of right and wrong. It may simply be they are experiencing the very opposite of a rush of blood to the head. Share this science with them. It will help you to remember it for yourself.

So, it’s time to think about your story. What will you tell your grandchildren that you did and didn’t do in the coming weeks? How will you stay mentally well and have as many powerful positive chemicals in your body as humanly possible? How will you train your brain to see things as they are and to prepare for the opportunities at the end of this to rebuild our world? 

None of us will be perfect in the coming weeks. But let’s accept what we don’t do well as quickly as we can and make deliberate choices in how we think to be the best versions of ourselves. We need collective brain power at the end of this. Training your own brain is something you can do, when so much else of what is happening in the world is out of our control.

If you think that reading about the science in more detail would help or you would like some practical exercises to help you to think more positively and to think about your thinking in the coming weeks, check out my books here. I have a stash and will be posting them personally if other sellers can’t!  https://www.toprightthinking.com/shop-2/

Click on the links to try these activities

Reduce the time spent on unproductive thoughts that don’t change anything, with this activity from It’s Not Bloody Rocket Science – The Journal.

https://www.toprightthinking.com/portfolio/coronavirus-keep-your-brain-well/

Help yourself to feel better. Use this activity from It’s Not Bloody Rocket Science – The Journal, to think about the things you are grateful for.

https://www.toprightthinking.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/RSJACT006-Gratitude123.pdf

RACI – Don’t Confuse Consultation with Consensus

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Finding that it takes an age to get a decision made in your business? And then people still don’t stick to what was agreed?

Are you frustrated that you don’t seem to be able to get anything done at pace because of a perceived need to consult with everyone before you make a move?

Do you attend meetings that take up a lot of your time, but you are not entirely sure why you are sitting at the table?

I work with clients on these challenges a lot. The good news is if you persevere to the end of the article, there are some quick fixes that can help.

Collaboration in a business is great. It means that the best ideas can be made because you get the combined brain power of different perspectives on any problem you have to solve.

The problem arises when everyone is unclear about their role in the decision making and action taking processes. There is no doubt that making complex decisions is a difficult business, however there are also some relatively simple human needs and traits that get in the way. If you can understand and remove some of those, you should find it gets faster and less complex.

As human beings we are wired to establish patterns and to repeat them to make our lives easier. As as result, if we form an opinion, our brain likes to look for evidence that this opinion is “right” and to filter out any evidence that we are wrong. (For more information about this brain wiring commonly called confirmation bias or cognitive dissonance check the quick blog on this website in the It’s Not Bloody Rocket Science section https://www.toprightthinking.com/2016/11/11/can-we-really-change-our-minds/ A full exploration is Chapter 1 in the book It’s Not Bloody Rocket Science and is called “Lies” for good reason! However, for the purposes of speed today, we are going to take, as read, the power of your brain to ignore information that contradicts strong beliefs that you hold.

This confirmation bias means that when we are consulted about something, we can easily jump to the conclusion that that someone has asked us to supply them with the “right answer”- i.e. what they should do. So when, during that consultation, when we tell them what our definition of the “right answer” is, we can later on, as the consultation process moves into the decision making process, become confused, angry or upset when our “right answer” is not integral to the final solution.

Those strong emotions can easily get in the way of us implementing a solution that we either weren’t consulted on, or were consulted on but where we feel our option was discounted. It is entirely human to convince ourselves that The Idea That Wasn’t Ours won’t work before we even try it.

This means that even if we are forced to implementing The Idea, we are primed to look for evidence it won’t work – and guess what?: Because we are on the look out for evidence it won’t work, our brain is primed to notice the flaws in The Idea – and as a result we can absolutely “evidence” that it doesn’t work.

Or we invent lots of good reasons why we are too busy to try The Idea, or why it won’t work in our team that is “different and special”. You probably know the rest of the story. Lots of time and energy wasted on checking why things haven’t been done, enforcement projects, checklists, compliance spreadsheets. Sometimes The Idea gets criticised because it didn’t deliver the benefits it was supposed to, but when you look closely, this wasn’t because it was a bad idea, it was more about it not getting off the ground fast enough to make the ROI that was promised.

Knowing that this is what we do as human beings can be helpful in it’s own right. However, I also find that the RACI model, combined with that psychology can work wonders. I picked up RACI when I worked in project management for a while (those of you who know me well are allowed to pick yourself off the floor via laughter or disbelief) It is a simple acronym to work through to decide:

Who is R – RESPONSIBLE,
Who is A – ACCOUNTABLE,
Who needs C – to be CONSULTED
Who needs I – to be INFORMED.

Think about a piece of work you currently are collaborating on. Ask yourself these questions:

Are you 100% clear who is responsible for which tasks, when they will get them done by and to what standard?

Who will be held accountable in the event it goes wrong or given the credit when it goes well?

Are there decisions you were consulted on that you felt didn’t need your input or ones you feel you should have been consulted on and no one asked for your expertise?

Are you being kept appropriately informed about all the decisions that impact you? Or do you have too much information and find you have to read through a lot of extraneous data to find the relevant facts?

You would not be in a minority of one if you were confused about who was responsible or accountable or even about what the fundamental difference is. It is very common in my experience that you will feel either consulted with too much about things you don’t care about or have little expertise is, or not enough about the areas in which you feel you could add value. You are also lucky if in your business as much time has gone into how people should be informed and what they might feel as a result so that you can integrate that into your planning, as it has into the content and the timing.

This is where RACI can help. If you work in Project Management you are likely to know all about it already. You may also have a massive spreadsheet with R, A, C and I’s dotted all over it…

But for those who don’t work in project management, don’t glaze over or start hyperventilating at the idea of a huge spreadsheet! I use the principles of RACI with clients to ask some really simple questions, that can better help direct the energies that we put into making collaborative decisions so that minimum time is wasted and the optimum amount of consultation is done.

There are some rules within RACI that help make it work and I have adapted them for use outside pure project management. I’m not always one for rules – I like to bend or break rules as a rule! But in the case of RACI, if you want clarity in your team decision making, I would suggest you stick with them. To the letter.

RULE 1: There is only ever 1 person truly ACCOUNTABLE.

You might have heard the term “Shared Accountability” before. There is an inherent problem here. If one person doesn’t have the final say, what happens when you reach an impasse? In my experience, great leaders know this. They are exceptionally clear about which ONE person has the final say. Which person is truly accountable. These leaders know that collaborating and consulting are vital, but that once the information is in, someone may need to take a final and potentially unpopular decision. This is the person who is accountable. The person who the buck stops with. Sometimes I ask who would get fired if the decision is wrong. That can be quite a clear way to decide who it ultimately accountable.

I sometimes play a version of the musical chairs game from our 70’s childhoods with Executives! There is just one chair. I get them to decide who is accountable. It’s can can get quite pushy and tactical! But it’s a great way to visualise and solve the dilemma.

RULE 2: You can have multiple people with multiple responsibilities, but they have to be collectively and individually ULTRA clear about who is doing what, by when and to what standard

Even better, contract with people on the team to hold one another to account as peers when they don’t deliver their responsibilities on time and in line with what they promised they would. Peer pressure in an honest and trusting environment can make things move at phenomenal speed. We don’t have time here, but look up Lencioni’s 5 Dysfunctions of a Team to learn more.

RULE 3: Consultation is not the same as Consensus. Be clear on that.
When you are consulting with people it is important to let them know that whilst you are asking for their expertise or opinion because it is of value, you reserve the right to make the decision and that their view may or may not make it into the final version of events. In effect you make it clear during the actual consultation, that it is not their decision to make.

I find some words that you can adapt to suit your style works here so try:

“Hi Kate, I really value your expertise and I’d like to get your thoughts on something. Before I do, though, I wanted you to know that I’m deliberately seeking out a range of views and it will be down to me to ultimately to consider them all and make the decision I think is best. I’ll then be accountable for that decision and for making it happen. So to play this forwards, you might give me your thoughts today and whilst I will absolutely consider them in the mix, I might ultimately ask you to implement something else. Are you OK with that?”

This is a form of conversational contracting. We are making clear to someone in advance, a difficulty that we might encounter later on. It is a device I have used often in both coaching and managing because it makes it easier to have a difficult conversation later on.

In my experience, being clear at the outset about the “rules of engagement” makes it easier for Kate‘s brain to process that she will be heard but her opinion might not be the one selected. This reduces the emotional impact later on if her idea is not chosen because there is no element of surprise or threat in it. Also if Kate did agree to this in advance and subsequently doesn’t toe the line it makes it more comfortable for me to go and follow up, even if I usually avoid confrontation or she is a “difficult character”. Because it is something we have spoken about already, I can use that as a way to start what could otherwise be a confrontational and more difficult conversation. It is quite simple to take her back to the point at which we contracted “Kate, I’d like to talk to you. Remember, when we spoke about X and you agreed that you would give me your views, I said that I would promise to hear them but that I then might ask you to implement something else? Well…”

RULE 4: Being INFORMED is not another opportunity for CONSULTATION.

The way in which we inform or tell someone about a decision that has been made – particularly one they might not like – can make or break getting a decision turned into tangible action.

I have found in my experience as an HR professional that direct and brief is best. Colleagues should be under no illusion that a decision has been made and they are being Informed about that and that whilst you are happy to discuss the implications with them, you are not asking for their further contributions about the wisdom of that decision. Again, here are some words that you could personalise that give you a sense of what I find helps.

“Hi Kate. I wanted to inform you about the final decision I made about X. It was to do Y. I appreciate that you might have some strong feelings about this. Whilst I’d would always want you to be honest and open with me about how you feel, we need now to focus on how we can make this work. I know that you appreciate that the decision was mine to make. I now need your help to make it happen”

That’s it. Just 4 letters and 4 Rules. Ensuring people know which part of RACI they belong to means that more decisions are made at the right level and in the right way. A clear understanding of RACI at an individual level means that people can contribute to decision making in a meaningful way and expectations can be managed at the same time.

In my experience RACI reduces the number of fingers in the pie and too much finger pointing after unpopular decisions are taken and not communicated well – freeing those 10 digits up to do some much more productive things!

The 4 Ds

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The 4 Ds

I used to be one of those people who loved a list. I got a kick out of buying a new notebook and devising clever new systems for my to-do lists – different coloured pens for different types of tasks, new ways to prioritise jobs with marks in the margins, creative ways of ticking off completed tasks…

…that is until I realised that all of this activity was partly just a distraction from actually doing some of the things on the list that I didn’t want to do…

I know from my clients that it’s not just me. People laugh when I describe those unpopular tasks which we keep moving from one “to-do” list to the next. Writing a new list might give you a sense of satisfaction, but sometimes it pays to consider whether in the time it took to put together, you could have done a big chunk of the stuff on the list instead! 

I learnt this neat model from the great team at Notion when I asked them to help me to launch a training programme for coaches. As a result, I ditched my to-do list. Actually, if I’m honest, painfully weaning myself off them would actually be a better way to describe it. I realised a to-do list gave me a sense of being organised, but without being a very efficient way of actually making sure I prioritised my time on the right things. I’m far from perfect, but I have found the 4Ds is a great way to take a moment to think about your thinking – instead of just ploughing through your to-do list regardless. 

If you are feeling overwhelmed by how much you have to do, try this right now. Look at your to-do list. Take the first item and do one of the 4 Ds with it. This means either: 

1. DO it now. Yep. Right Now. You will then have only thought about it once and only touched the piece of paper or opened up the email one time. This can save you hours. Otherwise you have to remember to remember it, which takes up valuable thinking time you can invest elsewhere.

2. DIARISE it. Don’t put the action on a to-do list. Put an appointment in your diary to do it. This helps you to schedule time really well – you can plan your important thinking tasks for when you know you have time to do them, or perhaps for a time of day when you have noticed those types of tasks take you less time to do. Diarising tasks means that you are also appreciating you can’t do something else at the same time . . .multi-tasking is a myth. Our small human brains simply can’t manage two conscious activities at once.

3. DELEGATE it. Do it straight away. Give the task to someone whose strengths it plays to most closely and who will do it without you having to chase them. Be clear on what you want the person to do. Get into the habit of asking once and ensuring there are clear consequences when you have to ask twice. (By ‘consequences’, I don’t mean being fired. A challenging conversation using some ‘Top Right Questions’ will mean you keep the people you took the time to recruit and simply get them to be more effective at executing the plan.)

4. DITCH it. Yes, you read that one right. Be realistic. If something is not important enough to you, and you will probably put it off until it is too late, then ditch it now, before you have invested any more energy on it. If you aren’t going to remember to send back the feedback request and don’t really have much to say then just delete or bin the request now – maybe sending a brief explanation if you feel you need to. Even if you do send a quick note of apology it will mean you spend far less time on it than you will if you half-carry it around in your head or keep writing it down on a new to-do list when you know in your heart of hearts you aren’t going to do it.

That’s it. Simple, effective. Based on sound research and proven by many of my clients to work. What’s not to like? 

To download our 4Ds activity to try it yourself, please click here:

The 4 Ds

It’s Not Bloody Rocket Science…

Old Habits Die Hard

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The Big Idea

Given that you can’t open a paper or magazine in January without a mention of New Year Resolutions, you might be surprised to know that most of us have given up on giving things up for New Year. 75% of adults reported that they didn’t make a resolution last year. This is more prevalent in the over 55’s than the under 24’s. The research also found that for those who did make a resolution, only 5% of people were continuing with the new habit, almost a year later. So maybe those over 55’s tried and failed so many times that they think there is no point promising themselves they will take up more exercise or cut back on the cake…

Regardless of your views on dry January, another study makes sobering reading. When doctors tell heart patients they will die if they don’t change their lifestyle habits, only 1 in 7 were able to make the change needed to live. Literally, even when it is a matter of life and death, being motivated to make a change isn’t enough – and that is because it is very easy to want to change something, but in fact our brains are hard wired to hold onto habits – even if they are not good for us and might lead to an early demise…

Whilst January and the start of a new decade is a great time to take stock, the research says that however motivated we are to make positive changes in our lives, most of us simply won’t be able to follow through. We will fail.  

Some clients tell me they can’t change – they have tried, failed and therefore accepted as true what they sang badly but boldly via a karaoke machine over the festive period – “I Am What I Am”. What I help people to understand is that the science doesn’t say we can’t change. It says we choose not to.

Recent research into ageing and the human brain says that it is a myth that all of our key mental development has happened by our mid-20s. Due to something called “neural plasticity” it is still perfectly possible to change and adapt – even in our 60s and 70s. The research proves that, if we choose to, we can develop our thinking to achieve more than we thought possible. There is also growing evidence that people who do adapt and change tend to earn higher salaries and live longer.

This single fact is how I can make a living as a coach – I ABSOLUTELY KNOW, with NO DOUBT WHATSOEVER that the person in front of me is DEFINITELY CAPABLE of more than they currently believe. Science puts that beyond doubt. So, once I have shared that science with my clients, we work hard – identifying opportunities and exploring barriers so we explicitly understand what the individual needs to do more or less of – and then crack on with it.

But as Shakespeare said: “Aye, there’s the rub”. Because the key word/s in that last sentence aren’t the sexy or motivating ones like “identifying opportunities”, “exploring barriers” or even “crack on”. Sadly, it is “work hard”.  

That is a key part of the problem with a New Year Resolution or change at any time of the year. It sounds easy. Your clothes feel tight so you tell yourself “I’ll just cut back on the cakes.” You know you are drinking too much wine so you tell yourself, “It will be easy to cut back, I’ll not drink in the week.” But “I’ll just” and “It will be easy” are poisonous lies we tell ourselves. It sounds easy. So that fact that it is really, really, hard to change comes as a bit of a shock.

We have perhaps come to think that giving something up is like so much else in our lives – an “on-demand” activity. But breaking habits isn’t like that. Your brain is a pattern machine. It loves collecting experiences, conversations and memories and finding existing patterns that it can fit them into. This means that every time you do or hear something, your brain holds onto the things that fit established thought patterns that you have already. The unfortunate thing is that it modifies beyond usefulness or even discards things you see or hear that don’t currently fit the pattern you know and love.

This is the simple reason why new habits that are good for us are so hard to get established. It would be great if getting into a new exercise routine is as simple as joining a gym or buying a bike but it is not ( as those of us with a gym membership direct debit but very few actual gym visits will know) We like the idea of a new pattern – that’s why we get excited about the idea of a New Year and a New You, but our brains are not very effective at the implementation part.

Remember that going to the gym or cycling on a weekend morning would be a new pattern. Implementing new patterns require will-power, resisting the urge to do something you want to do or doing something you really don’t want to do, requires deliberate thought. Deliberate thought requires mental energy and your brain is a Scrooge-like miser – it doesn’t like spending that energy.

This is particularly true if getting on the bike or going to the gym is likely to change or remove an existing pattern – perhaps if you are going cycling on a Saturday morning you will have to trade some Friday night beer? Or in going to the gym after work, you will have to leave work early or be home later. This might easily give you an attack of the guilts.

Remembering the science here can come in very handy. Because our brains hold onto existing  habits and patterns for all they are worth to save energy, one of the tactics that your brain will use is to tell you “lies” Your brain is fabulous at coming up with some very convincing reasons as to why you should not change the pattern today. Your guilt or your FOMO could actually be lies that your brain has invented because it simply doesn’t want to invest the energy required to create the new thought pattern.

This trick your brain plays on you is perfectly normal and is part of a condition we all experience called cognitive dissonance. Every day it is part of being human to look for evidence that what we believe to be true is actually true and to dismiss anything we see, hear or tell ourselves that doesn’t fit our current patterns. Because change is hard work and requires will-power and effort, when the going gets tough your cognitive dissonance really kicks in.

Cognitive Dissonance and the miser-like quality of resisting new patterns to save energy does have a purpose – your brain does everything for a reason – even if it gets in the way of change! The cognitive part of our brain – the bit responsible for remembering things, making decisions and so on, is actually quite small. This is why we are rubbish at some types of multi-tasking – our brain simply doesn’t have the room or the power to process two conscious thoughts at the same time.

All is not lost though. The great thing about patterns and habits is that if you persist, when the new habit is established to the extent that you are doing it, almost without thinking it moves out of the conscious part of your brain to our unconscious  (the limbic brain if you want the technical term). When this happens we can multi-task and the new habit doesn’t feel like so much of an effort – because we are not doing two conscious activities at the same time – we are doing an unconscious one and a conscious one.

Think about learning to drive. When you first got behind the wheel of a car you could think of nothing but mirror, signal, manoeuvre. Chances are , you now drive mostly unconsciously –  leaving you free to talk hands free, listen to an audiobook or imagine your future It’s why even if you have a break from driving/cycling etc, you never forget how to do it – you don’t need to remember how to remember something if it has moved into your limbic brain. Imagine learning how to forget to drive?!

In summary, the truth about creating new productive habits and breaking old unhelpful ones is simple but a bit depressing, because there is usually no quick fix. Most of us are well intentioned and are genuinely motivated to make changes in our lives but science proves good intentions are not enough. Particularly on days when you are tired, feeling a bit unloved and super busy, your brain will actively find evidence that making the change doesn’t really matter. That you don’t have time. Or that you aren’t the most unfit/overweight/disorganised/bored of all your friends…so if it’s not really broken, why go to all this horrible effort to fix it?

Before you settle for the status quo though, remember the good news – the research into neural plasticity and the other side of the cognitive dissonance coin. If you get to grips with the tricks that you brain is playing on you, you can absolutely change things. Expect to work hard on thinking about your thinking and you can achieve things beyond what you currently imagine (or ditch a small but irritating habit!) 

Change requires clear sighted thinking about your thinking. It requires you to develop the ability to assess the way you are currently filtering what you see, hear and tell yourself. And to see if those filters need adjustment.

So, take heart, prepare to work hard and start to think about your thinking.

Got It – What Now?

Avoid “don’t” or “mustn’t”

Ever told yourself to stop worrying and get to sleep and been unable to? Or wondered why a child touches a hot plate when you have told them not to? Our brains are not very good at recognising the “don’t” or “stop” in a sentence. One study found that insomniacs actually sleep better when they are told to try to stay awake.

If we did a quick experiment and I told you NOT to think about something, even for a split second you would find it harder than you think. Try now.

Absolutely DON’T think about a blue double decker bus.

However, every time we have a brain glitch, we also have an opportunity to use it to our advantage.  Try re-framing your commitment or resolution. If you tell yourself “I won’t have that cake”, sadly all your brain has heard is CAKE. You can’t help but think about cake. Frame it instead as “I’m going to find ways to make heathier eating choices” Another option is when you think CAKE, find something else quickly that you can focus on instead. Choose something that requires your full attention remembering that our brain is rubbish at multi-tasking – so it can’t think about CAKE if it is trying to learn a new language on an app or writing a thank you note to someone.  

Fold Your Arms

Yes honestly! Fold your arms right now. Now fold them the other way. How does that feel? I’ve done this activity with over 10,000 people and the results are always the same. Folding your arms one way feels normal, you don’t think about it. Folding them the “other way” feels weird. You have to think about it. It takes effort.

It is unlikely that you were taught to fold your arms one way over the other. There is no right or wrong way to do it and no danger to you in doing it the opposite way. Your brain simply prefers one way over the other because it has a pattern or a neural pathway to fold them that way and your unconscious brain now folds your arms for you so that you don’t have to think about it.  Asked to fold your arms the other way, it becomes a conscious task that requires conscious thought because there isn’t an established neural pathway for that alternative.

Think about any change you want to make using the arm folding trick. Chances are what you are doing now has become normal. The opposite will feel like folding your arms the wrong way. However, if you persist both will start to feel quite normal – after 10,000 goes at folding my arms the wrong way, I promise you this is true!

Listen for Your Lies

If you are going to try to break a habit, actively start to listen out for the excuses that you tell yourself as to why it is OK to “Do it tomorrow”. I have unashamedly stolen Cordelia Fine’s term for these excuses – “lies”. Her book A Mind Of It’s Own is one I recommend at least weekly to clients. Actively listen out for the lies you are telling yourself, and call yourself out on them. Maybe give other people who you are close to permission to call them out too. Remember they won’t sound like lies – they will sound like really plausible reasons that it is OK to have a lapse. That is because they have been invented by your very individual brain. The lies will perfectly suit you. Your brain is literally designed to tell you the very best personalised lie possible so that it can hold onto an established pattern.  When you hear your brain inventing an excuse like “I really don’t have time today” or “I should really stay and finish this work rather than go to the gym tonight” you brain has intended to convince you absolutely and completely to believe the lie. Some of my clients have reported that noticing the lies makes them feel like they are making progress. Feeling positive about yourself is linked to better success with breaking habits and making better judgements. This means noticing your lies can have a double benefit – you start to think about your thinking and you get the feel-good factor.

Practical Reminders Can Help the Shame Factor  

When you fall off the wagon or start to listen out for your excuses/lies it can be a bit disconcerting. Cordelia Fine goes as far as to say that the only truly self-aware people are often the clinically depressed. There is truth in that because your lies and excuses aren’t exclusively a bad thing – they are actually there to protect you from feeling the full shame of your failure. This gives us a classic catch 22.

  • Your brain wants you to avoid feeling ashamed of yourself for not going to the gym, so it tells you a lie to justify not going to make you feel better.
  • Calling out the lie is the only way to start to change, but if you do call out the lie you probably will feel ashamed of yourself.
  • Feeling ashamed doesn’t help us to think and change so we are more likely than ever to persist with the unhelpful habit.

Psychologists did some research where they got people to imagine they had done something really bad (it was kill a child in a road accident, so it was pretty horrific.) They got a comparator group to imagine they had done something really good. They then asked both groups to do a maths test, with an option for a period of practise first.  Biscuits were available for all participants. The people feeling low did worse on the test because they didn’t practise. They mooched around the room instead, flicking through magazines and opening drawers. And they ate double the amount of biscuits. This experiment was with imagined events. So, think about what happens when you have real life issues going on that you feel bad about. Is it really any surprise you can’t hold off the pies or get to the gym? 

We know that where there is a brain flaw, there is also a way we can exploit it to our advantage. The researchers also found that where they put up a sign to tell people that eating the biscuits wouldn’t make them feel any better, people didn’t eat the biscuits. When people were made aware of the facts, they performed just as well as those with happy thoughts.  

So, the top tip here is simple tricks work. That post-it note on your fridge that says “remember extra treats won’t actually make you feel better in an hour” might work. A note on your desk that says “remember, if the first thing you do is check your emails, you won’t make a start on your actual priorities” could help.

Replace Judgement with Curiosity

Try not to avoid feeling the shame of failure. Rather, when you are feeling ashamed of yourself change the language that you are using to talk to yourself about your lapses. When you find yourself avoiding the gym using sentences to berate yourself, or catch yourself saying “you are useless – how hard can it be to resist a piece of cake?” the change will get harder. Instead, deliberately use what I call “Curious and Interesting” questions – “Ok, so it’s interesting that I’ve avoided the gym tonight. Has today has been particularly stressful?”  Or “OK so I feel a bit rubbish about myself for eating that cake but if I took the time to be curious instead what would I notice about today – has it been particularly tiring or upsetting? What was my best lie?”

Expect to Fail

The drop in self-esteem from the “failure” makes us feel worse and means we are even more likely to resort to the cake-tin and the corkscrew for comfort. I help my clients to understand that failure is totally normal and something to learn from and build upon, rather than use as a sign that you will never succeed

There is a psychology study I love to quote because it is memorably about radishes and biscuits. Volunteers were sent into a room. Some were told to resist the biscuits and just eat radishes. A second group were told to eat whichever they wanted. They then tackled a puzzle afterwards. Those who hadn’t had to spend mental energy resisting the biscuits, persevered for twice as long as those poor souls who had been on the radishes…Resistance is hard work.

Remember, resisting something or doing something new takes conscious brain energy. Because we only have a finite amount of conscious energy, if we are using that energy to make decisions in the day job and resist the biscuits, we will get pretty tired. Make decisions – your day job!

It’s not weak to find you don’t seem to have the energy to resist the biscuits after a busy day, it’s inevitable that you find it hard. You simply don’t have the resources to resist.

Your brain will want to use that as an excuse/lie of course – “Come on, there’s no point in going the gym, you’re shattered”, but a quick rest of your mental resources can work wonders. Allow your brain to recharge. Stop thinking for a minute. Shut your eyes, use a calm app but otherwise don’t look at your phone or just take a walk outside. You will be amazed at what 3 minutes of not thinking can do.

Failure doesn’t have to mean that the effort is wasted – quite the contrary. Using the Curious and Interesting test about what caused you to fail on that particular occasion can be enlightening and game changing. Imagine finding through your thinking that you fail most spectacularly when you have had 6 hours rather than 7 hours sleep the night before. Maybe you will find you are working on fixing the wrong habit?

Practise Matters

Imagine that the part of your brain that deals with change is like a muscle – psychologists sometimes refer to it as the moral muscle. There is a great study that showed that where people used conscious energy to make a small everyday change that this strengthens this moral muscle. If you imagine your brain being like a real muscle it helps. Doing a particular exercise every day without fail will strengthen the relevant muscle you are working on. You wouldn’t consider exercising that muscle just twice a week as wasted energy. You would expect it to have some effect – just maybe not as impactful as quickly.

Scientists think that the important thing about changing habits is to keep trying. Forgetting is normal – you are battling your own established brain circuitry after all! But remembering to remember and persisting with thinking about your thinking, particularly when you fail, does work. It’s just hard work and your brain would rather give up.

Expect More Failure When You Feel Tired or Unloved…

Another study asked two groups of people to work at a task for a full day. One group had work that involved a lot of mental stimulation. Another group had a simple repetitive task. In the evening the researchers put them in front of a TV screen with a still picture and waited to see who would turn off the TV first. In every case it was the people that had done the simple work that acted first. They simply had more mental reserves left to go “this is boring”. Those whose brains had worked hard were slower.

A different group of researchers also found that when we feel socially excluded we are also more likely to reach for our cake/biscuits/wine. Dropping going for an after work pint or a calorie loaded coffee with a friend might sounds like a practical solution to cutting out wine or cake but actually may not help you as much as you think. Finding other ways to stay connected with your friends and work colleagues will be important.

Remembering that your brain is going to have a field day with it’s lies and make it much harder work for you to stick to a resolution if you have a day at work or home that makes you feel a bit bruised and unloved, can help. So be hyper-alert and appreciate you might have to work really hard to get to the gym or resist the wine in the fridge after a bad day.

Plan for the Long Haul

You might have heard that “it takes a month to make a new habit” but unfortunately recent research says it takes most of us a lot longer. The “month myth” did come from a doctor – a book called ‘Psycho-cybernetics’ written in the 60s by Dr Maxwell Maltz, a plastic surgeon turned psychologist who noticed that after plastic surgery it took about 21 days for the average patient to get used to his new face or lose “phantom limb” syndrome after an amputation. Unfortunately, Malz looked for correlations with other habits that don’t stand up to modern scientific scrutiny.

Our YouGov findings echoed a previous study that UCL did in 2010. To succeed you will have to persist with a new habit for on average 66 days (or until about March 6 for those who are doing a New Year Resolution) before you have created a neural pathway strong enough to withstand your excuses/lies and allow your unconscious to take over the task. Most of the people in our study who kept going with a change for over 3 months also made it to the full year.

It is worth planning for feeling more tired than usual for probably 3 months when you make a change – even if you are “just” resisting cake or trying to remember not to bite your nails. The UCL average also contains some depressing news for some people – for one person it took 254 days of persistence. Given that willpower to resist is very energy sapping, this poor person must have been physically and mentally exhausted by the effort. You might decide that the thing you want to achieve is simply not worth 3 months hard work. If so, be honest with yourself about that now. Certainly, having a long list of resolutions or things you want to change about yourself is not likely to succeed if you tackle them all at once. With my clients we take time to find the most important things to work on and then tackle them one at a time. Maximum two at a time if the two are closely intertwined with each other.

Help Yourself and Others

You might well be exception to the rule – the UCL average of 66 days to break a habit, had one person succeed in just 18 days. However, imagine the lucky 18 day person saying to the 254 day person, “Come on mate, it’s easy. Just do it. If I can you can. It’s a simple case of mind over matter” etc.

Comments like that are likely to be well intentioned, but make it even harder for the person to succeed. So sometimes it’s no surprise that well-meaning advice from our super-fit, successful friends can be more a hinderance than a help! Be specific with your friends and family about what they can do to be helpful. Maybe share the science and give them permission to help you spot your lies. Be clear that jokes about you “eating all the pies” definitely won’t help. The right sort of support works wonders. Feeling like a failure or an “outcast” in comparison to your colleagues or friends does the opposite. It makes breaking the habit even harder given the science we have talked about above. 

Be Specific

Scientist have found that you have much more chance of changing something if you use something called Implementation Intentions. Telling yourself not just “I am going to do more exercise” probably won’t cut the mustard. However, telling yourself “I am going to do more exercise by taking a spin class on a Tuesday and going for a 2 hour walk on a Sunday” works much better. A simple trick, but hey, given this is such hard work, why wouldn’t we grab some simple things that research shows does make a difference?!

Make Brain Patterns Work For You

Something called ‘context-dependent repetition’ can really help you to have more good days than bad days whilst you are waiting for your unconscious brain to kick in. Let’s take a work example. Say you decided that you want to spend less time on emails. First, take the advice about being specific from above – “I want to reduce the time I spend on email so I am going to resist looking at email before I have written down my priority for the day”. The next step is to give that specific action some context and to make it dependent on something else. So, each time you close your laptop at night, put a plain post it on the screen. When you open up your laptop the next morning, you will need to get the post-it out of your way. You can do this by writing down a single achievement that you want for yourself that day first and sticking it up next to you.

Doing this means that when you first open your laptop and write on your post it, a mental link is formed between the context (opening your laptop) and your response to that context (writing your post-it). Each time you do a post-it in response to opening your laptop, this mental link gets stronger. When you open your laptop and this prompts you to think about your objective for the day automatically without giving it much thought, a habit has formed. You have simply replaced the habit you probably have now (opening up your laptop and opening email first) with another habit, opening up the laptop and creating your priority for the day.

I trialled content dependent repetition after a recommendation from a coach I know who works all over the world with senior executives – helping them to stay healthy and resilient. I used his recommendations for a couple of simple things – to drink more water and take more exercise. At night I would place a pint of water by my bed and choose an uplifting song for the next morning. When I awoke I would drink the pint of water, click play on my phone and get straight down on the bedroom floor to exercise for the length of my chosen track. More often, I carried on for 2 tracks. Those 4-6 minutes of exercise a day adds up usually to about 25 minutes a week. It’s not as much as I would like but what I was finding was that even that 25 minutes was at risk if I was looking for a “window” in which to do it all at once (“I’ll do it on Sunday…” was my usual lie) What I have learnt though, thinking about my thinking, is that if I start to potter downstairs for a cuppa, that exercise never happens. I have to do it before my clever brains starts making excuses – so just as I wake up and am a bit bleary is perfect!

What’s In It for You

Our brain likes habits because they are mentally efficient It can be helpful to think about what fantastic use you could put your “spare” energy to if you just created a new habit (say defining your daily objective) and removed  a bad habit (wasting hours recycling email) . One way to start to invest your time wisely and to start to use your energy better is to notice you are doing your bad habit, stop immediately and do something else instead, straight away – even if it is for just 1 minute.

This has really worked for me. I wrote sections of my first book and learnt to play the guitar by doing 5 minutes of writing or 1 minute of chord practise as a distraction activity for 2 particularly bad habits – biting my nails and over-dwelling on a particular frustration in my life that was out of my control. The writing was relatively easy. I’d do a paragraph on my phone if that is all I had to hand. In the case of the guitar, I got a stand and put the guitar by my kitchen table where I spent most of my working life as well as my home life. When I noticed myself doing one or the other, I would pick up the guitar for 5 minutes, thus breaking my thought pattern for a moment. Remember we can’t multi-task so doing something you aren’t good at immediately takes your full attention.

Think About Your Thinking

I’ve left the big one until last. If you are still reading, stay with me. This could change your life. There is a fantastic book called Immunity to Change by Harvard Professor Robert Keegan and Harvard Director Lisa Laskow that I recommend to clients all the time.

Keegan and Laskow write with experience and knowledge about how our brains are actually immune to change. How our very wiring and nature sabotages even those who are most enthusiastic and motivated about making changes.

In a nutshell they talk about the difference between technical changes and mindset changes. Technical changes are relatively easy to make. So, let’s assume for a moment that you didn’t know much about the research into calorie intake and intermittent fasting, or the life-threatening dangers of not getting enough sleep. It might be that finding out that a change is needed might be all it takes to get you to think about your eating patterns or turn off your screen at night. This would be a technical change. For me, as it turns out, some of the exercises that I was spending time on were not that efficient. A great personal trainer later (thank you Hedge Haigh) and bingo, I’ve made a technical change which has meant I spend less time on muscle based exercises, have indulged horribly over Christmas but am starting the New Year without a muffin top. Don’t diss technical changes. They can be brilliant.

However, for most of us, the persistent things we have tried to change are harder. This is often because it involves mindset change, rather than technical or structural change. It requires us to think about what we really really want, to quote the Spice Girls. This is because sometimes the change that we want to make, that on the face of it seems really simple, is not that simple at all. Sometimes a different priority that we have, another thing that is important to us, is in direct competition with the thing we want to change. If we are not aware of these competing priorities we might not realise that some of the things we are trying to achieve are bound to fail, because they are a direct contradiction to something else that we hold dear.

A practical example can work best here. Try drawing 4 columns on a piece of paper. Keegan and Laskow call this an “Immunity Map” – and it’s available free on the web.

Title the first column “New Behaviour (they call it “Visible Commitment”). In that column, write down the new behaviour that you want to create. Let’s assume it is “Drink less Alcohol” for our purposes.

Title the second column “Doing/Not doing Instead” and under that heading, list all of the things that you are doing instead of that behaviour that you want to change. So, in our case that might be “over-indulging at weekends with friends” and “always having wine with dinner” and “reaching for a G&T after a hard day to wind down”

Now for the tricky third column. Keegan and Laskow call this “Hidden Competing Commitments”. Have a look at each line in column 2 and have a think about what things you like about yourself or things that are important to you that those habits in column 2 are actually supporting. So, for example you might realise that your “over-indulging at weekends” from column 2 is because you are “love being the life and soul of the party” or are committed to “Having a reputation for being able to take my drink and be the last man standing”. You might realise that “always having wine with dinner” is actually supporting something really important to you such as “Making evening meals a real event with my partner or friends”. You might think long and hard a realise that “reaching for a G&T after a hard day to wind down” is connected to “Rewarding myself after a long day” or “Living every day as it it is my last”.

Once you start to think about your thinking, you start to realise that you have next to no chance of achieving the things in column 1, because you have some competing priorities that require column 2 in order to survive. Or at least that is what you tell yourself. Onto hard-thinking column 4. What big assumptions are you making? Our brains love an either/or. The either/or is simple. So a big assumption you might be making is “I can’t be the life and soul of the party if I am sober” or “meals don’t feel like an event without wine” or “If I can’t reward myself after a long day with a G&T then what is the world coming to…” The problem with these assumptions is that we don’t test them. What your brain is less good at is answering this brilliant question “What would you do if it didn’t have to be either/or and you could have both.”

So, as we have often come across in this chapter. Where there is a brain glitch, there is also an opportunity to use it to your advantage. Instead of allowing those big assumptions to live on and squash any chance you have of drinking or eating less or getting the job of your dreams, thinking about your thinking can work. You can have both. Sometimes just knowing these assumptions are there can help because they make you realise that some of your “doing instead” from column 2 are choices, not necessities. I recommend people experiment. Pick a party and have just 3 drinks to prove to yourself what could be possible. Book a massage for an evening where you know in advance you have a tough day to get through. Get in from that hard day and do 5 minutes dancing and singing in the kitchen to your favourite song – then see if you still need the G&T to feel good.

To download both the article and workbook , visit our bonus material section:

Bonus Material

Immunity to Change: Robert Keegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey

A Mind of It’s Own: Cordelia Fine

Research on Time taken to Break Habits: (Lally, van Jaarsveld, Potts, & Wardle, UCL. 2010

Forced Fun at The Office Christmas Party…

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Christmas is a time for fun and celebration right?! Well, it all rather depends on your definition of “fun”. I recently joined Emma Barnett and Bea Appleby on Bea in my Barnett slot on BBC Five Live. We talked about Bea feeling obliged to take time away from her family to have “forced fun” with colleagues at Christmas. She recalled a scene from the day before. A group of visibly bored people at an office lunch party, looking like they would rather be anywhere else. Clearly not fun. However, as I hope I politely pointed out – the person who had organised that dull looking “do” had obviously done it with the best of intentions. It was unlikely they deliberately made choices to force people into not having fun!

So, that got me thinking.
If you are a reluctant guest, given you probably, (albeit reluctantly) are going, how can you help your reluctant brain to find a scrap of enjoyment? And if you are the party organiser, what can you do to help please most of the people, most of the time.

For Reluctant Guests

Listen to your self-talk

Be aware that as soon as you tell yourself “This is going to be rubbish”, your brain will look for evidence that this is true. If you want the science, look up “cognitive dissonance”. Our brains like what they know to be true already. If you think something is true, you will look for evidence you are right and ignore evidence to the contrary. So try telling yourself, “I’ll go with an open mind and find something small to enjoy”. This at least gives your brain the option to have a good time!

Beware being the “Bored Boss”

There are 2 things you need to know…1) There is a trick that our brain plays on us called Negativity Bias. It means that we are likely to pay more attention to criticism than we are to praise. 2) There is something called the Authority Index. It means people will pay more attention to what you do or say if you are the person in charge or with the most influence. Combine the two and if you are a boss looking bored, the chances are that your attitude will be infectious. This could mean that even people who are really looking forward to the event or were throughly enjoying themselves might align themselves with you and start to hate it. You could literally be a killjoy without knowing it.

For Party Organisers

Consult on what people hate

Ask around and find out what people really don’t want to do. It’s strange but our human brains are quite quick at coming up with lists of things we don’t like (What habits would you hate in a partner?) Whereas ask us what we do want (What does your ideal partner look like?) we can draw a bit of a blank. The question seems almost too big to answer. So chances are, if you say to people “What should we do for our team get-together?” People might say “Dunno”. Whereas if you ask, “What should we definitely avoid when we are thinking about getting together as a team?” People might give you a quick checklist. We can’t please all of the people all of the time. But the right question can get you closer.

Avoid delegating the job of party-organiser to the party-animal

Curious one. But people with a strong sense of fun can sometimes miss that one person’s definition of fun can be another person’s idea of a nightmare. So don’t always choose the gregarious, party going person to create your party. Choose someone that understands that people’s ideas of “fun” are inherently different.

Positively allow people to adapt

Try to choose an activity or an event where people can play along in their own way. Don’t create an event that will only appeal to the strongly outgoing – unless you have a whole team made up of the strongly outgoing! Instead create something where there is a role for the person who loves to observe the action, without getting embroiled in it too.

Be considerate about diversity

Most organisations have genuinely tried to promote diversity and provide so many more opportunities for flexible working. It means our work-places are so much more diverse than they use to be, so don’t chuck that away by not considering your social events! Be considerate when you are thinking about the provision of alcohol and things like location or start and finish times. Try to think about whether you can arrange the event for during the working day when people have already made personal arrangements to be with you anyway. Some people love an excuse for a late night and a belly full of beer. You don’t want the single parent, new to the town with no babysitting network who has no choice but to arrive sober and on time for a school pick up at 4pm to feel like more of an outsider than they probably already do…

It might be too late for this year. But maybe your next team event might go with a bang! If you need some help, get in touch with us at TeaBreakTraining.com. We have loads of ideas about how to make team events and learning new skills fun – for everyone.

Can I give you some feedback…?

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It was really fun to engage in a feedback debate with Emma Barnett and her friend Bea on BBC Radio 5 Live in their “Bea in my Barnett” slot!

Listen back at:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m00089qc

It’s towards the end of the show at 2hrs 39 minutes in. The rest of the show was quite good though so maybe don’t skip it!

If you don’t have time, have missed the boat and the link has expired or want something easy to access just before you are about to give some difficult feedback here we go:

GIVEN WELL – FEEDBACK REALLY MATTERS

More than 1000 people interviewed internationally in a study published by Harvard Business Review. 92% of respondents agreed that feedback was effective at increasing performance IF (and it is a big IF for a reason!) it was delivered well. If you want to check out the study it was done by Zenger and Folkman.

WE WANT FEEDBACK – BUT DON’T GIVE IT

The same study highlighted a problem. We want feedback – but we avoid giving it.The study found we are twice as likely to want CHALLENGING rather than POSITIVE feedback

But in terms of giving feedback we will tend to put off giving it – and are TWICE as likely to put off giving CHALLENGING feedback.

I think that is because when we give feedback it is not always well received. So even if our feedback is well-intentioned, if people get upset or angry, it puts us off giving it again. As human beings we are wired to avoid things that give us discomfort or we find threatening – even if they are good for us!

IN THE MOMENT FEEDBACK IS BEST – TRUST IS CRUCIAL

Many studies have found that regular in the moment feedback is best – rather than saving it up.

Study by the Corporate Executive Board has found receiving in the moment feedback from someone you trust to be an indicator of high performing companies – in a study it has repeated for 20 years

YOUR INTENTIONS MATTER

To give feedback it has to be well intentioned. If our subconscious thinks it is a “threat” and not a genuinely well intention piece of critical feedback

The research mentioned above found that feedback from someone you TRUST leads to high performance. Trust is the operative word here. If we don’t trust someone’s intentions towards us and we feel that far from being something that is for our benefit, their feedback is designed to hurt us, humiliate us or make themselves look good, our brains can’t help but see it as a threat…and when we are threatened – our bodies react accordingly…

OUR BRAINS PROTECT US FROM FEEDBACK IF WE PERCEIVE IT TO BE A “THREAT”

Can I give you some feedback can strike fear into even the hardest of hearts – especially if it comes from someone who only ever gives you negative feedback – and saves up all their vitriol for the moment where you are really not really to hear it.

In those moments, pay attention to your body for a moment you will probably notice some tension, or you might feel flushed or sweaty – If I’m in this sort of high stakes situation, I can get a flush on my chest or my fingers start tingling? Do you recognise those sort of reactions?

The reason for this quick physiology lesson is that we all have an inbuilt “fight or flight” response which you may have heard of. It gives us a rush of blood to certain localised areas of our bodies which causes these sensations of tingling or a visible flush. What is really interesting is that we now know from neuroscience that the rush of blood to your hands or your chest when someone threatens your Status or your sense of being right about something has to come from somewhere.

And it comes from the particular part of the brain that we need to process feedback! The part of the brain that deals with logical and rational thought, decision making and controls our impulses.

So “Someone asks to give us feedback…we experience a “rush of blood” the clever bit of the brain is starved of blood and oxygen and as a result we lose rationality and impulse control – just when we need it the most!

It is new news to many of my clients is that a physical “fight or flight” reaction can be triggered not just by the threat of a fight or fire that you need to run from. It can be triggered by everyday threats and just those words “Can I give you some feedback” can actually be perceived as a threat. Give people a moment if you see them flush when you ask them. It gives them time to collect themselves and get the blood and oxygen away from their chest/fingers/armpits – and back to their brains!

So really its not a surprise that we are not good at receiving feedback – and if we worry about how we might come across – we can worry about giving it too – and end up receiving and giving it poorly.

If you want to read more David Rock, a professor of neuroscience writes brilliantly about this. – Google him and his SCARF model. He says that the modern things that set off our fairly ancient fight or flight reactions are threats to our Status, Certainty Autonomy, Relationships or our sense of Fairness.

POSITIVE FEEDBACK

Another thing that we know is that people listen to feedback more when it is given to them by someone who is known to give out feedback all the time and this feedback is both about good things and bad. People become more used to feedback if they receive it all the time.

One more note on positive feedback – The fastest way to extinct good behaviour – especially when it is someone trying really hard to develop a new skill or a behaviour that is less natural for them – is to ignore it

FEEDBACK SANDWICH

An important point to note about positive feedback though is not to “hide” negative feedback between two pieces of positive feedback. It’s sometimes called a shit sandwich…The “Feedback sandwich” is rubbish. It just doesn’t work. The reason is that the first positive is discounted in value or diluted when you get to the negative in the middle. And the negative piece is obscured or muddled with the positive bit at the end – so people are often confused about what you actually want them to do.

Don’t give people extraneous information – just cut to the chase and name the thing you want them to think about, but do it in a way that preserves their dignity and tries to reduce their sense that they’re being threatened or judged.

“FEED-FORWARD”

Sounds a bit new-fangled but it’s good to bear this term in mind. “Back” – is about the past that we can’t change. Important that we understand it but more important to focus on the future So instead of “you interrupted too much in that meeting” TRY. “I think that you listening rather more – rather than jumping straight in with questions at the start of the meeting when we meet the client next week would really make you sound more experienced and build their confidence in you”

Good Feedback should be like FAST CARS !

In general terms good feedback is:

FREQUENT – Give good and critical feedback all the time so people get used to receiving it

ACCURATE – Be factual and precise. Don’t exaggerate – avoid “You always…” “Everyone says…”

SPECIFIC – Don’t generalise or get personal. Avoid: “You are aggressive” Try “Yesterday you did…”

TIMELY – Give feedback as close to the incident as you can but check the person is ready to hear it.

When preparing the words you will use and the examples you will give, consider the following:

CONTEXT – Time might have moved on help people remember EXACTLY where and when the incident happened. Don’t be random – “I’ve seen you being aggressive a few times recently”, help people to remember “I noticed at the meeting yesterday that Anna visibly flinched when you said…”

ACTION – Be specific about the behaviour – what did they do or NOT do – don’t blame the person or give THEM a label “you are aggressive” be specific and own the feedback yourself if you can. “I felt myself shrinking back as well”

RESULT – Be clear on what happened as a result of the behaviour. “Did you notice that Anna was quiet for the rest of the meeting? I think it was connected to your comment”

SUGGEST – Be positive about what they could they do next time. “Next time I’d like you to think about your intentions. If you feel angry with what Anna says in our next meeting, I’d like you to think about whether you need to get it off your chest there and then? I think we would get a better results from Anna’s team if you talked to her on her own afterwards?

Meeting Fatigue

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A recent study in The Times reported what most of us know already. We are spending way too much time in meetings talking about doing things that we could actually be doing instead…If only we weren’t in a meeting talking about it.

Ask yourself:

Which meetings in your working week do you look forward to, enjoy and find a really productive use of your time?

How many times have you been in a meeting and thought a decision could have been better made with fewer people and/or on the phone or via a 1:1 discussion

Research in the US showed that lost productivity from ineffective meetings costs business up to $283 billion per year

What’s in it for me?

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I have been meaning to cover the topic of different ways to motivate people for ages. But with the book (named after this very blog!) taking up any writing time, it’s been on the back burner.

Lucky for me, I have been coaching a senior client who decided to take the writing into his own hands after one of our sessions!

The results of focusing on different motivations have been pretty impressive for him. Tangible and measurable. Trust him. He’s a lawyer…

Motivation Blog – John Kushnick

The issue of what motivates individual members of staff arose as a result of some very useful feedback from my direct Reports – it appears that I didn’t know what made them drag themselves into work every morning.

I had never really thought much about this before, assuming that everyone would obviously be the same as me. Why wouldn’t they?!

My first port of call after some tips from my inspirational coach Dulcie was that font of all knowledge, google. This took me to a couple of very useful articles: 9 Types of Motivation that Make It Possible to Reach Your Dreams by Dylan Buckley and 10 Types of Motivation: What They Are & How to Use Them, by Evan Tarver. Are these the best, the last word on these subjects? Who knows! It’s a long time since I’ve immersed myself in academia. What I can say is that they pricked my interest, unlocking that part of my brain that was looking at motivation but hadn’t let me know. Tricky things these brains.

I started by boiling down their work into 2 categories and 9 types of motivation.

The Categories are overarching and the types of motivation can appear in each:

1. Intrinsic: these people are motivated by internal rewards like fulfilment and contentment. This is about what is within that person rather than external rewards. It might also include the desire to avoid negative outcomes that are self- rather than externally-imposed. For example, they may have a strong fear of making mistakes, of failure, whereas the employer puts no such pressure on them.
2. Extrinsic: these people are motivated by external rewards like a bonus or raise as well as negative external factors like getting fired.

I then narrowed down the Types of Motivations to 9. The articles use slightly different terms but I was satisfied in the end that the following was the best way for me to separate out the key motivating factors:

1. Incentive/Salary – commit to actions due to the expected rewards. This is a classic motivation and one that is as valid as any other, although perhaps not destined to lead to the most truly rewarding working life.
2. Fear – act to avoid painful consequences of failure. This may be intrinsic (the employee’s own fear of failure) or extrinsic (where the employer has a history of moving on those who fail to meet targets). This is not necessarily one to encourage but it can be effective – please bear with me! One of my Reports is driven by a fear of the regulator and this means that she will ensure that her team work diligently and accurately so as to ward off the perceived risk of the firm being shut down for poor performance. It will not be a surprise that this person’s other main motivating factor was Recognition (see below).
3. Power – act in order to control own working life and/or others. This can appear to be somewhat negative but the employee motivation for power may be altruistic, to get the job done effectively rather than power for its own sake.
4. Recognition – I am recognized & respected by others. This is a powerful motivator. Who among us didn’t blush with pride when given a compliment by a teacher? If as a manager you get this right then you have an employee who will be self-motivated to go above and beyond for you; just top them up with praise and awards, step back and watch the needle go off the graph.
5. Competence & Learning – learning new skills is reward enough. Work should always be about challenges and I can’t think of any business where there’s been anything but radical change over the last few years.  This makes this employee an invaluable member of the team. While many want certainty and stability (see below) others want to rise to the challenge and help make your business future proof – or at least keep up with the breakneck changes. It is therefore vital to provide these employee’s with the right environment to stay ahead of the learning curve.
6. Autonomy – “I do it my way”. This is a more individual based version of Power in many ways; maybe more of an introvert. A valuable member of your team with this motivation will need to be protected from those trying to exert Power over them.  The challenge will be to manage and harness their talents within the framework of the needs of the business without letting them disappear into their world at one extreme or feel micro managed at the other.
7. Stability – “I like to know the future”. Not everyone wants or can cope with constant change. They will work best in an atmosphere where they are given very set tasks and sheltered from change while it is still being debated. They will have to be carefully managed when change becomes inevitable so that they can focus on all that stays the same rather than stress about the changes.
8. Status – “I have social standing” This can go hand in hand with Competence & Learning and is a more visible version of Recognition. It may sound a little big headed but need not be. For example, the status as an expert may be required to make it easier for that employee to train others.
9. Teamwork – “I am a member of the group”. This is a classic motivator and one that must always be encouraged. Like ants we all achieve far more together than we can on our own.

Having reviewed the subject and written the Motivation Pro Forma I sent it, ahead of their meeting, to my Reports together with a copy of the articles and a summary of what I was trying to achieve. I asked them all to think about theirtop 2 motivating factors ahead of the meeting so that we could discuss what they were and how I could best motivate them.

What was interesting was the degree that those who had (correctly) fed back about my lack of knowledge of their motivation actually lacked any real knowledge of it themselves! While this may at first blush appear to be a disadvantage it actually proved extremely useful in opening up the process so that we could both truly understand what motivated them.

We went through the categories and types of motivation and discussed what each meant to them. This allowed us to get a far more nuanced version of what their key motivating factors were, rather than just using the headline names. For example, while some saw Power as a negative, denying that they wanted the raw sounding control over others, one employee saw Power more as a way to obtain the best results for the company by controlling their work processes proactively.

By taking notes about their views about each motivation type and highlighting their top 2 Motivation Types I was able to get a full picture of what they needed from me. Interestingly it also gave my Reports some insight into what they wanted from their jobs. It is amazing how easy it is to spend so much time at work without ever really thinking what we want out of it!

Something else that was a pleasant surprise was that no one chose Incentive/Salary in their top 2: this is not to say that it was not seen as important, but rather that this is an outcome rather than an aim in and of itself. We all go to work in order to be paid (that’s why it’s called work and not play) but it’s a sad state of affairs if that’s our main reason.

By understanding my Report’s true motivation I can achieve the perfect Win Win scenario of improving their experience at work which should also lead to their becoming more productive and effective. Now why wouldn’t I be motivated by that?

Here is a version of John’s questionnaire that you are welcome to download and use.

Motivation Type – Pro Forma

Your Small Clever Brain

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Most people know that the brains has different sections, and that those different sections have different purposes. We might not know what the parts are called or exactly what they do, but most of us know that some areas of the brain deal with conscious thoughts, some deal with emotions and some deal with things we do unconsciously like breathing or heat control.

Without getting too technical, one of the things I often end up talking about with my clients is just how relatively small the ‘clever’ bit of your brain is. By the ‘clever’ bit I mean the part that deals with conscious thought, or ‘cognitive function’ to use a technical term. Our cognitive functions are the things we do consciously – learning new things, memorising and then recalling, making sense or understanding, deciding between alternatives, imagining what could happen and making predictions, and – last but by no means least (because it is exhausting) – controlling inhibition. This part of the brain is also responsible for trying to avoid those things that we know aren’t useful or helpful, but that we can’t seem to resist doing . . .

The technical term for this ‘clever’ part of your brain is the prefrontal cortex. It surprises lots of people I talk to, given everything that it is responsible for, that this hard-working bit of tissue makes up less than 5 per cent of the volume of your brain.

Clients often tell me that they are feeling overwhelmed. They describe their impossible workload and how they are far too busy to cope. They might tell me that their brain feels ‘too full’ and they can’t think.

One of the first things I do is reassure them that this is quite normal, given how small the part of the brain is that they are using to complete to most of their to-do list.

Take a moment to think about the things you are going to do today. It’s extremely likely that you will require this small part of your brain for all of them. You will move between learning something, memorising something, remembering something, deciding upon something, making sense of something, imagining what could happen to someone or something. You might even use it to resist a biscuit.

Not only is the area of your brain that processes all these things really small – in our human evolution, it was also the last bit to develop. When I describe it to a burnt-out client, I get them to imagine a simplified version of our human history so that they can more easily visualise the impact of those thousands of years.

The human brain we have now took thousands of years to evolve. It was 95 per cent finished and then, right at the last minute, we discovered a need to be intellectual and to think. There was just a tiny space left at the front where this ‘clever’ bit could be squeezed in. There’s no real room for it to grow and develop, which is why it can only do one thing at a time. It might evolve in the future, but for now the prefrontal cortex is a bit like an old-style light bulb that requires a lot of energy. It is also the last in the queue for any energy we have spare – we can’t decide to stop breathing or pause our heartbeat to give us more thinking space.

Our whole body requires metabolic energy to operate. In simple terms this ‘fuel’ derives from blood, oxygen and glucose. Those resources are limited – we don’t carry an infinite supply – hence we need to replenish our stocks by resting.

We understand the metabolic impact of energy reserves and their use about other parts of our body that we can see, feel and touch – for example we don’t find it strange that our legs can’t sprint hard for more than about ten seconds without needing a rest. We would think bizarre the suggestion that anyone could run at this pace for hours – we would simply understand it was impossible.

When we think about our brain in this way, it starts to make sense that we struggle sometimes to juggle all the things we have to do in a day. We are trying to do all those different tasks using one tiny part of our brain that is shoehorned in, not yet efficient enough to do two things at once and that takes far more blood, oxygen and glucose to run than other parts of the brain. The clever bit is doing the best job it can; however, with limited room and finite resources, it is simply not as efficient as we would want it to be, and we can’t force it to be more efficient by working harder. Our biology means that is impossible.

It doesn’t matter how smart you think you are – ask this part of your brain to do two things at once and it can’t do both with the accuracy it could achieve by doing one at a time. You will know this for yourself – have you ever tried to remember a song whilst another song is playing in the background? Or – try this now – perhaps recite the alphabet backwards and then see if you can do it whilst typing out an email. Or next time you are using a hammer to put a nail in a wall to hang a picture – or maybe not . .

This is not new science. One of the first experiments in this field was conducted in the 1890s by a scientist called J. C. Welsh. She measured the strength of people’s grip using a dynamometer (you can buy these online as we speak – apparently gripping one daily is a scientifically proven way to reduce your blood pressure!) She asked people to grip as hard as they could and measured what happened to the strength of the grip if she gave people a mental task to do at the same time. She showed that the strength of the grip reduced dramatically when people were thinking about something else – commonly by as much as 50 per cent.

My favourite piece of research to provoke thinking about distraction, multitasking and the modern trend of always being ‘switched on’ comes courtesy of a controversial study by Glenn Wilson, a psychologist from King’s College, London. He found that constant access to email and texts as a way of ‘multitasking’ reduces the IQ of men by fifteen points and women by five points. This might be part of the reason why there is a myth that women can multitask ‘better’ than men . . . But the truth is no one can multitask without the quality of the result suffering and no one can keep making good decisions without a break.

The BBC programme Twinstitute carried out an experiment in a similar vein in January 2019. The premise of the show, which is presented by two medical doctors who are also twin brothers, is to take pairs of identical twins and scientifically test two different ways of improving health by assessing two different ways of doing something head to head.

One of their experiments involved splitting the twins into two groups and getting them to do an IQ test. One group did the test with their smartphone on the table. The second group had their phone taken away from them at the door to the examination room. It was found that the twin with the phone on the table performed on average ten points worse than the twin who couldn’t see their phone.

It was not the distraction of an actual call or text that was responsible for the lower IQ results – no one actually used their phone during the test – but the sheer presence of the phone. Being reminded by association that something might have happened on social media they’d like to know about, for example. Our brains are less efficient (so use more energy and need to think about something for longer) when we ‘switch’ from one task to another and try to do two things in parallel rather than completing one and then moving on to the other.

Remember, the small ‘clever’ part of our brain is not just responsible for answering an exam question and deciding if the answer is A, B or C; it is also responsible for imagining who might call or remembering that you need to order something online. When it is doing one of those activities, it can’t do another one efficiently. It is likely that the twin with the phone on the desk was inadvertently switching between tasks – between doing the IQ test and wondering briefly what was the latest news headline. The results of this experiment showed just how easily we get distracted – and how simple it can be to ‘allow’ our brains to be less efficient.

There might be a few differences on the edges – some people might be able to focus for longer than others, but those differences are marginal. We all have the same biology. We all have basically the same brain, of which just 5 per cent is given over to conscious ‘clever’ thought. To imagine that some people have found a way around this limitation is like being told that someone can run at Usain Bolt’s pace for six hours. You simply wouldn’t believe them.

Another more recent experiment showed the potentially dramatic impact on our decision making when we refuel our tired brains. In a paper published in the National Academy of Science USA in 2011, Kurt Danziger, who studied at Oxford and Melbourne, did a study to look at the impact of rest and refuelling on the decisions made by a parole board. His experiment found that the last prisoner to be seen before the mid-morning break had an almost 0 per cent chance of obtaining parole. Immediately after the break, during which the judges ate a sandwich and piece of fruit, their chances of parole increased to around 65 per cent.

As ever, science is evolving, and there have been subsequent studies that have questioned whether all of this 65 per cent differential can be attributed to a rest and a sandwich. For our purposes, we don’t need to get involved in the academic debate. Safe to say there is a significant connection proved by this study and many similar ones between our decision-making capabilities and whether we have taken a break to replenish our glucose levels. We can be confident that once we have made one decision, we have significantly less resources to make the next decision unless we stop to refuel. You can’t just keep the quality of your thinking going by telling it to power on. You have to stop and refuel, or you will simply be unable to do your best thinking. Just as you would have to stop after one sprint and take a breather before you were able to do another.

If we accept what the science has proven – that you can’t do two things at once without diminished quality, that you have to refuel to do your best thinking, that the tiny ‘clever’ bit of your brain is energy hungry, not very efficient or far too easily distracted for our own good – what can we do? Does it mean that you can’t actually have a busy job, loads of family commitments and a social life? Can you really not have it all?

I don’t think it does mean that. I think you can ‘have it all’. You just have to find ways to get your best game-brain on.

Before you tell yourself that your workload is impossible and that you will never be able to get everything done today, or that you can never be both a good parent and a high flyer, or you don’t have time to get fit . . . Pause. Stop. Think. The science doesn’t say that. It does, however, tell us that to win the Game of Life, you will benefit from living it with some new and more productive ‘brain-tricks’ up your sleeve. When your brain pitches you a curve ball, some of these tricks will enable you to bat it back.

Got It – Now What?

Minimise distractions

It sounds obvious and simple, but most of us don’t actively look to avoid distractions as much as we should. In my experience this happens less often when we know we have a big job to do that requires our full attention – most of us will at some stage have locked ourselves away to work on something important in peace. However, if you have accepted that your brain can’t multitask, that it takes energy to switch from one thing to another and that your brain loves a distraction, then hopefully you will accept that some of the small daily things that ‘help’ your brain to get distracted are worth thinking about too.

Some of the distractions are technological and initially seem helpful – until you know about this science. If you have an email pop-up, for example, there is no doubt that it will help you not to miss an important notification, but every time a notification pops up we have to accept that we will expend additional brain energy as we glance at it before focusing back on the job at hand. Turning this function off – even if you only do so whilst you are working on a task that requires your full focus, will mean that you save brain energy and time. We can then choose to reinvest that time and energy into something else.

Putting your phone away or hiding it behind your laptop is a good tip to make sure you don’t suffer from that five-point IQ drop.

Simplify

If something is quite complicated to understand or explain, try to simplify it first – so that you and anyone to whom are trying to explain it can get their head moving in the right direction first. Asking yourself or others to imagine things that are innovative takes up a lot of energy. We find it much easier to imagine something that is similar to something we are already familiar with.

In Powerful Pitching for Film & TV Screenwriters, a book he wrote to help screenwriters and other cinema and TV professionals to pitch their ideas, but one that is also a great place to start to learn the art of simplification, Charles Harris tells a story. Two screenwriters walk into a Hollywood producer’s office and say three words – ‘Jaws in Space’. Those three words won them the contract for the film Alien.

If you are confused about a task that someone has given you, use the simplify principle to clarify what they mean rather than spending hours and wasting lots of that precious brain energy trying to make sense of it. You can get to a surprising level of understanding much more quickly if you ask things at the outset such as, ‘Would you be able to draw what the finished result looks like?’ or, ‘If you were to encapsulate what a really good job looks like in two sentences, what would they be?’

Use it to clarify what you want to get done, too. Look at your diary for today. Write down two sentences that describe what your priorities are today. What are the one or two key conversations or activities that will help you get what you want? Prioritise and do those first – before you get distracted or de-energised by something else.

These simplification activities take seconds, but they can really help you to focus on what is important. Try setting an hourly alarm or just check in with yourself at points during the day. Are you doing an activity in a way that will achieve the goal you set and help you to feel how you want to feel? If not, and you have been distracted, don’t worry – that is quite usual – but use the pause to get back on track. Writing your simplified goals for the day makes it easier to dismiss emails, conversations tasks or interruptions that will take up brain space but won’t help you to get what you want today or make you feel how you want to feel.

Think: first things first

Many people have heard of ‘first things first’ as a phrase from Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. That’s because it’s a great tip that works.

Remember that your brain only has limited energy before it will need a rest. Therefore, it makes sense to do the important things first. If you don’t feel you are at your best early in the day then ensure that you schedule the important things when your brain is at its best.

Many people I work with start the day by clearing their email inbox and then wonder why they feel stressed and tired. Email is undoubtedly a fantastic tool, but nearly all my clients say they receive unhelpfully many of them.

The bottom line is that if you use your brain to clear email first then you will have used up some of your best energy of the day on other people’s priorities rather than your own. This observation/tip was given to me by a hugely talented and very smart lawyer Bronagh Kennedy, now Group General Company Secretary and Counsel for Severn Trent Water, who combined having young children and an executive role. She was very open with me about how she balanced her home life whilst succeeding at the very top of a tough corporate organisation and I’ve never forgotten her wisdom and advice. I use this tip myself every day and pass it onto a client at least weekly.

The other problem with email is it doesn’t play to your brain’s strengths. To be at its best, your brain wants to finish one thing before it starts another. Email can make that feel almost impossible. Even if you turn off the notifications and don’t get interrupted, if open your inbox first and you have a hundred messages there, the first thing you are telling your brain is that there are a hundred things to deal with before you can start on your priority. You have overwhelmed your brain with a huge list of activities right at the start of the day and it is likely your brain will start to lie to you immediately: ‘Oh, I’ve had too much come into my inbox, I’m too busy to start my priority today. I’ll clear these today and get started tomorrow.’

There are many tools you can use to sift and sort your email, but it doesn’t change the baseline scientific facts. Once our brain has worked on something, it is less efficient at the next task unless it is given time to rest and fuel to recharge it. It means that once you have started to sift and sort emails, even if you only deal with the important ones, you will have a lot less brain power for whatever task you intended to prioritise.

The most simple thing I do, and something I recommend to clients, is to start the day writing down how they want to feel at the end of it and their single most important priority during it. I then suggest they actively do something about their priority in a way that will contribute to them feeling how they want to feel – and to do that before opening up email – this can be just ten minutes of uninterrupted focus on the priority to think it through or ‘doing’ something in the more traditional sense – like chunking it down into simple steps or mapping it out.

At mid-morning, lunchtime and mid-afternoon I suggest they pause for a while (some set an alarm on their phones). I ask them to think about how much time and energy they have put into their priority and whether they are in a position to feel how they wanted to feel at the end of the day.

This gives them three opportunities to put first things first, not just one at the start of the day; three chances to make a correction if their brains have allowed them to prioritise something else.

Many of my clients have reported that pausing like usually helps them realise that they have become side-tracked or distracted. They find themselves super-busy on a task-treadmill – often at the expense of the one thing they wanted to get done – and feeling nowhere near how they wanted to feel.

Without a pause, their brains help them to avoid their priorities by telling them some of the brain’s “lies” it tries on us everyday, such as, ‘I’ll just finish this first,’ or, ‘I’ll start that tomorrow when I’m fresher,’ or, ‘This workload is ridiculous – everyone says so.’ Their brains might be wasting energy on the things they can’t control or directly influence.

With a quick pause we can challenge such lies and consider whether we are working on our priorities and the things we can control. The pause reminds us to take a break to refuel our brains and make a conscious decision about what to do next. Without the pause we will be busy, but we might well be directing energy to things that weren’t first on our list – or even second, third or fourth. We can easily – unless we consciously stop and think – be working on other people’s priorities, telling ourselves we don’t have a choice and feeling nothing like we wanted to feel but resentful, stressed and overwhelmed.

It might seem counter-intuitive to stop when you are so busy, but it is only by stopping that you can refuel and refocus so that you put first things first and take control of your thinking power.

I’m not perfect. I readily acknowledge to clients that I am the queen of distractions. I love it when they call me to ask, ‘Are you busy – can I ask you a quick question?’ and so even if I am focusing on something, I will usually take their calls. However, because I know I might not focus on my priority once the day gets going, I will always try to make up for it by giving that priority at least half an hour before I open up my email or turn my phone back on from silent mode.

To give you a real (and potentially unwelcome) picture, the words you are reading right now are being typed in bed at 7 a.m. with a cup of tea made from my bedside Teasmade and the breakfast sandwich I put in foil last night. I do this so that I can fit in half an hour of writing before I get up to sort the kids out for school, empty the dishwasher, walk the dogs and get ready to go and train or coach someone exciting. After eight years of false starts, I realised that if I was waiting for ‘some spare time’ to write, or that I would ‘do it when I’ve finished this’, it was never going to happen.

Remove your hecklers

David Rock uses an image in his book The Brain at Work of the prefrontal cortex as a very small stage with space for just one performer. I build on this idea to explain to clients what happens from a neuroscience perspective when we don’t deal with issues or tasks straight away.

Imagine that you are a comedian on this small stage. You are telling a joke and partway through someone shouts from the audience. You can see how this would be distracting and how you would need to either consciously refocus in order to ignore the heckler, divert from your original joke with a witty put-down, or ask security to remove them. Whichever way it goes, the original joke is disturbed and the effort of refocusing or thinking of a retort or shouting for back-up uses brain energy that you would not have needed to expend if they had kept their mouths shut.

Things we haven’t done or things we have started and haven’t finished act like hecklers when we are trying to concentrate. The fact that you need to remember to book a doctor’s appointment or schedule a meeting with someone is likely to shout ‘Don’t forget about me!’ partway through another task you’re concentrating on.

Imagine how distracting you would find it as a comedian, and how much brain energy it would take, if there were five hecklers in the audience. It would be exhausting. Your joke would probably never get finished.

My tip if you feel overwhelmed or heckled by tasks on your to-do list is to use the comedian-on-stage imagery to help you notice. Try to spot an example of it today or tomorrow, whilst the image is fresh in your mind.

When you realise you have become distracted, pause and ask yourself ‘What is the best use of my limited energy?’ Do you think you will genuinely be able to refocus and put the distracting heckler out of your mind? Or would it be more energy efficient to use one of the 4 D’s to deal with the distracting heckler quickly and remove it from the audience? The 4Ds are Do it now, Diarise it, Delegate it or Ditch it – do a quick Google search if this is a new model for you to deal with.

I sometimes add in an extra D that’s actually a P – Post it. When clients are getting distracted by something, I suggest they put it on a Post-it note and stick in on the wall. The action of physically doing something with the idea or the distraction seems to help them to put it to one side, both literally and neurologically speaking.

Sometimes the thoughts that keep popping into our heads to distract us are things are we are putting off. Perhaps the heckler is reminding you about an uncomfortable conversation you have been putting off? Or that you still need to do that boring job you hate?

Remember that every time one of these heckling distractions happens, you are using up a little bit of brain power in order to put it to one side or to refocus. So, if that same heckler pops up more than once, you are wasting even more brain energy on it. You can create extra time and energy for yourself by dealing with your distractions decisively the first time they heckle you. If it’s Done, Diarised, Delegated, Ditched or Posted on the wall it is a lot less likely to interrupt you.

You may have come across tips before, perhaps if you have ever done a time-management course about only touching a piece of paper once or only reading an email once – i.e. dealing with things straight away rather than putting them in a ‘to be dealt with later’ pile. I like to think of this habit as stopping the heckler at the door. Getting into the good habit of using one of the 4 Ds on an email the first time it comes into your inbox can stop it from turning into a heckler in the first place – and the fewer of those in your audience, the less likely you are to be distracted by their interruptions.

In summary, the trick is to notice hecklers, pause to deal with them and, if at all possible, keep them from even getting through the door. Notice when you are being distracted. Pause to use the 4 Ds (or 1 P) to deal with the distraction. Try to avoid the distraction by dealing with it sooner rather than letting your current-moment bias allow to you put it off for later.

Chunk things up

Your brain remembers and processes things better if the information or ideas are presented in chunks. For an easy way to prove this to yourself, say your mobile phone number out loud. Chances are you will separate out the 07XXX bit and then chunk the last six digits into pairs or groups of three.

You can use this same trick to plan your work better and therefore better harness your brainpower.

If you have a big job to get done and start to think ‘I don’t know where to start . . .’ don’t just dive in. Your brain might find any sort of momentum difficult to sustain. Or you may find that the whole thing feels too intimidating to tackle and therefore you lie to yourself to feel OK about putting it off until tomorrow. Instead, try to divide the job into three or four chunks. Writing down those chunks seems to help too.

Zoom out before you zoom in

Your brain is not only easily distracted, but also very good at going down a rabbit hole and getting stuck – if you let it. We can be prone to overthinking and going into too much detail on the first part of a task or zooming in on a problem we find whilst doing a task and giving it too much attention. If you go down those rabbit holes, you can find that you have not left enough time to complete the overall task properly. This can particularly be the case if there is a part of a task that we enjoy. Our brain is likely to help us feel that this is the most ‘important’ part and that we are right to be spending time on it. For example, if you like problem solving and you find a problem to solve, you can spend hours on it before realising that, in the wider scheme of things, it is actually not that important a problem.

When you have done the ‘chunking’ exercise above, look at how much time you have to complete the task. It can help to give yourself a rough deadline to complete each chunk.

If you find yourself stuck on a problem, ask yourself how much time you realistically have to fix it. If you have all the time in the world, great. This means that you can really get into the detail and come up with your very best solution. But let’s say you have five minutes to proofread a report before you send it to your boss or to a client. If you find that your second paragraph doesn’t make sense you could easily spend that five minutes working on it – only to find it doesn’t leave you the time to proofread the rest, which might also contain errors. Just pause before you zoom in to fix paragraph two. Zoom out first.

 If you don’t read the rest, how will you know that the issue in paragraph two is the most crucial thing to fix?

 If you quickly proofread the rest first, how long would that leave you to rework paragraph two?

 Is paragraph two crucial? If not, could you lose it altogether and use the five minutes to proofread the rest?

Just a few seconds spent zooming out can mean that the small, clever part of your brain is focused on what it really needs to – particularly when you are short on time and you start to panic.

Use your full brain

There is an exception to the rule on multitasking. If you practise something long and hard enough, you can ‘move’ that skill from the prefrontal cortex to a different part of your brain called the limbic system. An easy way to explain how this works is to think about learning to drive. At your first driving lesson, the ‘mirror, signal, manoeuvre’ instruction would have been going around the small, clever bit of your brain because you would need to have consciously thought about it and you were trying to memorise it. You would have found it very hard at that driving lesson to have repeated the alphabet at the same time as concentrating on which pedal to use. However, after a few years you become very used to driving and can happily talk, sing, listen to the radio and so on as you drive along. That is because driving is not something you ‘think’ about any more – the responsibility for the task has been shifted into the limbic system. This releases the small, clever bit of your brain to do other things. You would find it quite easy now to recite the alphabet whilst driving.

You can use the same techniques to reduce the load on your brain at work. For example, one of the things that I have trained myself to do is touch type. I can now type out virtually word for word a conversation I am having and still focus on that conversation – because I am not having to think about the typing. In Your Brain at Work, David Rock gives an example of a quick email response that he has trained into his limbic brain. He has trained his brain to automatically use just three key taps to send a message that includes an emoji to clearly say to anyone who receives it, ‘I’ve read your email, thanks and yes I will do that.’

Have a look at tasks you do on a regular basis. Is there a way that you can move some of the responsibility for how you do that task into your limbic brain by repeating it in such a way that you can do it without really ‘thinking’ about it?

Top Right Questions

Before you forget this blog forever, take a piece of paper and an pen. Ask yourself these questions and write down your answers before your clever brain can make excuses to stay doing what you are doing and feeling like you have a full brain and way too much to do…

 What thing keeps popping into my head? If I did it now, would it simply go away?

 What is the difference between what I want to do first and what I should actually focus on and give my full attention?

 When was the last time I paid full attention to the person speaking to me?

 How many times today did I stop and think about my thinking?

Cultural Mapping and Change

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Most of the work I do with organisations relates to change. I might be asked to help with an organisational change that will impact upon established ways of working, or to help them to introduce new ways of thinking, learning or leading.
It’s usually never easy!

But it can be a lot easier if the leaders who are responsible for the change don’t assume that they can simply tell people that they are going to do something new. And expect that will do the job.

I have seen many examples where despite following a sensible step-change model, a change or new initiative simply does not land as hoped. There had been an assumption that with good consultation and a firm project plan, it would be possible to “paper-over” the old culture of an organisation or an existing way of working. It is sometimes hoped that because the “new” is bright, attractive and fashionable that the “bumps” underneath – those places where the change doesn’t really fit or seem that popular – won’t matter.

When we pause to think about it, is it surprising that change does not always go down well – even if it looks like something that everyone would welcome. Most of the aspects of an organisations existing culture are man-made [sic?!] And if there is one thing that people aren’t very good with as a rule, it is change. Even change for the better. (Anyone who has ever struggled to stay fit, slim or sober will tell you that!)
So what can we do to plan where change might stick and change might struggle? How can we identify the unwritten rules of the organisation that might get in the way of the formal plan?

It is helpful to map out the organisation. Imagine the business as an island viewed from above with a bird-eye view. This aerial perspective would reveal the island’s own contours and the unique landmarks. Some parts of the island/organisation would have occurred naturally and been there forever. Other parts would be man-made and recent. The different parts would relate to each other – so roads would lead to particular destinations. Parts might be fenced off or protected. Some bits are beautiful and some useful but ugly. But they are all part of the island’s unique and individual aerial “map”.
Imagine the change you are seeking to implement was the equivalent of dropping a huge parachute that was big enough to cover the island from the sky.

Where the land was flat and uninhabited, the sections of the parachute landing there would cover the ground, settle quickly and almost instantly obscure what was there before.
The parts of the parachute that floated down towards hills or mountains, would have to adapt to the unique contours of the hill to find their settling point.

If the mega-parachute landed on a settlement and there was not a plan to adapt or move the people first, there is no doubt that they would find their own varied ways to get around that – either by finding a hole or an edge in the Nylon, or cutting through it and clearing the parachute off their part of the land completely. Either way damage would be done and panic would likely ensue.

Finally where the parachute came down towards a church steeple or a wind farm, the parachute would just rip, however solidly constructed it was. The steeple or turbine would proudly poke right through it.

It can be a useful image to think about when trying to change something in an organisation. We can assume that we can just land something and people will calmly and rationally adapt to it. But it’s never the case, particularly if they are not on board – It seems ridiculous to assume that people would happily live with a piece of Nylon over their heads! But actually why is any more ridiculous to assume that they would be happy to move offices and have an additional 20 minute commute or change a habit of a lifetime.

Thus it helps to think about the “map” of the organisation. Imagine you had a bird’s eye view and were looking at it from above. What are it’s own unique characteristics. Which are obvious – like the biggest mountains? And which are more subtle and unrecognisable because they are man-made and layered – but very important to someone. You are mapping out the different aspects to the organisation – such as the structure and the behaviours so that you can start to see what matters the most.

When you create a map, it can help you identify where are the bits of the organisation where the change will land with very few obstructions? Where will it land but need to adapt to the “contours” of the organisation but remain intact and still recognisable? And where because of the strength of feeling will people find a way to escape out from underneath it – either quietly or with aggression. And where will it simply rip on landing unless it is particularly well reinforced in that particular area – or patched-up quickly?!

I like the cultural map or web invented by Johnson and Scholes in the late 80’s because it does not just pay attention to the obvious things that we might look at when we are think about mapping out an organisation – such as the policies or the organisational structure. But it also reminds us to look for more subtle clues about where we might hit problems – What stories are proudly repeated in the organisation? What tangible and intangible symbols of power exist in the business? We can begin to think about whether the change is congruent with those symbols and stories. And if not, we can plan what to do about it.
Identifying what the stories, symbols and routines are that make the cultural map unique today, can help you understand what might be possible tomorrow.
One quick but really effective way to assess how well a cultural change programme might land is to draw 2 maps – One showing what the dominant aspects of the culture you have now and one showing what might be in the aspirational culture you want to create. When you compare the two it starts to become more obvious what the barriers might be. Will the people in your organisation see your “parachute” as essential to survival or providing the means to escape from some organisational practises that are no longer working? Or as a suffocating cover that destroys all that is important to them?
The cultural “web” that Johnson and Scholes used to map organisations contains 6 inter-related parts

The Stories and Myths that are told about past and current events.It is interesting to compare the stories that are told inside and outside of the company – do they match? Who are the heroes in the stories that are told and who are the villains? What stories are told about when people succeed or fail? How long have the Myths been in existence? How long does it take for a new story to take hold and what sort of stories capture the imagination of the people the best?

The visible Symbols that represent what the Company “stands for” This could be the obvious ones like the logo, but is also about the informality or the grand-ness of the offices, whether the dress code is formal or informal. Whether the car park has Director spaces right be the door.

The Power Structures that exist in the business. It may be that the power is held by one or two Executives, or that a whole department actually holds the most sway. How is power attained – is it earned or ascribed? Where are the pockets of real power and influence – who really influences decisions and direction regardless of role. Where does change usually emerge from? Who is socially successful and what characterises that informal power?

The Organisational Structures that exist in the business. Who reports where? What does that tell you about how different departments or different individuals are viewed? Which structural aspects illustrate whose contributions are most valued? It can help to look at meeting structures as part of this. Who attends which meetings and how is that related and reflected in the organisational structure.

The Control Systems – so the way that the organisation exerts control over itself and the people within it. How formal or informal are the financial and quality systems? How is performance rewarded and how is underperformance dealt with? What is expensed and what is not. How generous are the benefits and why? Are control systems followed religiously or “accidentally” ignored. If there is a difference between how different departments adhere to the control systems, does this inform what you know about the power structure?

The Rituals and Routines are the daily behaviours that you see that signal acceptable behaviour. What actions are taken that people perceive as “normal” which in another organisation might be interpreted differently? What behaviours are rewarded and punished – both formally and informally? What is supposed to happen in particular situations? What do managers pay attention to (and is this different to what they profess to pay attention to?!)

We hope that this provides you with a way to look at your organisation in a different way and provides you with some practical next steps that you can undertake to make change happen more successfully. For help, guidance or practical training to help get you there, please get in touch at dulcie@profitablyengaged.com or visit our websites at www.profitablyengaged.com or teabreaktraining.com

Are MBTI/Insights/Personality Profiles still worth doing?

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Quick answer. Yes

3 BIG caveats

1) Use wisely and get someone to help you interpret profiles in line with the latest neuroscience and psychology, rather than relying just on the various commercialised products arising from Jung (MBTI/Insights etc) or Marston (DiSC etc) Brilliant minds and some great subsequent interpretations. But Jung/Marston did published their original works on psychological types on which these tools are based in 1921 and 1928 respectively and things have moved on a bit.

2) Don’t slavishly adhere to one version of “the truth” and treat whichever profile you did as “the answer”. It’s all helpful information to use as a start point, but there is not a silver bullet that will change your life and help you to suddenly make friends, get promoted or be a successful and popular leader who gets everyone to be both excited and productive. Remember that the products arising from the 1920’s psychology have now given rise to extremely lucrative businesses. So of course you will be told that “ours is different” and it will change your business for the better, forever… Mmmm.

3) Don’t use it to make excuses based on “your type” and  evidence/pretend that you can’t do things because you are Red/Blue, Introverted etc” Best to be honest and say “ I just don’t like doing that and I’m looking for an excuse.”

BIG caveats aside, I have had some remarkable results and some stunning ROI for individuals and organisations that were based on insights (with a small “i”) that stemmed from a session understanding and talking about their own personality profile or a team’s collection of “types”.

I can only speak from my own experience. What I have found is that used sensibly, the profiles give you a shared and balanced language that enables you to receive and interpret helpful feedback from other people about what you are doing that drives them to distraction.

Having words other than “I hate you and you are useless” enables you  to have a productive discussion with someone about what they are doing that cramps your own style, rather than rant to your other half about them, wasting your precious leisure time in the process.

We use a good old mixture of the psychologies for our common sense (and quick and pretty cheap) approach to psychological profiling. Our clients tells us it works wonders. But we suspect that is as much about encouraging and giving people the physical tools to have “top right” – high challenge and high trust conversations after reading their profile than the profile itself.

A personality profile is a starter for 10. Reading it and exclaiming how remarkable it is and how well it seems to have captured your brilliance and your “allowable weaknesses” gets you about 1% of it’s potential. It’s super easy to do that bit. Therefore a lot of people do it!

The hard work (and thus the big wins) come when real people use the knowledge in the real world. Use the profiles to have really difficult conversations. Give and receive really tough feedback. Feel vulnerable and have to dig deep resilience-wise to bounce back from uncomfortable truths.

And keep those horribly difficult conversations going and going…

Not many people do that bit because having started, they suddenly become much too busy with the day job or the latest organisational call to arms which needs their immediate and full attention.

We call that avoidance “Look a bear”. But that is an entirely different story!

 

If you were to die in 1 minute, would you be at peace? You can only answer yes or no. If the answer is “No” what can you do about it right now?

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This question came from Andy Smith who goes by the fabulous name of “Changesmith”

I love it because it is so “Andy”. When we worked together many years ago, we were not in the same team or even the same function and I used to have to walk down 4 flights of stairs to find him!

However I always made the trip in person to seek his counsel when I was enthusiastic about an idea because he was so pragmatic, sensible and wise that he would help me to explore why it might not work…but what I could do to make it better!

He has an amazing moral code and is a throughly nice bloke. Thus his challenging question works if you ask it from the heart and make it safe for people to answer with their heart too.

Thanks Andy

AQ – Adaptability Quotient and the Growth Mindset

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AQ  – Adaptability Quotient is being cited as the “New EQ” – the big thing that will make the difference between excellence and extinction in the modern workplace.

In a nutshell, it’s about how well placed you are as an individual or organisation, to adapt to the rapidly changing circumstances in which we now all operate.

When I’m talking to clients I use the Blockbuster example. It would not have mattered if they had the most engaged teams, the best leaders, the best sites and the most impressive labour and GP ratios. There business would still have died because people became able to watch films for free on their telephones.

It is super easy to be exceptionally busy with all the things that have always made you successful as an individual. Or focus almost entirely on the things that are driving the profitability of your business today.

But how much time and structured thinking do you put into the things that might make your business obselete in 10 years? Or maybe more scarily, turn you from someone with a proven track record in skills that are highly valued, into someone who is the business equivalent of a Betamax expert.

It’s not new science. How adaptable we are is closely connected to things you may have read already about Growth Mindset.

However the AQ or adaptive thinking terminology has helped emphasise one of the most difficult things we overcome when we develop a genuine Growth Mindset – that we have to learn to challenge our very deeply helps beliefs on things. And that sometimes these are the very things that made us successful in the first place.

I’ve summarised what it takes to train your brain to have a higher AQ at the bottom of this article, using the acronym ADAPTS so it’s easy to remember and pass on.

So if it is such an easy concept to get your head around, why is AQ so prized? It’s because it is easy to define, but really difficult to do.

This is because our brains don’t like adaption. So those with high AQ are likely to have done some pretty difficult thinking. Adapting in business is crucial, but when the “what’s in it for me” is more important even than that – and is the difference between surving or dying, our brains are great at coming up with very rational ways to resist adaption.

I am very fond of the sad story told in a HBR book Immunity to Change. A number of heart patients were told that they were faced with almost certain death if they did not change their lifestyle habits. Only 1 in 7 were able to make the necessary changes. 6 died.

Even when it is literally a matter of life and death, the motivation to change is not enough. We still listen to our faulty wiring. Our brain  finds evidence that what we have always done is still OK and we listen to it because it means we don’t have to do something difficult or painful.

When our brain tells us “I know I have to find the time to do this a bit differently and I will definitely do it tomorrow” we can defer what we need to do, but will be difficult. And go back to focusing on what is comfortable instead.

It makes sense. Old habits die hard – especially ones that we think helped to contribute to previous success.

Take the scientific research that appears to prove irrefutably that there is a link between whether people like you and whether they rate you professionally.

In one Harvard study of over 57,000 leaders only 0.1% of who were disliked by their teams, were also perceived as being good at their job.

How hard would that be to read if you were a 50 year old Executive who has oft quoted the mantra “I’m not here to be liked, I’m here to be respected.”

Woah. Our brains just don’t like that sort of curve ball. We have a complex system of thinking that is there for good reason – to protect us from the shame of being wrong. Or the disappointment of wondering about what could have been.

So instead our brains try to keep us safe from shame and disappointment and quickly find “evidence” that justifies keeping that questionable belief intact. But that is what AQ is all about. Developing the confidence and mental agility to adapt even your most strongly held beliefs and assumptions if you find they might be wrong.

A leader who has not bothered previously about being “liked” with low AQ would probably stick with the first “rational” thought that dismisses that research out of hand and enables them to get back to the business of the day. “Yeah but that was just in America. It’s unlikely that it was in a tough environment like mine. Look at what I’ve achieved. It’s clearly tree hugging rubbish.”

It’s much, much harder to develop a personal high AQ. Where you allow yourself to feel a bit ashamed of yourself for being quite horrible at times and acknowledge you might need to adapt your thinking into something like “Well that blows my assumption out of the water that it is shows weakness to want to be liked. Wow, that’s uncomfortable. What would I have done differently if I had known this 20 years ago? OK. Let’s think. What can I do about this right now. Today”.

Given how hard genuine adaptive change is for us as individuals, why are we surprised that it is even harder – and sometimes feels impossible – in an organisation?

An organisation is simply a collection of people doing business together. If if the business environment changes, what makes us believe that those people can automatically follow suit?

Changing ways of working is difficult. I would say almost impossible. Getting people to let go of something they have found useful in the past takes time, effort and real focus. It is not something that can be achieved with a day’s training (or even a week of workshops) – no matter how good the training is or how hot the burning platform is to change something.

It is really common practise for us to work hard to set a vision, goals and values and invest a lot of time and money in encouraging maybe hundreds or thousands of people to “sing from the same hymn sheet”. But we remain surprised when people can’t remember the new lyrics, even if they agree the song has become old hat.

I’ve seen evidence where even if where we have uncovered that a business “myth” is actually propping up underperformance, teams and individuals can really want to hold onto it.

The article in HBR about AQ from 2011 resonates with me more than ever. We are learning more daily about why we find change difficult and why AQ or “adaptive quotient” may become the new EQ.

Reeves and Delmer write:

“Management paradigms die hard, especially when they have historically been the basis for success.”

The article is great. Please do read it. However if you are now too busy because you have read this instead, there are 6 key things that you can do to train you and your organisation to be more adaptive so that you can increase your AQ. Ask questions and spend time thinking about Alternatives, Disrupters, Assumptions, Plans, Threats and Speed – helpfully we have turned their recommendations into – ADAPTS.

Try these 6 things today to increase your AQ.

1) ALTERNATIVES: Insist any change proposal has several suggested alternatives as a matter of course – this encourages cognitive and organisational flexibility

2) DISRUPTERS: Ask questions that set an expectation that the leaders in your business are thinking about what the disrupters on the edges of your business are doing – not just what your competitors are up to.

3) ASSUMPTIONS: Get into the habit of thinking about and  asking questions about what you think you all “know”. Are there some firmly and widely held beliefs that you need to have the courage to challenge?

4) PLANS: Do you spend quality time and energy thinking and reflecting on plans that take your business beyond what you know? What are the megatrends? What are you under-exploiting? What can you not know?

5) THREATS: Treat threats or risks to your business with rigour. Do you have people with time and a clear responsibility for exploring areas of potential market exposure. Do you set up and incentivise  initiatives to measure future threats with the same passion as you measure yesterday’s performance?

6) SPEED: Increase your “clock-speed” – make any annual reviews lighter and consider how to transform any processes that you do on a monthly or annual basis into business as usual activity that takes minutes not hours.

I am frequently to be heard challenging my clients about separating “business fact” from “business fiction”.

We all have assumptions. We are wired to make them. But we can train our brains to stand back and check them out for what they are. We can then decide if the things that we are protecting are actually the same things that are holding us back.

To increase your AQ, remind yourself and your organisation regularly that some organisational widely held beliefs and firmly followed processes are actually based on questionable or outdated assumptions. Also remember that initially it will be normal that when you question them, your individual and collective organisation brains might be desperate to hold onto them!

Here are some questions I have found helpful to ask. I hope they stimulate some thinking for you.

“What trends are emerging that mean we just won’t have customers in the same numbers in 5 years?”

“What would X do if they bought our business?”
Insert whatever name you like for X.

“Is this actually “real” or a myth we like – that it suits us to believe?”

“Just because our brains can to find “evidence” to support that view, does it mean it is actually true?”

“Did this used to be a business fact but one we need to question now things have moved on?”

“What do we not want to know?”

“If we needed to overcome that risk within 6 weeks, who would we have working on it and what resources would they need to create a viable alternative in that time?”

“If we needed 3 other options, what would they be?”

“What would be ridiculous about us turning that annual review into a fortnightly one?”

I hope that helps explain what AQ is if you hear someone mention it!

More importantly, I hope it gives you a head start about how we could help you to do something about it before everyone else does!

Contact us via Teabreaktraining.com for more information and a cuppa to get you thinking. It’s our job to keep you. ahead of the curve.

Avoiding Vulnerability

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So today I was finding things to avoid writing. The fear of committing ideas that sound great in your head down on paper is sometimes too much.

I’d already done,”It’s Monday – you are never fresh enough to write your best things on Mondays”

and

“No point starting now, kids are back in an hour”

So after a call from my great and wise friend Sally, in a final act of desperate uber-avoidance, I even found time for “tele…during the day”…and watched a bit of TED.

To give you a bit of background another of my great and wise friends Nikki had sent me a link to this TED talk this morning. Brene Brown. You may have heard of it as 32.7M people have seen it!

Then when I spoke to Sally this afternoon, I remembered she had sent me the same link. In 2015.

And then when avoiding writing and instead doing a “To Do” list (those of you who know me personally will know that I was really scraping the bottom of that avoidance barrel!) I wrote down “Contact Alison for feedback”. And then remembered that my great and wise friend Alison had also recommend the same TED talk, Last Year. It felt like FATE.

So as a result, I watched Brene Brown’s TED talk on Vulnerability right the way through. And forgive me, but I then binged and watched the next one on Shame too.

I know how brilliant TED talks are. I recommend them all the time. But I still feel guilty about watching them “in work time”.

Yes I know. Even though I run my own Company. Bonkers. But that’s for another day.

Anyway I “made time” to actually watch the whole 20 minutes – I’d always been “too busy – and told myself  “I’m sure I have got the jist of it anyway from the bit I have read/watched/picked up…” And then another 20 minutes. Television. In broad daylight. Shocking!!

And here is what happened.

My first and second reactions were fascinating…

Reaction 1 – Oh my god, this is so brilliant. I so love it that I am learning to be vulnerable too. This is all the stuff I talk about all the time. Made real by another proper scientific researcher. Brilliant.

Reaction 2 – Oh no. Any of the millions of people who have seen this already will think I have just been ripping off her stuff all this time – they will think I have seen it already and have just been recycling someone’s ideas and style.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha!

My third reaction interesting and shows how much I have come on in terms of vulnerability and shame – thanks to friends like Nikki, Sally and Alison. I thought…Wow – there is a good story in those reactions. I ought to share it!

So rather than be ashamed of those reactions, I thought I’d write about them right now instead.

Please don’t do what I did and don’t watch these talks because you think you know this already. They are a real joy by a real person. But here is what I got from my TV binge.

1) If you don’t feel Vulnerable sometimes, you can’t really feel anything – joy, happiness etc.

2) If you don’t feel a sense of “not being good enough”, then you are probably a sociopath. So don’t worry about the Imposter thing – I’ve done blogs and a book chapter on “IT” as I call if if you want more info.

3) Sharing and talking about your experiences is not something to hold back on until you are “good enough” or “ready” – people want to see and hear from you as a human being – BEFORE you become a professional expert – because we all know that however much you study/do/rehearse you will never feel like a professional expert – even if you are one!

So here is my go at sharing my vulnerability, shame, imposter thinking, my suppression of my “who do you think you are” thinking that someone will want to hear your take on it Dulcie.

And finally my hope. That in sharing it, you might watch and share it too.

A final thought. I would have gone and have some wine so as not to think about my shame, vulnerability and imposter thinking, if the first video didn’t expressly talk about that being a really good way to numb and avoid those feeling.

Bollocks. Some people really do know what they are talking about!!

www.brenebrown.com

Resilience – Why it really matters…

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In exploring this topic, I went straight to a great consultant who I’m really lucky to have in my contact list. Based in Switzerland, he works privately and with a couple of large consultancies, helping Executives and their teams across Europe and Asia to increase their personal performance.

I love that his advice is practical and do-able. I can absolutely vouch that what he has recommended for me personally has had amazing results. The 5 minutes of exercise in a morning has been a revelation. I now fit in more exercise than I used to – without having to “find the time” – which inevitably never happened. My advice is to take what you already do and add in the things that will have the most impact for you personally. I’m still not great with the wine on a school night though…ho hum!

Here is a sneak preview of the content for our our new postcard for a super fast summary of what becoming more Resilent entails…

And over to Oliver. As you will read, he has the “H” of our THRIVE model pretty much sewn up…

ENERGY AND THE VERY BAD DAY
or
Maintaining your energy and building your resilience

By Oliver Lewis-Roberts

A VERY BAD DAY

1. The radio alarm goes off playing Sonny and Cher.
2. You wake up, in your rush to get the kids ready for school, feed the cat, take out the bins and get to work on time, you miss breakfast, or grab a quick bowl of high-sugar Flavios that sends your kids hyper.
3. Your commute sucks, you name it – train, bus, bad weather, traffic jam, it makes you late and sucks out a little bit of your soul.
4. You’re stressed, you missed breakfast so you’re hungry. You grab a muffin, a cake, or a chocolate bar from the coffee shop with your morning latte.
5. You have a morning of meandering meetings with people who all want something from you, or talk too much with little very little impact or purpose. You’ll never get that hour back.
6. As you grab your third coffee of the day, you chat to a colleague who’s in ‘I’m gonna bitch to you’ mode about all their disappointments and dissatisfactions. Have you slashed your wrists yet?
7. Because of the *YAWN* meetings, you’re still catching up with the normal stuff, so you either skip lunch (lunch is for wimps anyway, right?) or grab something quick and carb-y from the canteen and wolf it, wash it down with some more caffeine/sugar-filled Coca-Fango.
8. More meeeeeetings.
9. You get the afternoon lull and brain-fog, so you down an energy drink, some chocolate, or coffee number six.
10. You finally get back to doing some proper work but end up answering a bunch of oh-so-urgent emails.
11. The commute home is no more life-enhancing than the morning’s and is mostly taken up by finishing the emails and messages you accumulated during the day. You turn to Facebook to switch off only to get depressed by how lovely your best friend’s holiday looks. It’s raining here.
12. Your only laugh of the day so far is a funny video on YouTube. For Fenton’s Sake!
13. You walk through the door at home still focused on work on your phone, blanking your partner/kids/flatmate/dog/cat/hamster. They get in a mood with you. What an evening you’re going to have.
14. …and it’s only Monday.

How do you feel now? A little deflated? Sorry to dump that on you but, I bet that most of you reading this will have had days like that. If not every day, then often enough to drag you down. Shit happens, right? Well yes, but the way you prepare and deal with it can change your life.

ENERGY AND RESILIENCE

Solutions to life or work problems can often be counter-intuitive. We keep trying harder and harder at something and achieve nothing more than tiredness and frustration. You know that fly in your home that bangs its head on the glass 500 times in a bid to escape, completely ignoring the open window one metre away? I bet you look at the fly and think ‘how stupid are you?’ If your days are a bit like the one I described, then you could think the same about yourself.

I can only get away with that because this is a blog and you can’t punch me right now. Kidding. You’re not stupid, you just can’t see the glass in front of you. We are all blind to things when we have low energy. We lose resilience and even the little things can kick us in the Wotsits (not a high-energy snack). The final straw, as they say. You’re not stupid, you just need to make a step sideways and see the gap in the window.

What’s the answer? Resilience is about mental toughness, right? Well, no, not really. Mental toughness could be an outcome of working on your energy and resilience, but it’s not a character trait. It’s not inherent, or guaranteed, it requires attention. The good news is that if you do the things I’m suggesting, then your energy will grow, and your resilience will grow, and you will develop mental toughness as a result. People who overcome hurdles can become stronger than the people who seem to have it given to them on a plate.

Energy and resilience come from activities and habits that look after you physically and mentally. You’ll have heard of all the things you can do to train your brain to perform better; puzzles like Sudoku, crosswords or practising mindfulness, and yes they all work. The reality is, you can do one thing, and it will make a difference, but it will be a small difference. The way to get a big impact is to do a whole bunch of things, and create something that’s bigger than the sum of its parts. Think the Beatles, or Take That.

Most of the clients I work with are pressured, stretched, time-poor and energy-bereft, so the things I suggest are designed to be either a) short and sharp, b) easy to do, and c) involve you removing things which result in you having more time.

I know you can fit them into your normal day.

How arrogant, right? Well, I would call it confidence based on first-hand experience. Going back ten to twenty years, that bad day I described would have been what my days looked like. And this stuff fixed me. But I’m not you, I hear you say. No, I’m not you, but I can promise you, as human beings, you and I share more in common than we do differences. And all these things benefit you as a human being. It really isn’t rocket science, but it is science and it works.

WHAT TO DO FOR A GOOD DAY (EVEN IF SHIT HAPPENS)

Before you read the list, please park the scepticism. Open up your mind, get a can opener if you need to. Most of this is super-simple and takes no time, but if you aren’t doing them, they won’t work. Try them and they will give you more energy which will, in turn, impact your work and your friends and family. In a good way. Take a deep breath and dive in…

1. Wake up, drink water first, 2 decent glasses full: You will have dehydrated overnight. Water is one of the main fuels for the body, use it. Often. Have the first coffee of the day at 40+ minutes into your day, the cortisol levels in your body peak just before you wake, waking you up, the effect of this hormone lasts a little while after you wake, so coffee first off is not needed.
2. Stretch or do some light exercise: Set the alarm for 10 minutes earlier, do some push-ups, planks, squats, sit-ups, even a 5-minute set will do wonders, and anything is better than nothing. This is not just to get you fit (although, duh, that’s not a bad idea), exercise releases cortisol in the body, which will help wake you up even more. A study in the US showed that 10 minutes of taking the stairs gave the equivalent boost to ingesting 50mg of caffeine (what you get in a can of a C***), you’re not going to take the stairs yet, but you get the idea.
3. Eat a good breakfast: Eggs (no more than 2-3 a day, cholesterol!), low-sugar/high fibre cereal (look at the packets!), wholegrain bread, the brown stuff with lumpy bits in it. This will lessen the urge to pick up something nasty from the coffee shop. It’ll make you poo better too, which is a good thing.
4. Your commute: Download a meditation app and use it, watch the scenery go by and do some simple breathing exercises. All of this will help you maintain a calm and solution-oriented mind, and will stop a bad commute from sapping your soul. Don’t meditate while driving!
5. Now take the stairs, walk, anything other than a lift or an escalator. Walk the escalators in the London underground. They make your life comfortable, but they also turn your legs and brain into mush.
6. Meeting Schedules: Don’t be an Outlook slave; you’ll end up rushing from one meeting to the next with no down-time. Schedule meetings for 20 or 45 minutes, yes, it lets you do that! Get your colleagues to do it too. Use the extra space to drink water, go to the loo, take the stairs, have a snack.
7. Meeting Methods: Have a walking meeting, if there’s only two or three of you, what’s gluing you to that seat? Get some air, not more coffee. If it was good enough for Aristotle…
8. Write personal intentions or objectives for meetings: Don’t go in there waiting for them to wash over you, take some control back. I don’t mean a task list, you probably already have that. I mean, what do you want to get from this meeting? What are you going to do to make it productive? Remind yourself of these before you walk in.
9. Snack well and regularly: Ditch the muffins and chocolate bars for a while. Get some High protein, low carb, low processed-sugar snacks like nuts (unsalted, not too many) or dried fruit, some protein bars are good (but read the nutritional info, avoid high sugar levels). The sugary stuff gives you spikes in blood-glucose, which also gives you come-downs (the afternoon lull).
10. Coffee: Be strategic, limit your intake and don’t have sugary flavoured shots. Drink good coffee or tea. Switch to fruit or herbal teas in the afternoon. Caffeine in the afternoon will stop you from sleeping well. Stick to having it when you need it for a boost (e.g. important meetings). Come off the 8-cups-a-day habit, you’ve just immunised yourself to the benefits.
11. Water: Did I mention water? Always have water with you, drink it regularly, even with a coffee (like the Italians, they know about this!), get a sports bottle and take it to meetings with you. The brain is 80% water, so guess what happens if it doesn’t have enough?
12. Have a good lunch: 1/3 protein, 1/3 vegetables, 1/3 carbs. Avoid the overly carb-y lunch, this is one of the things that gives you the afternoon lull. But remember, you are allowed a treat now and then! If you’re trying to lose weight, then reduce the carbs to 1/5 and up the veg, you’ll still feel full and energised, but with less calories.
13. Sleep during the day: Power nap (yes, seriously!) 10-15 minutes is enough. You don’t have to fall fully asleep. Find a quiet place or even in your car. There are apps to help you do this. Much better than Angry Birds. There is a substantial uplift in energy and co-ordination, that way outstrips the 15 minutes you spent napping. Caught napping? Well done!
14. Block times in your calendar: For emails or for focusing on projects, so you can really concentrate on the important tasks without distractions. Even turn your emails off for a while if it helps, and no, the world will not end.
15. Your home commute: Ignore Facebook. Reflect on the day, include what went well in your reflections as well as the tough stuff. What choices can you make tomorrow that will give you a better day? And again, meditate (even just for the last 10 minutes – not while driving!) or breathe, or enjoy the scenery or the other people on the train or bus, there’s nowt so queer as folk. Finally, spend 2-3 minutes before you walk through the door breathing to relax and think about how you want to be perceived by your family as you walk in. Switch off work calls/emails/messages for the first half-hour at home. Focus on you and them as a family unit. You can always take time to catch-up on work a little later if you really have to. Your evening will go much better (I promise!) and that will energise you for tomorrow.
16. Alcohol: Don’t drink too much on a school night, you do the other stuff listed here, you won’t need to ‘take the edge off’ so much. That’s not to say a glass of red isn’t ok, just not the whole bottle on a Monday night!
17. Evening Exercise: This is one to watch. If you work out close to bedtime, it can cause trouble getting to sleep, same as in the morning, it increases your cortisol levels, but just before bed this is not a good idea. Do something, but in a lunchbreak, the early evening, or in the morning. Keep longer workouts for the weekend.
18. Bedtime: Spend the last 30-60 minutes before bed without TV or a device. Read or do some other relaxing activity before sleep. Plan for your sleep just as you would plan for your day. It’s the best rest and recharge you can get, pay it respect.
19. Repeat from step one tomorrow, and guess what? The good day can turn into a good week.

TOO MUCH?

If you are a sensible person, then you probably do at least some of these things already. But also notice, most of these things takes less than 5 minutes to do, and the rest will give you time back in return. All of them will give you more energy, and make you more resilient for when the shit stuff happens.

There’s much more to this than just dealing with one day; how to deal with days coming up you know will be bad, how to lead bring your team along with you, more on the psychological stuff, the physical stuff, dealing with travel and so on. But that’s for another time, I can’t give all my secrets away in one go.

What I can say is that the people I know who stick to this stuff regularly and consistently, and I do it too; they have more energy every day and are therefore more resilient and ready to deal with the shit in a much more productive way. They are more successful as a result. The crime is, they don’t usually tell you this stuff on an MBA program or a leadership workshop.

A FINAL NOTE OF ENCOURAGEMENT

If it all sounds too much, or even just a little bit dull, remember Grandma’s advice: Everything in moderation. I am not suggesting you stop partying on a Friday night, or don’t enjoy that desert guilt-free after a good meal out, or even all of that nice bottle of red. Just be strategic, and let go when you know it’s okay to. The lesson here is that the good stuff is great, but only until it’s not great anymore. You will know where to draw that line. And, if you think you have already crossed the line, or are heading towards it with a whooshing noise in your ears, then maybe it’s time? It really isn’t rocket science, it’s a simple choice.

Lastly, if you want to make a lot of changes to your work and life habits, then find a close friend or colleague who you can trust and will help you (not a partner, it’ll just end in tears), use them for coaching, encouragement, to confide in and to work together with. And if you want someone professional to help you with it, let me know, I might know someone. Now, where’s my bottle of water…?

http://linkedin.com/in/oliver-lewis-roberts-mcipd-4127999

oliver.lewis-roberts@hotmail.com
Zug, Switzerland

A Christmas Miracle?

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Not quite! But hopefully a welcome gift.

At this time of year it is easy to feel overwhelmed by just how much you have to do. In addition to our already busy jobs and lives we also have to fit in Nativity Plays, Carol Concerts, writing cards, buying presents – and for some of us recently, clearing snow!

So where does the extra time to fit in all of these additional tasks come from?

No one can create a 25 hour day or an 8 day week. Every human on the planet shares that limitation.

So the changes are that you are trying to fit both the doing and the thinking about these things into the time you have already. I have found that one of the common tricks that our brains plays on us every day, is even more in play at this time of the year.

Our brain is absolutely brilliant at enabling us to find reasonable and rational excuses to avoid the things we don’t want to do. Have a look at your to-do list or just pause and think for a moment. What is the thing on that list that you really don’t want to do?

Maybe there is a call you need to make that you are scared might go wrong. Perhaps a conversation that you know will be unpleasant or difficult that is already overdue.

Chances are at this time of the year your brain is even more able to convince you that it can wait until the New Year. Or that once you have sorted out the Christmas Party you will get to it.

Avoiding things we don’t like is built into all our wiring. It is there to protect us from things that we think might do us harm – perhaps a failure or an aggressive reaction. So the excuses that come to you to avoid things will be really convincing.

So here is my simple gift to those feeling like their to-do list is fit to bursting.

Take that thing that you are avoiding the most. Do it now. Literally now. If it is more than a 5 minute job, then at least take the least pleasant part of it and spend 5 minutes on it.

I promise you that afterwards you will feel a burst of joy and a lightness to your step that has nothing to do with your favourite Christmas song coming on the radio.

You may even find that like lots of my clients, suddenly you feel very able to handle your massive to-do list, and feel a real sense of “Bring it on” instead of a fog of “Oh god I will never fit all this in.”

I’ll bet my current glass of mulled wine that the first thought in your head is something like “Well I can see how that would work for some people, but my “thing” really wouldn’t be a good thing to do right now.” Totally normal. It’s your brilliant brain playing delaying tactics with you.

Why not have a go anyway and see if your brain could possibly be wrong – despite the mountain of rational excuses you can immediately bring to mind?

We can meet with you in the New Year and share the science about how this works or see more at our websites below. But in the meantime we will assume you are too busy to read it and just happy to get the gift of feeling that you really can take on the world today.

Tweet us via @dulciestbam (short on time, big on ambition anyone?!) and let us know what you did and how you feel.

Have a very, very, very Merry Christmas!

www.teabreaktraining.com

www.profitablyengaged.com

 

 

 

Leading Innovation

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Having worked with small family businesses, larger SME’s and some of the largest businesses in the UK, what keeps being evident is that the old adage that people work for people is still very true.

Whatever the size of the business, whether they have manufactured a product, provided a service or sold an experience, the successful leaders of the businesses I have worked with have shared more in common than their business size or product might suggest. In fact when someone asked me recently whether I had any experience in the finance sector, rather than talk to the about the FDs I had coached, or finance teams I had trained in leadership, I paused and asked:

“That is an interesting question. It makes me curious about whether you think leaders in your business need different personal qualities to leaders in other sectors or functions?”

We ended up having a really interesting discussion along the same lines. That whilst particular jobs or sectors might attract a person with particular characteristics or skills, a good leader was a good leader. The skills and qualities needed transcend sector and size of business.

So when I was asked to talk recently at a conference for businesses of all different shapes, sizes and sectors on “How to Lead Innovation”, this conversation was very much in my mind.

The group I presented to had already met on a number of occasions. They had found that 3 words kept coming up when talking about what qualities were needed to take an innovative product or service to market.

The words were: Resilience. Tenacity. Creativity.

This was a great place to start. I began by agreeing about the importance of these qualities. And by suggesting that innovative places to work both need to attract people with these qualities, but that they also need to continue to grow and develop those qualities over time.

In a fast paced environment with lots of pressure to innovate the qualities need to be nurtured and fed back upon so that they remain strengths. I have seen resilient, tenacious and creative people stubbornly hanging onto yesterday’s idea that wasn’t working, for all they were worth. Tomorrow’s creative idea is after all “so last year”. Tenacity without feedback can easily turn into stubborn blinkeredness. Resilience in the face of failure is admirable – but what if you are really missing what people are telling you about why your idea won’t work because you are only selectively listening?

I added an example of my own. Seeing failure as feedback to help you get it right. I visited Dyson a few years ago to give them some advice on embedding learning from employee engagement surveys. I was struck by how much they talked about failure. It was one of their values. Fail. It really made me think about the sort of tightrope you have to walk as a leader to make failure OK but still ensure you are making enough money to survive. The key for me to turn failure into a learning opportunity is feedback. Asking questions to ensure people are becoming wiser and even more open minded, resilient, creative and tenacious from their failures. Ensuring people remain positive by digging underneath their responses to check whether they really are OK that their product has just crashed again. Making sure that people aren’t being over confident about an idea that has had it’s day or will simply not pay for itself soon enough.

So the list of things I spoke about became Resilience. Tenacity. Creativity. Feedback.

We spoke about how to develop those qualities in yourself and how to grow them in other people. I had 3 point plan which was simple but I think all I could do in 15 minutes!

1) Appreciate people are different. 

We all have different wiring and express our “tenacity” and “creativity” in different ways. Some people might adore a brainstorm. Others might need to lock themselves away and speak to no one in order to come up with their best ideas. Find ways to let people make the most effective use of their brain. Your way might work brilliantly for you – it is therefore natural that you will want to share “what worked well for me in the past was…”Consider whether it will work equally well for them.

Remember, your way of organising yourself or your thoughts may simply not suit someone else’s wiring.

2)  Play to individual and group strengths.

It’s a build on the point above. Don’t expect the person who wants to lock themselves away for 3 days to come up with ideas to necessarily be brillliant presenting them to a group at a conference. Or the person who loves brainstorming to necessarily be the best choice to take those ideas away and put them into a project plan with milestones. There are jobs that need to be done and processes that need to be followed. But delegate them to people who have the personal qualities as well as the skills that the job needs.

Expecting people who are technically brilliant at something to be equally as good at leading a team to do the same job to that same standards, may not give you the exceptional result you hoped for… Train them to lead.

3) Learn to lead innovative people

The reason that you recruited someone can be the reason they drive you crazy as well – every strength has a relevant opposite or inevitable flip side. Finding a way to lead people and feedback to them about how their “flip sides” are impacting the people around them is tough. People who are creative can be difficult to pin down. People who are resilient can find it difficult to admit vulnerability. People who are tenacious can be rude and stubborn. All of these “flip-sides” need addressing – but research continually shows that if all we feedback to people is what they are not doing well – things that they find difficult – they will underperform. It’s tough, but what I call “top right conversations” can help. These are conversations when you project both approachability and authority as a leader. And are seen as someone who is provide feedback for learning – not to criticise.

Having a good degree of warmth and rapport so that someone can open up to you when things go wrong, is as important as been seen as strong and authoritative enough to help them to fix it.

I have recently written an article on this balance between creating trust and creating challenge – it is easy to say and really hard to actually do. You can read it here. http://www.itsnotbloodyrocketscience.com/

Many of the great leaders who I have worked with say they think that this might just be “the secret” to their success. However, it’s not a secret. It is really well researched common sense that is rooted in our palaeolithic brains! (See the work of Amy Cuddy at Harvard or Deborah Gruenfeld from Stanford for a much robust scientific studies than mine!)

It is hard but try it. It might just be the secret to unlocking profitable innovation from your people. If so, thinking about how well you balance trust and challenge is worth your very precious time.

We can help if you need it. Our websites at teabreaktraining.com and profitablyengaged.com tell you more.

Equally if you think you’ve read enough we’d love to hear from you!

Email elizabeth@teabreaktraining.com for help on how to get these skills into your business.

Or for 1:1 Executive Coaching or Business Mentoring get in touch at dulcie@profitablyengaged.com