What are you doing right now?

I read a story about a life coach, who recorded this message on his answering machine: “Please tell me who you are and what you want; if you think those are trivial questions, consider that 95% of the population goes through life and never answers either one!” It’s an entertaining story and it reminds me that seemingly trivial questions are often the most effective. I often joke with groups that my primary role on a workshop is to ask all the really obvious and “stupid” questions and recently I started to ask myself the obvious question – when it comes to my chosen career, what am I trying to do?

Having thought about it quite deeply, I think there are three answers to that question. The first – and most superficial – is that I’m trying to train people on various topics. That’s fine but training someone is never an outcome: the purpose of training, after all, is not knowledge but action. The second answer is that I’m trying to help people or make their lives easier in some way. That’s a key value for me; I know that the times in my life when I’ve been most dissatisfied with my work are those times when I don’t feel like I’m helping anyone. But, laudable as it may be, it still doesn’t quite answer the question.

For me, the answer is that I’m trying to create three things in delegates. Awareness: you cannot make any changes – or even decide not to make any changes – if you are unaware of what you’re doing now and/or unaware of the alternatives. Secondly, choice: whatever we do, whatever our situation, we are all volunteers. We do what we do because we choose to do it – even when it comes to something as fundamental as living. We continue to live because we have not chosen the alternative. Thirdly, consequence: whatever we do, whatever actions we take or do not take, there are consequences that flow from it. Those consequences may be obvious and what you intend or they may be unintended and come as a complete surprise.

I’ve presented those three things – awareness, choice and consequences – as sequential but they are inextricably linked. For instance, understanding as much as possible about consequences makes for better-informed choices. The one thing that I’m not trying to do in my workshops is convince or persuade you that what I’m saying is right. Persuasion leads, inevitably, to competition and conflict and that doesn’t help me achieve my objectives. I believe a little scepticism is a vital and healthy ingredient in a delegate and I encourage it. You don’t have to believe what I say just because I say it – I encourage you to try for yourself.

As you go through life this week, stop periodically and ask yourself what it is you’re trying to do – and what you’re not trying to do: you may be surprised by the answer.

Pig whistling

I’ve been working with some groups recently on a personal impact workshop. It’s been a fun experience and they’ve been good groups, open and ready to take on all the stuff we threw at them. On one of the workshops I encountered a delegate who was newly promoted into quite a senior role. As a facilitator, you begin to get a bit of a sixth sense about delegates; the quality of some just strikes you and this was one of those cases. She was bright, articulate and smart – the fact that she’d just been promoted into a big role clearly spoke volumes about her abilities and her organisation clearly had confidence in her. The one thing she lacked was confidence in herself.

She was role-playing, with an actor, a scenario involving her manager: she wanted his support (by which she meant his reassurance that she was doing a good job) but he wasn’t giving it. It wasn’t that he was a bad person or unsupportive – he’d recommended her for the promotion, after all – but he was totally unable to understand or deal with the emotional needs she was describing. The other people in the group, watching her role-play, suggested that she shock her manager in some way, to force him to change his approach and give her the support she needed – the most common suggestion was for her to burst into tears. I know they were motivated by good intentions but I couldn’t help saying I thought that was a bad idea.

I was reminded of an old saying: never try to teach a pig to whistle – it never works and it annoys the pig. The fact is there was nothing particularly wrong with the manager. Of course, perhaps she – and I – might prefer it if he was a little more in tune with the emotional needs of his staff but as he was in his mid-fifties, that was unlikely to change and wasn’t the problem, anyway. The problem was that she had perfectly reasonable needs which she insisted that he meet, despite his obvious inability to do so.

My advice to her was to use her manager for the things he was good at – his technical expertise and his practical guidance on the job she was being expected to do – and to stop banging her head against a wall, expecting him to do something he was clearly incapable of doing. Better, instead, for her to focus on getting those emotional needs met elsewhere – perhaps through a coach or a mentor.

It sounds like I’m blaming her and letting her manager “off the hook” in some way but I’m not. We deal with the world as it is, not as we would like it to be; sometimes people don’t do what we want or don’t give us what we want. No one can change another person any more than someone else can change us – they have to want to change and sometimes they don’t want to or feel they can’t. In that case, as Victor Frankl wrote, when we cannot change our circumstances, we are forced to change ourselves.

Confidence tricks

I’ve talked in the past about the importance of asking yourself those simple – but crucial – questions and when it come to workshops, one of the questions I like to encourage delegates to ask themselves is “what do I want?” I’m not surprised that the most common answer is that, almost regardless of the topic of the workshop, delegates want more confidence. It seems like a reasonable request: who couldn’t use a little more confidence? Who wouldn’t find their life enhanced if they had more confidence? Who wouldn’t live the life they wanted if they had more confidence? But what is confidence and where does it come from?

The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms, so let’s look at how confidence is defined in the dictionary: “belief in own abilities; self assurance or a belief in your ability to succeed”. The thing that strikes me about that definition is that it contains the word “belief” twice, so we can be relatively confident that confidence is a belief although we usually take it to be a feeling. This is important; we can create our own beliefs and change them when we need to.

The second thing to bear in mind about confidence is that we often get it the wrong way round. How many times have you said to yourself; if I had more confidence, I would… (insert dream/task/objective here)? But where does a belief in our own abilities come from? Is it going to arise, magically, before we attempt the things we want to do or does it arise afterwards, from reflection and hindsight, from learning from experience?

I knew someone once who was adamant that people don’t change but she’s wrong because it’s a fundamental part of being human – the ability to take action, experience the consequences, learn from them and behave differently in future. That’s where confidence comes from – reflecting back on our experiences and learning from them that we are able to succeed; because either we did succeed or because, having failed in the past, we have learned what it takes to succeed.

It’s also important to remember that having confidence doesn’t mean not feeling scared or apprehensive or worried: I’m not pretending that confidence is easy. I would love to have some magical injection or form of words that would give anyone more confidence but the truth is that confidence arises from inside, from our experiences. From grasping the nettle and taking chances; from risking failure and achieving success; from daring and reflecting. Confidence is a result, an outcome of a task or an experience, not a tool to tackle the task in the first place.

Consequences

There are times when you want to do what my American chums call “the headslap” and I recently encountered one of those times. I was working with a manager who was having problems with a contractor who was producing poor work, missing deadlines and so on. She told me that, despite talking to the contractor about it, the problems continued and it was causing her a lot of extra work, irritation and inconvenience.

We talked for a while and she told me the only sanction she had was to withhold the contractor’s payment but she didn’t want to do that because (a) she thought it wasn’t very nice and (b) it was a hassle for her to fill in the paperwork. In other words, the situation was causing her some inconvenience but she didn’t want to do anything to correct it because it would cause her some inconvenience. Hence the headslap.

It started me wondering, though: how often do we complain about situations that are, fundamentally, of our own making? I wrote previously about Irene – that situation was as much a creation of the managers who didn’t want to grasp the situation as it was of Irene’s making. I’m not saying that any manager should like or enjoy confrontation but it is a fact that sometimes we have to confront issues that aren’t going well or situations that aren’t working. What I tried to explain to this manager was that confronting the issue wasn’t being “nasty” but was the only way the situation was going to change.

We make decisions in the light of the consequences of those decisions. In this case, for the contractor, until this point there had been no consequences: he could continue to hand shoddy work in late and she would fix it for him. The only price he might have to pay was the occasional meeting where she complained a bit but even that was mild. There was just no incentive for him to change. For Irene, there was no real consequence to taking all that time off – she just got passed on to another manager.

I suspect that, for this manager, it was easier to complain than it was to fix – for her, the consequences of inaction weren’t sufficient motivation to do anything about it. Although I would choose differently, I respect her decision. I’m not advocating the old-fashioned “carrot and stick” approach to motivation or suggesting that the way to get people to do something is to threaten them, but it is vital that people understand the consequences of their current behaviour in order to make a decision to change. That’s not being nasty – it’s just common sense.

You can't always get what you want

After my last post, an astute reader kindly pointed out that it required assertiveness in order to work on one thing at a time. That got me thinking about what assertiveness is and how you do it.

There are degrees of assertiveness beginning, obviously, with a basic assertion of what you want:

I need to leave at 5:30 this evening.

This feels a little bald, so we can be a little more empathic:

I understand that you’re really busy and would like my help but I do need to leave by 5:30 this evening.

Sometimes, we need to be assertive because people try to break previous agreements; if that’s the case, you can point this out:

You said that if I finished the Johnson report by lunchtime, I could leave early. Now you’re saying that you need me to work late. I’d like to stick with our original agreement as I do need to leave at 5:30 this evening.

Alternatively, you can try to provoke some empathy from the person you’re speaking to, by describing the negative feelings that you will feel if they continue:

When you change your mind after we’ve agreed something, I feel upset and angry. I’d like us to stick with our earlier agreement as I need to leave by 5:30 this evening.

Finally, you can include the consequences of the other person continuing to behave the way they are:

If you insist on making me work past 5:30 this evening, I’ll be so angry it’s unlikely that I’ll get any work done and it’ll harm the good working relationship that we normally have. I’d like us to keep to our earlier agreement as I do need to leave by 5:30 this evening.

Notice that the central assertion of your needs – in this case “I need to leave by 5:30 this evening” – remains unchanged and is repeated each time; this is known as the “broken record” technique.

You can practice these different types of statement until you’re comfortable with the words but when it comes to assertiveness, what comes out of your mouth is less important than what goes on in your head. The American Declaration of Independence declares that the “pursuit of happiness” is an “unalienable right” and the language is very significant here. The Declaration doesn’t say that anyone has the right to happiness – just the right to pursue it and it’s the same with assertiveness.

As hard as it is to accept sometimes, no-one has the right to get whatever they want – but we do all have the right to ask for whatever we want. Truly believing this is the first step to being assertive.