Are You Good Enough?

Sometimes good enough is good enough.

If you find yourself unable to ever settle for less than perfection there’s a strong likelihood that you spend much of your life feeling very pressurised and stressed. Perfection in all areas at all times is rarely a realistic aim.

That doesn’t mean one shouldn’t strive for it, but if you are constantly unhappy with your less than perfect attempts you will never do anything: it can stultify you, and stop you from experimenting and trying new things. Being a perfectionist can stop you learning and growing and hold back your personal development. If ‘Be Perfect’ is one of your drivers, try ‘Good Enough’ for a day!

Sometimes good enough is good enough!

What do you think?

Is Prejudice Holding You Back?

Albert Einstein once said:

“Common sense is the set of prejudices we acquire before the age of 18“.

And our prejudices are formed by our early experiences and influences:the culture we live in, the type of schools we attend, the friends we have, our significant adults-parents, teachers, relatives. It all helps to fix in us an idea of what is ‘normal’.

Knowing and understanding what your own prejudices are will help you see the world differently and open up so many more opportunities for you! We tend to seek out people who are like us, people we have a shared interests with who as a ‘normal’ as we are.

When I’m working one to one, sometimes my task is to tease out what prejudices may be holding my client back from being where they want to be. Knowing what your own prejudices are can be immensely liberating and is the first step in neutralising any negative effects.

So this week, why not try striking up a relationship with someone outside of your ‘normal’ range! Try reading about the political policies of the party you don’t support. Listen to someone at work as if you have no preconceived ideas or knowledge about them – just take their words at face value, free from your prejudices about them. It will give you a new depth of understanding and perspective.

And let me know how you get on!

Career Tips for Women # 15

Just occasionally when I’m coaching within a corporate contract,* I come across women unhappy with their career progress but seemingly unwilling to do anything about it. They are waiting for some mythical ‘them‘ to notice how good they are and offer them training, development and a better job!

If you are not progressing as you wish in your job the responsibility rests with you to do something about it. No one cares about it as much as you do, and no one will put as much genuine effort and investment in positive change as you.

Take Advantage

Step one, take a look around your organisation and see what it can offer you. Not everthing is advertised or well known to all staff. For example, if you can’t get funding from an employer to take more professional qualifications, perhaps you can negotiate study leave, or encourage the learning & development department to order the books you need. Ask Personnel/Human Resources what is actually on offer to help staff progress.

Step two, talk to your manager and make sure she/he knows of your aspirations. Ask to be considered for any projects which will help, volunteer to go to meetings representing your area, join professional associations which will help increase both your knowledge and profile, and network appropriately.

Step three, if there isn’t any training or courses being offered which will help you, find out who is offering this training and send the details to your training section or manager. Do the leg work for them; instead of complaining about lack of training you need be positive and proactive.

Take Control

And finally, if what your employer has to offer is not enough, do it yourself. I have met some amazing women through my courses who have funded their own qualification, or worked for free, or attended night school, or saved enough to do a full time course. I know about them because they are always the enthusiastic ones who stay around after the course has finished, extracting every last bit of value from their experience. They are the ones who invest time and effort in themselves and don’t expect anyone else to do it for them!

* ie The women I’m coaching are funded by their workplace. By definition, women who are investing in coaching themselves are the ones taking responsibility for their own development.

PS If you’re not sure what a great job is for you, but know you don’t like what you’re doing now, I have the perfect answer for you! Click here!

Decide Not to Decide!

I was coaching someone recently who was struggling with a difficult decision, hampered by her feelings that she ‘ought‘ to be being more assertive.

“You know”, I said “it is perfectly possible to be assertive and not make a decision. Simply decide you’re not making a decision right now!”

Sometimes we get so caught up in looking at all the pros and cons that we can’t see anything with clarity. While coaching obviously helps provide that focus, sometimes the confusion is there for a good reason; it may just be the wrong time for you to make this decision. So, unless you have a particularly tight deadline, assert your right not make one!

Why I Love MBTI!

I really LOVE the MBTI and I LOVE the effect it has when working with women (It works for men too; but I primarily work with women). M.B.T.I. stands for Myers Briggs Type Indicator and you can find more factual details about it via this link.

Why?

I tend to love it more for what it’s not. A lot of psychological profiling is very judgemental, the MBTI is not. It won’t fill you full of ’should’ and ‘oughts’ or worse give you as sense of inadequacy. It simply helps you understand yourself in greater depth.

When I was doing my post graduate training in social work we were often subjected to (I use the word advisedly) various psychological tests to determine our attitudes, suitability for the role etc. I rarely found these helpful or enlightening. Standard tools and questionnaires work on a right or wrong approach; there is a yardstick by which you are judged, a perfect way to be.

For example, consider assertiveness. If you take an assertiveness questionnaire (and I confess, I do sometimes use one when training to promote discussion and debate) it will assume that there is a degree of assertiveness that is desirable. That will probably be measured at 100% with any score coming at over 80% being good. It can’t take into account the fact that you are totally assertive at work but find it hard to tell your sister in law that you want to stay home next Christmas! And if you feel perfectly comfortable with your assertiveness levels but come in at 65% you may feel a bit of  a failure.

No Pass or Fail

You cannot pass or fail the Myers Briggs Type Indicator. There is no right or wrong, no 100% score to achieve, there is just you. You are always in control. It is one of the most respected profiling tools in the world and one with a very high retest probability. Which in laywomen’s terms means you have a high chance of getting the same answers however many times you take it! (The only exception to this is if it’s taken when young, while our personalities are still developing).

Team Work

Although the M.B.T.I is often used in groups and can be great for helping teams understand each other, I personally will only use it for the first time it in a one to one situation.  I trained at the original MBTI college in the U.S and part of my ethical contract with them is that results are always confidential to the individual. The individual must be given space and time to fully understand and agree with their type before being asked if they are happy to share.

Peer Pressure

In my experience it is not possible to do this in a group situation; the pressure of peers to join in (however subtle and unintentional) can be too great. That said, if all team members are genuinely happy to talk about their result, and genuinely happy with the type they have, it can be a phenomenal tool in promoting understanding!

If you’re interested in discovering more about yourself using the M.B.T.I. either as a one off session or part of a coaching package, please do give me a call on 01761 438749  or email me. I have a great special offer running throughout the Spring!

MBTI, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Myers-Briggs, the MBTI logo and Introduction to Type are registered trademarks of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Trust. Strong Interest Inventory, FIRO-B, SkillsOne, and Davies-Black are registered trademarks and CPI 260, CPI, California Psychological Inventory, the CPP logo, the FIRO-B logo and the CPI 260 logo are trademarks of CPP, Inc.

Personal Development or Training?

 I had a great conversation recently with one of my clients. She had come to me initially for some coaching about advancing her career. I am not specifically a career coach so we talked for some time before committing to anything on either side. And as we talked it became apparent that she knew exactly what she needed to do to get on but the issue was one of confidence and belief in actually doing it!

She had tried various training courses but they didn’t help. Not because they weren’t good training courses; they sounded excellent, but because she wasn’t psychologically in a place to make best use of the information. She didn’t actually need any skills based TRAINING at that point in time, she needed some personal development.

Training

Although people (including me) often use ‘training’ to describe what I do it’s not particularly accurate. When I am running one of my courses I am not offering traditional training, I am offering an opportunity to reflect, grow and develop in a way personal to you.

Key Differences.

If you attend a training course it’s likely to be work oriented, and skills based. You may attend a training course on manual handling, for example. A manual handling course is often mandatory in particular fields- you have to attend and you have to come away with a piece of paper that says you’ve attended and met a required standard. The person teaching the course has a list of competencies or skills to teach you.

Or your firm may have introduced a new computer system and all employees have to understand how it works so have to either enrol on line or undertake a short course, or turn up for some hands on experience and tuition.

What these have in common is everyone is taught exactly the same way, with the same information. Even if you begin with quite a bit of knowledge on manual handling or the computer system you still receive the same input; there are ‘correct’ answers that you have to give at the end of the day. You can benchmark yourself against others and see how well (or otherwise) you are doing compared with others.

Personal Development

When you undertake personal development everything you have ever done is relevant, regardless of your status or age, or educational achievements. No judgements about your abilities are made.

In personal development, be it through a course or coaching, there are no right answers to strive for. Everyone is unique and everyone has a different response. Never compare yourself to anyone else. You don’t pass or fail, you simply develop. And how you develop depends on so many different factors but most of all on the uniqueness of you.

So you could attend a personal development course one year and maybe get something from it but it may not be especially life changing. Yet you could attend that self same course six months later and because of where you are at (figuratively speaking) in your life it totally transforms you.

For example, someone may be on one of my courses at exactly the right moment for them and it really does set them off on a new path. So, when I ask if anyone wants to make a comment, they stand up and proudly announce that this opportunity to evaluate their life means they are now going to give up the day job, learn eye surgery (in Flemish) and explore Timbuktu riding backwards on a donkey!

However, if you are sitting in the same group you may be thinking to yourself:

“Well, this period of reflection has been great. I think I’m going to join the local library and get a book out on being more assertive”

The point is personal development is exactly that, personal. Don’t compare, don’t set yourself impossible goals, simply be honest and allow the thoughts to do what they will. It’s for you, not a test or exam. Neither is right or wrong; you are simply exploring what is right for you at any particular time in your life with someone who is not judging you in any way, but focussed on helping you be the best you can be.

Coaching

Similarly with coaching; sometime clients come to me having been talking with friends and colleagues who have made enormous life changes following coaching. But coaching is another form of personal development- you don’t pass or fail. You get what you need at the time from it and a good coach will help you identify what is right for you. And that’s rarely what worked for someone else. It’s your life - what is important to you is what matters. So never compare yourself with others.

Another difference with personal development or coaching is that it is entirely voluntary. You cannot be ordered to have coaching or go on a personal development course. (Well, I guess you could but it would probably be a worthless experience for you!)

Research

One point that may be of interest; the Springboard Consultancy commissioned some research a few years back looking at the effectiveness of this type of coaching/personal development work. What they discovered was that managers noticed a positive difference in staff who undertook personal development work; they returned more focussed on problem solving than complaining about what was wrong and they coped better with change. And even more interestingly, women who had done some personal development felt that the effects of it went well beyond the actual time they were doing it. In fact, most said they really began to feel the full effects about 12 months afterwards as they began to see the fruits of the changes they had made in their lives.

And Finally

Back to my coaching client from paragraph one! What she actually rang me to tell me was that she now realised she didn’t want to go on in her career but had been swept along by other people’s expectations of her. The opportunity to reflect had allowed her to seriously think about what she wanted from her life and it wasn’t the role she currently had. She wanted to let me know that she had decided upon a different path and was actually setting up her own part time business which sat very happily with her value base and need for some autonomy. She was being true to herself!

A  Coaching Question

A simple question to leave with you to ponder upon:

If you had no fear and you could do one thing to improve the quality of your life as it is right now, what would it be?