Working with corporates and coaching executives always creates personal growth and development (PD). Unless an individual is ‘ready-for-change’ this growth may take quite a while. Typically, PD happens between a few minutes and about 18 months. Knowing that PD and particularly, Emotional Intelligence are not fixed, and knowing so much about real performance and behavioural change in executives, it seemed natural for Dr. McLeod to write this book.

Aimed at the domestic market, the book is relevant to everyone whether an executive or not.

Buy the UK Kindle Edition £6.17

Buy the Paper-back, $9.99 plus post (soon to be available with UK and European distribution, watch Amazon page in your country for book listing)

The EI model suggests that one cannot be fully successful in a team environment without both IQ and EQ. The EI model is predicated upon two pathways to growth and destroys the idea that we are stuck; that we cannot get beyond yesterday’s mindset.

Increasing EI helps to establish impact with others, to influence and lead through motivation. It is therefore a great underpinning philosophy for managing in a coaching style; when one maps leadership and coaching skills together, we find a very great overlap in these skills. See explanatory video on leadership skills vs coaching skills.

As well as training to help managers augment their management styles with coaching skills, we also go further than that with full culture-change programmes using ‘the coaching culture’ as a model for change and have been active in this area since 2004.

Take the Emotional Intelligence Test!

Judgements have their uses. Especially when you want polarity, the ‘yes’/'no’ options for an answer. For example, Judgement in logical decision-making or Project Management contribute massively to success. But do they always? No. So why do I celebrate Einstein as a genius of ‘letting go judgement’ in order to find brilliant solutions? Find out here. Yes, judgements are useful to executives. But we also need to look at the ‘con’ side of judgemental habit and how this habit can restrict team-work, lead to poor flexibility and, a lack of creative-solutions.

In teams, a culture of judgement is a recipe for poor performance. So, how could that be right when so many business-models are predicated on systems and judgements? I’ll provide an example. One of our international clients builds multi-billion dollar projects over 5-7 years or more. The careful systems-management within projects was seen as too heavy-handed and the best and most successful senior managers are the ones that are able to work around the system ‘to make things happen’. The art of doing this while still meeting stringent safety and quality criteria is highly evolved. Many of their most impressive talent simply do not have what it takes to lead at this level.

I found myself coaching one Project Manager who in his first coaching session declared that he was headed for a $20 Million progress-default fine, as, in about six weeks time, he and his team would fail a critical milestone. All his talent and experience of managing highly skilled talent could not find a way forward. Naturally, he selected this as an issue to work on, doubting that anything would make a significant-enough difference to make the crital marker on the calendar. He was resigned to losing the £20 Million and had advised the Board of that too.

What happened? In short, his new thinking from our session led him to go away and meet with his team and significant key stakeholders. One month later he was confident that the milestone would be met. It was.

What this taught us and the organization, was that there was too much reliance on yes/no systems and not enough on how to work with the systems (or against them) to get the job done safely and to specification. It also taught us that coaching can provide the most staggering Return on Investment in certain circumstances! Could the system be changed?

Changing the System and Flexible Thinking

A senior collegue of my coachee was charged with looking at the systems. He decided to create a phantom project. This would mean that the organization would design, pilot, test and build a new project without actually making anything. What would it cost to make nothing, but go through the paper formalities of ‘due-process’? This innovative approach led to an astoundingly (high)  figure for chasing paper: From memory, of the order of some $350 Million. He took this figure to the Government and told them that the organisation could reduce this on-cost substantially, save lead-time in development and reduce costs. They listened.

Einstein & Flexible Thinking

There is no doubt that Einstein was a genius of physics and mathematics. His theory of relativity was a mindboggling advance, so far-reaching that the proofs of his genius came many years later. Two atomic clocks sat on a bench. Their accuracy was in-step to 100 millionth of a second in a thousand years or so. One clock was sent on a US mission to fly around the Earth. When it returned, Einstein’s predicted time-shift had occurred. Of course this has been checked and proven many times since. I believe (yes, I am guessing) that Einstein, for all his academic brilliance, was unlikely to reach a solution on the basis of logic and what he knew: in other words by making judgements about whether one idea fitted experience or not. I believe he had to let go of judgement in order to achieve something radical, to go with that radical idea (in spite of academic reservations) and to keep digging deeper until something resolved. Now that is genius!

Judgements in Teams

There are more human aspects of judgements in teams – these worry me too! When we are quick to judge, we can be quick to prejudice.

We can alienate creative thinkers with our closed minds.

The quality of our relating with colleagues and stakeholders becomes inefficient, some of the time.

We close ranks with other similar judges and become siloed. The organisation becomes inefficient.

Worse than that, judgemental mindset closes off what is ‘dynamic and potential’ in ourselves. At worse, we become anachronistic, left behind, odd.

So, in organizations, we need the mix between ‘judgement mode’ and ‘open-minded mode’. Not just a mix of traits by combining people within teams: two judgemental thinkers and one creative person in a team or three for example. But rather the ability of all staff to flex from one state (of judging) to the other (open-mindedness), consciously and flexibly! Here then is the solution to judgement-cultures within organizations and one that leads and contributes towards strategies improved team-working, better communications, improved understanding, better motivational-management skills and raised productivity.

Judgements in the Coaching Manager and Coach

As coaches, judgements are best left to one side nearly all the time. Then we can hear and see what people are saying and read and adapt to them better. When we do have a sense of what is happening, rather then judge, we need to ask a question that will add perspective and self-learning for the coachee. This allows them to make the ‘Einstein Leap’ in thinking. And these coaching skills can (and are) learned by managers to adapt and grow their personal management styles in training. And that is exactly what AMA has been doing in organisations since 2004. We have worked with Surrey County Councils and with Kings College Hospital, and more.

For more information on culture change and isolating the key ‘tipping points’ of organisationa- change, contact us!

Angus McLeod, 2012.

Meet Angus McLeod and Prof. David Clutterbuck in November. This is a wonderful programme called ‘The Coach’s Journey’. More information here.

“To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded”.  Quote by, Ralph Waldo Emerson

How much I appreciate these wise words of Emerson’s! He writes of moral successes that paradoxically, put the bar both quite high and quite low. A ‘redeemed social condition’ might take more effort than helping just one person, but they are still successes.

It is very good to be reminded of these important reasons for being alive, especially today, in the competitive modern world, when success is often aimed for, seen and experienced as material success at all costs: the honours degree, the next job up the ladder, the successful business… These may be ‘real world’ objectives or ‘pressures’ but how do they fit the larger objectives referred to by Emerson? Are successes in the material world materially different from the kinds of success that he describes?
They might be, but I do not think they are necessarily so.

I feel that when material success is not kept in a separate compartment of thought from the kinds of success that Emerson puts forward it is ultimately more satisfying. Your own personal values determine what success is for you. What you aim for yourself, what you consider as success in others and what you experience as success are individual matters.

Let’s start with the experience of success. Success is very similar to contentment in that it is about satisfaction with how things are. Contentment can be a steady state in life if we are living in a mature way. Success can also be a regular feature of a rewarding life, but the feeling of success can also just be a fleeting experience. This fleeting experience of success may occur if when one goal is successfully reached, it is immediately followed by whatever effort is necessary for reaching the next one, and the next one after that…
Have you ever been hill walking and toiled uphill, perhaps in rain and wind with a pack on your back, to reach the top of the ridge, only to see the next ridge, and perhaps the one after that, still ahead of you before you reach your destination? Then you have to find some strength from inside yourself to keep going. It does help to stop for a while, to look back at how far you have come and to admire the view. We have to remember to do a bit of ‘breathing easier’ ourselves as well as helping others to achieve ease.

Finding strength within is good. It is necessary for achieving any kind of success, as long as you do not exhaust yourself and do not miss out on celebrating each success on the way towards further successes.

I think that is what is so helpful in what Emerson expressed. Both the ‘redeemed social condition’, which is a massive success, and the ‘one life has breathed easier’, which is a relatively modest success are notable successes.

Perhaps in terms of experience, perhaps that can be compared to the Olympic gold medalist reaching the podium for their medal and the child about to be presented with the school prize for winning a race. Both can be completely satisfying 10/10 experiences of success.

I heard on BBC Radio 4 recently that in animal experiments, I think it was rats as usual, the creatures who had succeeded in one challenge, in this experiment winning a fight, were more likely to win the next one, even though there was no measureable difference in prowess between loosing and winning rats. The same seems to be true of boxers. It is not just how good a fighter the boxer is, but whether or not he or she has already won that creates a winning psychology.

You could, and people often do, take that the wrong way round. I hope you don’t.  Expecting failure because of previous failure is a vicious circle and it is one well worth escaping.
You do not have to wait for large successes to be acknowledged by others (like the Olympic champion) before you allow yourself to have experiences of success. You can build what I like to call a ‘history of success’ by taking note of all your successes, whatever size or type. Try writing down seven successes every day for a week and notice how you feel. According to the psychologists, that kind of behaviour makes the next win easier to attain.

That is where contentment comes in. Appreciating small successes, including little increments of the kinds of success that Emerson refers to, can create ease with how things are, and hence contentment in life. There might be plenty of work to do to reach the large goals, but it is one step at a time and the steps can be celebrated. That process of celebration builds the mindset and the muscle for successfully reaching your big goals.

It’s akin to the cup described by Kahlil Gibran, if we do not keep it full, the cup itself dries out and turns to dust.

This is what Professor Angus McLeod calls ‘acknowledgement of success’ and he produced a figure for this, where one decides to act, one takes action and is successful and then one acknowledges that success BEFORE moving to the next task.What better way to keep the cup topped up and STAY successful!!?

Judy Barber c.2012.

Figure is from ‘Self-Coaching Leadership – from Manager to Leader’ by McLeod, A., Publ. John Wiley, 2007.

At the moment I am dealing with an excessively large workload and so it seemed like a good time to write about stress!

When life has a good rhythm of work, time for family and friends, and time for oneself, then it is easy to write safe platitudes about how stressed people should go about de-stressing themselves. As a reminder of how easy it is to make up advice, I made these up:

1.    Keep a good balance between time for work and time for your own life, and do not let these times spill over into each other.
2.    Make time for yourself, even if it means blocking off time in your diary, and make sure you spend the time wisely doing things that will bring you back into your best self, emotionally and physically.

Great advice, but have I been taking it in the last few weeks? No!

My current project is the publication of my raw food recipe book, the final part bringing text, photos and drawings together, to-ing and fro-ing with edits and doing all manner of last minute detail tasks in conjunction with different people to different fixed deadlines in a short space of time. It can get like that with any multi-faceted project.

I have spent far too many hours in front of the computer and have neglected my immediate needs in various significant ways, all the while busy with a house move!

Yesterday I cracked and burst into tears because it was all getting too much and I realized how woefully inadequate I was feeling. I took myself off to my favourite café, where I slumped in the background having a good think while supping a large bowl of soup. This was good because I re-jigged how I would spend the next few days and I planned in some proper time out for myself.
I made a very individual choice of how to spend my time off. If you are reading this for tips, I suggest you come up with something just as idiosyncratic.

I had things to buy further afield than my small town so I took the train. I did that in order to relax completely and just let life carry me along. To give my over-activated brain time to slow down, I did not take anything to read. Instead I took a small curtain to hem by hand in order to change my focus from head to hands. By the way, two-handed activities like sewing and knitting not only help integrate the head with the hands, but assist the left and right halves of the brain to  work together. The connection between these halves is encouraged and developed that way. That feeds back into being able to think logically and imaginatively about the same things, ‘joined up thinking’. How helpful might that be when back in the office?

Then, I walked all around town getting things done. I wore very comfortable shoes so that this was good exercise for bringing my body into balance.

I managed to tick a few things off a long list so that I had some sense of achievement.
Lastly, I sat down in this café to wait for my train home and gave myself the thinking, planning and writing time I had planned for.  I quietly wrote the first draft of this article without rushing.

In all it was a successful day. Of course, I could say, “I went shopping in Cheltenham”! But that would not tell you the whole story.
How do I feel as a result?

•    More relaxed
•    Rested
•    More together
•    Much more adequate to the tasks I have to do
•    Content
•    Not stressed

From my experience today, here is my one Winning Tip for you for de-stressing, for taking the distress out of stress when you have to work exceptionally hard.

Interrupt the Pattern

Trust yourself to know exactly what you need and give yourself at least half a day to meet your needs in whatever ways work for you.

A walk in the country? Re-reading a favourite novel? Ironing to good music? Sitting in the cinema on your own watching a tear-jerker? Swimming? Eating really healthy food? Rearranging the living room? Rowing a boat? Spa day? Aloneness or easy company? Going on strike from domestic activities for the day? Art Gallery? Paint a picture? Dance? Sleep?

These need to be conscious choices that will have positive effects on your physical and emotional wellbeing. It is the upside of escapism, with nothing that will give you hangovers or exhaust you further.

Plan your time and then interrupt your current stuck, stressed, treadmill pattern. Let the world wait for a few hours while you catch up with yourself and re-inhabit every part of your best self.

Having interrupted your recent pattern, then you can get back to working hard in a much better way.

Looking back at my two pieces of advice at the start of the article, here are my comments:

1.    Bringing everything back into balance is not always instantly possible. Do not hassle yourself about it.
2.    Making ‘time for you’ turned out to be wise advice.

I’ll go with my Winning Tip:

Take the distress out of stress this way: INTERRUPT THE PATTERN, in ways that are right for you.

Judy Barber, 2012.

IQ + Emotional Intelligence = success

Take this EI quiz and find out!

If you want more success, here’s how to do it!

Unless you live and work in compete isolation, it pays to be able to understand and influence other people. The primary key to those two things is Emotional Intelligence. Most people thought that it was a fixed thing that may or may not evolve slowly through life… it turns out they were wrong! Find out why from guru coach, Angus McLeod. Take the 2 minute test, read your result and watch the 6 minute video. You too can boost your EI and your success!

When we look at the four pillars of NLP proposed by McDermott (2006; Rapport, Flexibility, Outcome Thinking & Sensory Acuity), we find interesting learning that maps directly to best-practice in modern coaching.In this available (free) article first published in November 2010 (Acuity, Published by the ANLP, London) we learn about subjects including the following:

• Gaining and losing Trust
• Patterns of thinking
• Insight and intuition
• Leading coaching cultures in organisations
• Deeper-level coaching
• Why coaching tools are of secondary importance in coaching
• How to instantly upgrade our coaching ability

Read the article here

Typical errors include upskilling to target new behaviours and performance and members of the Board rejecting these new behaviours and performance. Find out more about best-practice in setting out leadership development journeys.

Angus

see the slideshow