In the late 1960′s and early 70′s a communication model emerged that took a different look at the way we communicate. Not wanting this new model to fit into any existing discipline of psychology or therapy the founders, Richard Bandler and John Grinder called it Neurolinguistic Programming or NLP for short.
NLP is essentially a model of learning and demonstrates that we can model human thinking, behaviour and communication. Continue Reading »
Today is auspicious, being 1-1-11 and the first day of a new decade. As the year clicks over on the calendar it is customary to make New Year’s Resolutions and it is also customary to break them a few days later; which begs the question, “Can we change ourselves for the better?”
From a self-leadership perspective, the answer lies in the question – to change we must change our ‘selves’. ‘Self’ is a matrix of frames of mind which includes our self beliefs and values which make up our ‘identify’ and we tend to conform to our identity. In short you behave to meet your expectations of how your ‘see’ yourself. Continue Reading »
Although I have been a coaching for 10+ years, last year I decided to align myself with the International Coach Federation’s (ICF) competencies and ethics. My reasons were simple, executive coaching is coming of age and yet the coaching industry is a ‘wild west’ of different schools, methodologies, approaches and standards; through this confusion the ICF has emerged as a unifying force for defining professional coaching. Continue Reading »
When communicating any message it is essential that we are congruent, that is to say our words match our tonality which matches our body language. It is also important to get our facts right, because to fail to do so will lose you all credibility.
You may be familiar with the above statistics which are regularly rolled out by communication trainers to make the point that tonality (38%) and body language/facial expressions (55%) are important in getting your message across. The irony is that people, who I believe should know better, are promoting a myth by quoting statistics without knowing what they mean. Continue Reading »
Do you want to be a motivational or inspiration speaker or trainer? Then there is one thing you must avoid – Death by Power Point.
You know the symptoms; you are sitting in a slightly darkened room and the speaker drones on in a montone whilst showing you slide after slide, dot point after dot point, spreadsheets you can’t read and before you know it your eyelids feel heavy and your consciousness floats away.
Power Point is a powerful tool that is often misused and yet with a little preparation can bring your presentation to life and free you to inform and inspire your audience.
I trust you enjoyed the short YouTube video above. For more information about presentation skill training and coaching, visit www.selfleadership.com.sg
in a previous post, How to Influence Your Boss, I explored how to influence upwards, but just as important is how to influence laterally.
When I teach a programs on influence or influence without authority, I ask participants to create a circle of influence like the diagram below.
I then ask them to put ticks or crosses, representing ability or inability to influence, against each circle. Obviously some circles will need sub-circles to represent individual key people. This is a useful exercise to map out where you need to develop or strengthen your influence.
In a modern matix style organisation, your success will be determined not just by what you do, but by what you can influence others to do. The effective manager/leader learns to find out what is important to the people in their circle of influence and communicates to them in terms of what matters them rather than directly stating their own needs.
Another previous post, titled ‘Leadeship is Influence’ expands on finding needs and looks at what are people’s currencies. When you know what is valuable, a currency, to another person you can trade them what they want for what you want.
I have been coaching a senior manager who had a history of antagonising clients and colleagues alike by telling them what he thinks is the right thing to do. We had discussed this and he had commited to stop “telling” and start finding out what’s important to the people in his circle. This week he reported a dramatic improvement in his relationship and that he was getting things done quicker. This result surprised him because he thought it would take longer to ask questions than to tell people what seem to him to be an obvious solution.
Have you drawn a circle of influence? Do you know the currencies of the people you work with? Are you exercising all the influence you could?
Feel free to let me know.
As a leadership consultant and executive coach living in Singapore and working across Asia, I am often asked; “is there is a difference between Western and Asian Leaders?”
The answer is “yes” and “no”. Leaders worldwide need to ask the same questions:
In addition leaders must be able to engender trust and effectively communicate their messages. Continue Reading »
I recently had a challenging situation in the office, with a colleague of mine. Because we had only been working together for a short time and our personalities were quite different, we ended up struggling in our communication: I preferred to be direct and to the point, she liked to also have a friendly chat and spend time getting to know each other.
Obviously, because of our differences in communication styles we ended up having some very heated conversations. We both felt upset and not understood by the other which created a tension in the office. Continue Reading »
Do you know your strengths?
Do you operate from your strengths?
Research has shown that only about one-third of people are aware of their strengths and the management guru, Peter Drucker said that we can only lead from strengths.
A common approach in management and leadership development has been to measure the gap between a person’s behaviour and the desired corporate competencies; whilst this approach is valid it can downplay the application of a person’s strengths.
My top strengths are; love of learning, humor, zest, perseverance, honest, open-mindedness and perspective. I know this because I have taken a test based on the research of Dr Martin Seligman and Dr Christopher Peterson.
Seligman and Peterson’s research has found six broad categories of the best of human behaviours (virtues) that are intrinsically valued across time and cultures. Seligman and Peterson suggest that these virtues may even be biologically linked in terms of survival of the species. Within each virtue category are strengths that we all demonstrate to a greater or lesser extent.
The list is as follows:
There is a natural tendency to consider those strengths that you don’t score highly on as weaknesses but, unlike talents, strengths can be built up.
My lowest scoring strength is modesty ( for those of you who know me this is no surprise) and yet this does not mean I am not modest in some circumstances and with the awareness of this I can build it as a strength.
Positive Psychology researchers are now validating interventions to build strengths and the work is ongoing. This has major ramifications for the field of leadership development as we can know with certainty as to how to build up individuals and teams.
At Self Leadership International we have already started to build this research into our coaching and programs. A popular activity is a partner exercise in which each party listens to a success story told by the other and reflects back the strengths that they heard. The result of this exercise are profound in that colleagues who have known each other for some time get a deeper understanding of each other and managers learn to better delegate and build up their teams rather than jump to criticism.
Posted from Singapore 27/10/2010
I have just experienced three transformational days at the first Asia Pacific Coaching Conference held in Singapore, and before I share my learning’s and take-aways I wanted to publicly acknowledge Foo See Luan and Nancy Hughes Verhoeven and their team of dedicated individuals for bringing together 300 coaches from across the region to talk, listen, learn and collaborate.
The theme of the conference was ‘Coaching for Sustainable Mulitcultural Communities’ and the attendees were certainly diverse; I met fellow coaches from Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China, Australia, India, Brazil, USA, Norway and of course Singapore. Continue Reading »
