Archive for Coaching

The power of perspective

November 2, 2008 / / No comments

In Cultivating Strength (see http://www.creativeleadercoach.com/2008/10/10/cultivating-strength/ ), we discussed how speaking our truth and postive thoughts and words literally make us stronger. In this post, we will talk a bit about a way of understanding the world, so that we can more easily see why this might be true.

The science of psychoneuroimmunology, which studies the intimate relationship of our minds and bodies, shows us that our subjective states have physical correlates. And other posts in this blog have discussed how our perspectives, thoughts and feelings help shape our social, and ultimately environmental realities, in both gross and subtle ways.

This is common sense: We know, for example, that stress can physically damage our bodies, and we usually easily notice when a person is joyful, anxious, loving, or angry. And, of course, our actions arise from the complex interrelationships of our thoughts and feelings.

Yet, culturally, we are generally taught (when we are taught such things), that mind and body are two entirely different spheres. In philosophical terms, this is called mind-body dualism. However, another, altogether different view has arisen from both our common sense experience and new sciences, such as psychoneuroimmunology. The psycho-social or process view observes that subjective and objective states might be thought of as two sides of the same coin. For this reason, the term “body-mind” is increasingly frequently used to refer to ourselves as unified beings, having both subjective and objective dimensions.

Cultivating Strength described how negative thoughts and feelings can weaken us. We know that unmanaged stress can have negative consequences for our physical, mental, emotional, social, financial .. health, and depending on our actions, for the health of the environment. Thankfully! conversely, postive thoughts and emotions can be healing. (For example, see professor Norman Cousins’ Anatomy of an Illness).

Our perspectives, which guide our perceptions, and hence thoughts and emotions are extraordinarily powerful with respect to the physical, social and environmental realities that we co-create. Yet, because our perspectives, or the way we view things, tend to be implicit — both in a physical and psychological sense prior to our actual thoughts — we are often not consciously aware of them and how they are creating our circumstances.

Therefore, it’s useful to exhume?! our perspectives to better understand how they are shaping our lives, and to decide whether we want to keep them as is, or whether other perspectives might help us create the kinds of lives (and organizations) we want.

To be continued!

Category: All Posts, Change, Coaching, Leadership, Philosophy, Science /

Cultivating strength

October 10, 2008 / / One comment

Especially given the turmoil in the markets in recent days, it seems to be good timing to return to the subject of how we can leap off the “hamster wheel of fear” — a self-perpetuating negative cycle — and onto our wheel of creative freedom.  Recently, I had the privilege to watch a presentation by certified hypnotherapist, Monica Justus, CHt.  Ms. Justus invited a volunteer from the audience, a local business owner with a technical background whom I would consider a skeptical person, and demonstrated the effect of thoughts and words on our physical and mental strength.

For the demonstration, she asked him to extend his arm straight out to the side, which he did. She then asked him his name, which he answered truthfully. She pressed down strongly on his extended arm, but it remained strong and in place, demonstrating strength. She then asked him to respond to the question in a way that was not true.  Strikingly, his arm weakened, and she was easily able to push it down.  I’ve since used this demonstration in a training situation — it works.

It appears that when we speak our truth, we are, in fact, stronger.

Ms. Justus went on to test the effect of positive and negative words and concepts. The words “love” and “peace” tested “strong.” The word “war” caused his arm to go weak.

We spend most of our days thinking and communicating with others. What is the quality of our thoughts? Do we think self-defeating and fearful thoughts that weaken us, or do we look for the positive in ourselves and our situation? Do we see problems or opportunities? 

And, are we living and speaking our truth or supressing our true thoughts out of fear?  (On this note, I don’t advocate reckless, controlling, or inconsiderate speech. However, if your situation does not safely permit you to express your perspective, it may be worthwhile to consider how you might alter your situation).

Choosing what makes us stronger, including our truth, and a constructive perspective is a key to shifting off the wheel of fear, and onto our wheel of creative freedom.  More on this later!

Category: All Posts, Coaching, Collaboration, Communication, Creativity, Culture, Leadership, Partnership, Vision /

Creating a virtuous cycle (recap so far)

July 18, 2008 / / No comments

Because our conversation on vicious and virtuous cycles is multi-part and spread out over time, I thought it might be helpful to briefly recap the previous discussion and look ahead.

Earlier we talked about the downward spiral that master coach Rhonda Britten calls the “wheel of fear,” a vicious cycle in which our fears prompt us to perceive particular aspects of reality and take actions that ultimately perpetuate our fear. We also considered how our personal wheels of fear can shape our leadership philosophies and organizations in ways that  can create the problems we seek to overcome.   

I also promised to talk about the antidote — a strategy for “leaping off” the hamster wheel of fear in order to begin to create a virtuous cycle, which Britten calls the “wheel of freedom” in which we recognize and leverage strengths, and invoke and develop potentials — of both ourselves and others.

This topic is particularly relevant for down economic times: Because these times tend to trigger stress and because our reaction to stress can either help or make conditions worse, it is useful to understand the dynamics of both kinds of cycles and how to shift from a negative cycle to a positive one.

To get off the wheel of fear, we need to take action which is “counter-intuitive.” Towards that end, we are considering some principles that we can use in our “wheel of creative freedom” towards 1) creating the conditions that best support our visions, and 2) optimally engaging the conditions we experience.

The first principle we are exploring is “perception creates reality”: our perspective tends to shape the psychological and social realities that confirm our perspectives. Towards this end, we considered how our perspectives with respect to Theory X and Theory tend to generate different kinds of organizations and dynamics (which endorse those theories), and how the beliefs that we hold about ourselves and others can either nurture or suppress and diminish the potentials of ourselves and others.

Coming up, we’ll be continuing to explore the power of perception and belief, and for those who like to understand things before they experiment, how and why that works…

Category: All Posts, Change, Coaching, Leadership, Organization /

How perception creates reality

June 27, 2008 / / No comments

In my last post, I described how our perspective can shape the very conditions that reinforce our perspective; in this sense, we tend to create our realities. In that post, I used the example of how my fear of being unsafe on cliffy moutain roads actually caused me to become a more unsafe driver; the more afraid I was, the less safe I became. Becoming a safer driver did not involve forgetting that the lanes were narrow and that the drop off steep; on the contrary, being aware of these conditions rationally constrained my driving. For example, I didn’t speed or try to pass. However, by keeping my focus on what I wanted rather than I didn’t want, I materially improved the odds of my achieving my objective.

This is also true in a more subtle sense. For example, earlier we discussed organizations based on Theory X.  Theory X assumes that people don’t really want to work, and that the manager’s job is (essentially) to create the “unnatural” conditions under which “workers” will be productive. Organizations based on on this philosophy rely on supervision and control, rewards and punishments to stimulate productivity. Motivation is driven from the outside, which is another way of expressing the idea of “control.”

Operating within this perspective, it would never occur to us to “enrich” the work environment to make it more intrinsically satisfying, because the possibility that people *may be* self-motivated and want to contribute will not have occurred to us; in fact, that possibility would be eclipsed by our belief that people are inherently lazy.

Not surprisingly, as leadership coach Robert Hargrove (1995) points out, organizations with this perspective, create the very conditions that discourage employee enrollment, and generate passivity (endorsing the assumptions of Theory X).

Now imagine that things aren’t working very well — which given that current conditions require organizations to become more creative, proactive and adaptive, would likely be true for this kind of organization. Given these beliefs, the most likely response of a leadership team influenced by Theory X thinking would be to tighten controls. This would *tend* to further decrease commitment and increase passive compliance — a classic organizational wheel of fear.

In my next post, we will consider the very interesting example of the power of our perceptions in shaping both ourselves and the self-perceptions of others. This can be very subtle, yet it shapes personal, family, community, organizational, national and world histories.  Then, in subsequent posts, we’ll begin to apply these insights to our wheel of freedom and creativity.

Hargrove, Robert. Masterful Coaching: Extraordinary Results by Impacting People and the Way They Think and Work Together. San Francisco: Pfeiffer, 1995.

Category: All Posts, Change, Coaching, Creativity, Culture, Leadership, Organization, Partnership /

Leaping off the hamster wheel of fear

June 15, 2008 / / No comments

For many of us, the “wheel of fear” (see: http://www.creativeleadercoach.com/2008/05/30/getting-off-your-wheel-fear/ ) is like a hamster wheel.  The path is well defined; we put one foot in front of the other and … find ourselves somehow back where we started.  So, how do we get off?

As Anthony Robbins observes, “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.” And we behave in habitual ways because it makes sense and feels natural to us. Therefore, getting off the wheel involves doing something counter-intuitive and learning to see things differently.

The process is more than intellectual; it’s not about learning a new model. It literally involves a shift in perspective and experience, that involves our intellectual, bodily, emotional and spiritual selves.

This process can be mind-bending, but the payoff is big — you experience a new sense of freedom and possibility: playing with perspective brings us to a highly creative space.

To jump off the “wheel of fear” and onto our “wheel of freedom” (Britten 2001), we can begin either with shifting our perspective or shifting our behavior. We can see why this is so, by considering the “wheel of being” below.

Wheel of Being 

Where you might begin depends on your orientation. If you prefer to understand something before experimenting with it,  you would likely choose to begin with Perspective. If you are more empirical, you might experiment with a new behavior, and see where that leads…

We’ll continue in my next post!

Britten, Rhonda. (2001). Fearless Living. NY: Penguin.

Category: All Posts, Change, Coaching, Creativity, Leadership /

How does your “wheel of fear” shape your leadership strategies in times of stress?

June 6, 2008 / / No comments

In my last post, we talked about our personal “wheel of fear” – how it works, and how to develop awareness of our wheel of fear as a first step in getting off of it.  Organizations, too, have their “Wheels of Fear.” One might be: We are experiencing intense competition that threatens our survival. Therefore, everyone needs to work harder and longer. People who aren’t enrolled should not be in this organization. Sound familiar?

But suppose this reaction actually represses the changes that are needed in order to successfully adapt to the new conditions? For example, what if successful adaptation actually required people to become more thoughtful and creative?

For this reason, it can be very useful to develop an awareness of you own reaction or response to stress, and how this shapes your leadership strategies in difficult times. I invite you to the following experiment:

  1. If you have not already identified your wheel of fear, I invite you to do so. The series of questions that coach Rhonda Britten uses can be found in the post: http://www.creativeleadercoach.com/2008/05/30/getting-off-your-wheel-fear/   (If you are interested in learning more about this model, you can find more information on Britten’s book, Fearless Living: Live Without Excuses and Love Without Regret, in Recommended Reading).
  2. After you become aware of your own patterns, it might be interesting to consider: how does your personal wheel of fear affect your leadership strategies in times of stress? 

I invite you to share your experience!

Category: All Posts, Coaching, Creativity, Leadership /

Getting off your “wheel fear”

May 30, 2008 / / 2 comments

Think for a moment about something that scares you (not too much!). Now suppose you had the confidence that you could absolutely handle that situation. What happened to the fear?

In this sense, we might notice that our fears of external events and people, reflect our fears about our own abilities to adequately respond to challenging situations. 

Coach and author Rhonda Britten (2001) describes a “Wheel of Fear” in which we hold a perspective of a situation as being threatening and take habitual, reflexive actions that, in the end, create or perpetuate the very conditions that threaten us. For example, Britten writes about a woman whose deepest fear is “being incompetent.” This woman is attuned to any cues in her environment that might suggest that people have doubts about her, and feeling the fear, her reaction is to take on additional commitments that she can’t meet, leading to more fear and more projects! This cycle actually creates the incompetence it fears, and needs to be broken.

We will discuss a variety of good coaching strategies for breaking this cycle. The formula Britten suggests involves developing an awareness of our deepest fears about ourselves and the strategies we use to avoid them. Usually, these fears and responses (and the beliefs behind them) were established when we are very young. Becoming aware of them as adults, tends in itself to help create a positive shift in perspective: 

1. Identify your fear/trigger: “If someone I love, respect, or admire thought I were __________, I would be devastated.

2. Identify your core negative feeling: “If the people I care about thought I was (the trigger you identified…) _________, I would feel as though I were ________.”

3. Identify what you do reactively to avoid that feeling: “When I want to avoid having people think I’m ___(trigger), I react by ______________. ”

4. The wheel: When this doesn’t work and I end up feeling ______(core negative feeling), then I ____________. (Britten, 2001, pp. 48-56)

As Britten points out, this is also the cycle of addiction, including workaholism.

I invite you to give this a try, and let me know your experience.  

References

Britton, Rhonda. (2001). Fearless Living. NY: Penguin.

Category: All Posts, Coaching, Leadership /

Is our need for control inhibiting needed change?

May 16, 2008 / / One comment

“After so many years of defending ourselves against life and searching for better controls, we sit exhausted in the unyielding structures of organization we’ve created, wondering what happened. What happened to effectiveness, to creativity, to meaning? What happened to us? Trying to get these structures to change becomes the challenge of our lives. We draw their futures and design them into clearly better forms. We push them, we prod them. We try fear, we try enticement. We collect tools, we study techniques. We use everything we know and end up nowhere. What happened?  

Yet it is only our worldview that dooms us to this incompetence. This world that we seek to control so carefully is a world we have created. We created it by what we chose to notice, by the images we used to describe what we were seeing. It was we who decided that the world was a great machine propelled by external energies. It was we who perceived the creativity of life as a dire threat. We saw life in motion and called it uncontrollable. We saw life’s unceasing desires for discovery-we say the dance-and called it disruptive..

Yet out beyond the shadows of our old thinking, a wholly different world appears. […] A world that welcomes and supports our endeavors. The world knows how to grow and change. It has been doing so for billions of years. Life knows how to create systems. Life knows how to create greater capacity. Life knows how to discover meaning. The motions that we sought to wrestle from life’s control are available to us to support our desires if we can stop being so afraid.”  (Wheatley & Kellner-Rogers, 1996)

Our organizations arise out of our perspectives, which give rise to our deepest psychological beliefs and values.  Wheatley and Kellner-Rogers insightfully observe that the impulse to control arises from fear and distrust (ultimately, of the world and other people). Yet, by now it’s generally become clear that centralized, bureaucratic organizations (whether they be businesses or governments) are unable to respond rapidly enough to changing conditions.

It seems to be human nature that, the more fearful we are, the tighter we hold the reins of control, and the more resistant we will be to change. Yet, if environmental conditions have truly changed, change may be what we most need to survive.

How do we break out of this vicious cycle? Wheatley & Kellner-Rogers describe a perspective of trust.  Is that “realistic”?

In the next post, we will look at this organizational “wheel of fear” and some strategies for replacing it with an organizational “wheel of freedom” (Britton, 2001).

Britton, Rhonda. (2001). Fearless Living. NY: Penguin.

Category: All Posts, Change, Coaching, Culture, Leadership, Organization, Trust /

Organization as Organism & Machine

May 9, 2008 / / 15 comments

In my last post we backed our way into a discussion of an emerging way of thinking about leadership and organization: the metaphor of the organization as an organsim. 

 http://www.creativeleadercoach.com/2008/05/01/the-brain-as-a-metaphor-for-organization/

As we talked about earlier, metaphors are maps of the terrain that can yield some useful insights, so we don’t need to hold on to them too tightly (as an ideology). Rather, when considering a metaphor we might ask two questions:

  1. Does it have some basis in reality?
  2. Is it useful?

Whereas the organization as a machine metaphor can be seen to have arisen out of Newtonian physics (the view of the Cosmos as machine) and the industrial revolution, the metaphor of the organization as an organism has its recent roots in new physics and biology, and the framework of systems theory, which observes that the whole has emergent properties that can’t be fully explained by examining each of the parts. Rather these properties emerge as a result of the relationship and interaction of the parts. 

I’ll apologize in advance for this: A useful but gorey example that is often given is that you sacrifice an animal and examine each of its parts, you won’t find life; life is an emergent property of the whole animal.  The same could be said of  a well-functioning team: a quality emerges in the interaction that only exists in potential in the individual team members.

 Seeing relationships vs. parts requires us to shift our vision. Are you familiar with the famous cognitive optical illusion: the figure-ground vase? http://www.123opticalillusions.com/pages/Facevase.php

The image can be validly interpreted as two faces or as a vase. The one we see is the result of a mental interpretation, which may or may not be conscious. Once we’ve seen one view, it can be a challenge to see the other, because our current perspective is so obvious to us!  Yet, if we look for the other figure, as described by others (or the text), we can see that as well.  

And so it is with our metaphors of organization (and the cosmos). We might see the parts or we might see the relationships/interactions of the parts and the structures formed by those interactions.  As Westerners, our cultural history has attuned us to see the parts very well. However, most of us have not been trained to “see” the tangible reality of the qualities that emerge in relationship and how these materially influence what emerges as the whole.

Coming back to our earlier post on the brain analogy for organizations … Scientist Fritjof Capra (1988) observes that biological organisms often have some machine-like qualities (Turning Point, p. 266).  Our knowledge of these qualities has empowered the accomplishments of modern medicine. And, it is also true that biological organisms (and as it turns out, social organizations) also have emerging systemic properties. To “see” how relationships give rise to these properties, we need to shift our field of vision to look at relationships and patterns of relationship.  (This is where Riane Eisler’s concept of Partnership can be seen to be very relevant to leadership and organizational development).

This is just one example of how a shift in perspective can be extremely powerful in opening up a whole new set of tools and possibilities. And that is what coaching is all about…

Category: All Posts, Coaching, Collaboration, Communication, Culture, Leadership, Organization, Partnership, Philosophy, Science, Teams /

The brain as a metaphor for organization

May 1, 2008 / / One comment

In Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World, Margaret Wheatley discusses the metaphor of the organization as self-organizing system.  From a biological perspective, we can see that successful systems dynamically both help shape and adapt to changing environmental conditions: the successful organization and environment evolve together.  Conversely, the unsuccessful organization might be seen as one that does not respond quickly enough to changing conditions in a way that promotes both its own flourishing and the flourishing of the larger environment.   

Waldrup’s article (see link below) might be seen as complementary to these ideas, in that, using the human brain as an example, it shows how successful complex systems can include specialization and executive functions. Although this article doesn’t mention this topic, it is also potentially instructive to note that the more researchers study the brain, the more “plastic” they are finding it to be, with respect to developing new capacities and connections. 

http://radio.weblogs.com/0107127/stories/2003/03/09/mitchWaldrupTheBrainAsAMetaphorForOrganization.html

One of the reasons that I am personally excited about coaching is that it is an excellent method for creating these new connections at both the individual and organizational levels. 

Category: All Posts, Coaching, Communication, Leadership, Organization, Science, Vision /
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