It’s Crosswords!

Probably….

Problem Solving

Regular blog readers will know that I love crosswords. My favourite is the Sunday one which is particularly cryptic and takes me most of the week to complete (I say ‘complete’; usually there is one clue that drives me bonkers and I never solve!)

Over time I have got to know the style of the setters and try and tune into it on starting. So some I know will be tilting towards anagrams and others have a bias toward general knowledge for example. So when looking for clues that’s where I start; I’m either looking for anagrams or dredging up my general knowledge.

Stuck with a Problem?

And when I get stuck I put the puzzle down and pick it up the next day when the answer will often be staring me in the face! How could I possibly have missed it the day before?

The truth is of course, that I have been looking at the same problem for too long and got stuck in my self imposed terms of reference. As in:

“This is probably an anagram as the same amount of letters are in the clue as in the grid and this setter loves anagrams.”

When I take a fresh look and (crucially) forget about the anagram thing I seem to leave space in my mind for the answer to appear!

Like life, eh? Sometimes we have a problem that we’re just stuck with no matter how much time we have devoted to solving it. Sometimes we need a fresh pair of eyes to look, either our own or someone else’s. And sometimes we have to let go of our sacred cows, our own internally imposed restrictions and parameters.

Problem Solving Exercise

If you’re problem is a person try to imagine them as someone else. Let go of your preconceived ideas of what you think they are like and try to really LISTEN to them afresh. Imagine you know almost nothing about them. Your ideas of where they are coming from probably means you’re not really hearing them but instead are:

a) thinking of your next riposte

or

b) only hearing the bits that fit your preconceived idea of what and who they are.

Neither is particularly helpful in arriving at a good outcome.

And if your problem is not people focussed, try leaving it for a while and coming back to it. Go for a walk, try doodling, listen to music. Put your focus elsewhere and give your brain a boost and then come back to it and get creative!

If you enjoyed this, take a look at this article from the archives on problem solving. If you’re facing a problem there’s lots of advice on the blog – hope it’s helpful to you!

And if you’ve been thinking about working one to one I have some spaces available very soon! Give me a call on 01761 438749 or use the contact page. I promise you I don’t talk in anagrams!

Photo Credit: Katia Grimmer-Laversanne

The lads were mainly from difficult or deprived backgrounds and regular truants. Violence was a feature of their daily lives. Hardly good prospects for cookery classes! Yet they loved it! And I never had any bother at all (although one boy did think it was really funny to hide in a cupboard and leap out brandishing a cook’s knife just as I was demonstrating how to separate eggs…)

Talking is Good

Teaching someone a new skill, or adding to their skill base, is a great place to talk things through and we had some amazing conversations over sieved flour! Nowadays I suppose it might be called coaching. For the boys it was general chat about life (with some discrete input from me) as we measured, stirred, cooked and created something together.

I took  A level Home Economics at school (does that still exist?) and loved the chat and discussion as much as the cooking. With hindsight probably too much!

And when I was a social worker, working with traumatized children, it was always good to do something practical with them. It’s always easier to talk about ‘difficult’ things when you don’t have to look directly at someone, when you’re engaged in a practical activity, particularly for youngsters.

And now, I still find cooking a good place to gather my thoughts; it’s almost meditative. (Well, until I day dream too much and the pan boils over!)  I often think I should maybe set up a cooking and coaching course!

When do you have some of your best thoughts?

In each case the people concerned were in quite distressed states. I am not qualified as a medic but I have worked in the field of psychiatry and  can usually tell when someone is depressed as opposed to miserable or fed up. I always offer a free session before anyone signs up for coaching (in fact, if I don’t know the individual,  I insist on it as all good coaches do). That session is a two way process. It’s for me to find out what the person is looking to achieve from coaching and for them to check out if my style suits them.

Depression

And just lately I have been speaking to people who are clearly very distressed and looking for a very quick fix. I think this is a sign of the times we’re living in. Sometimes coaching can provide a quick answer but not when, as in these cases, the problems are deep seated. In each case the person has been very vulnerable and I have advised contact with a GP, and recommended action where they don’t need to pay a fee. When they have been insistent that I am just what they need, I have asked them to check out with a doctor and call me in a month’s time if they still think coaching will be helpful.

It’s great when they come back on a more even keel and better prepared to get the most of the coaching experience. And when they don’t, I just hope that they have received appropriate help and no longer need coaching, and have not been taken in by some of the spurious claims made for miracle cures.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t just abandon them; I offer my support and advice as far as I am able but I am very clear that sometimes coaching is not the answer!

If you are considering coaching, there is more on this subject here.

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?

“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!

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!

“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 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.

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 women’s 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 women’s 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 woman’s 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 and make sure I give myself some ‘me’ time.”

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. 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?

Picture Credit: Sigurd Decroos

Here’s a tip I use when coaching to help clients control their worrying:

Coaching Exercise

Allow yourself to develop the worry. Take it to the extreme as in ‘What is the worst possible outcome?’ Simply articulating this can help enormously and if you can visualise yourself dealing with the worst case scenario it will help.

Then imagine what is the best possible outcome?

And finally, looking at all the evidence and information you have, what is the most realistic outcome?

How do you manage life’s wee worries? Do you have a favourite tip to share? I’d love to hear it!