Tag: self-awareness

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Leaning to Action

Nuttin’ Like the First Cuppa Tay

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Towards the latter years of her life, my great-grandmother lived with my grandmother in Cork City, Ireland. I remember as a young boy that she had a saying: “Dere’s nuttin’ like da first cuppa’ tay!” (Translation: “There’s nothing like the first cup of tea.”) And so, using her Irish logic, she chose a huge mug with which to enjoy that first tea in the morning… and so made it last longer.

I was reminded of my great-grandmother’s habit when I came across a study into what urges us to keep going. Apparently, researchers noticed that it is largely negative factors. In a paper in The Review of General Psychology, these researchers argue that bad inputs have a more powerful impact on us that good ones.

From this study, behavioural psychologist, Nir Eyal, in his book Indistractable, summarises four psychological factors that make our satisfaction temporary. These might answer the question: Why is there nothing like the first cup of tea in the morning?

These are:

  1. Boredom. We repeat something often enough and it becomes more tedious with each repetition. It spurs us to experiment. (Hat tip to Taylor Swift and her song, “Shake it Up”!)
  2. Negativity Bias, where our natural alertness to the down-sides help us seek safer, surer, easier alternatives. Fear can change what we do, but only temporarily
  3. Rumination, where we dwell on past negative events and outcomes. We can replay them in our minds over and over again. So, we seek a better outcome this time, and
  4. Hedonic Adaptation, the experience we all have that a pleasurable experience first time is less so as it is repeated. Like that first cup of tea, it wanes in pleasure with later cups. So, we return to the wisdom of Taylor Swift.

—

However, “Enough of the dark side,” I say.

I believe there are positive equivalents to these four that can maintain, even increase, our satisfaction and maybe even help motivate us to improve as well.

  • Instead of boredom, we can excite a sense of curiosity. For example, before reading any new book now, I write down three questions I want the author to answer. This helps me focus as I read, and it respects the way the human brain works, which seeks to close open loops (questions). Rather than starting a book with vague hopes, like “Impress me,” or “Entertain me,” I read hunting for clues. I give my mind permission to be curious.
  • Instead of giving in to a default negativity bias, I cultivate gratitude. In my daily journal, I hunt for three things for which I am grateful and explain to myself why I am thankful for them. As well as raising my level of emotional contentment—as it invariably does—this helps me in the present moment to contribute to tomorrow’s gratitude statements, such as while I am writing this article, for example. This too helps spur me on.
  • Instead of negative rumination, I practice what Cal Newport describes in Deep Work as savouring: allowing myself to remember and dwell upon a happy event or sensation. Such meditation spurs me to take actions such as put aside some cash for my family celebrations and holidays. I do this, because savouring helps me realise the bliss of those experiences with my loved ones.
  • And rather than giving in to hedonic adaptation, I take joy in the familiar, in the present moment. I encourage myself to laugh with family and friends. Joy rises in me when I am walking outdoors. And we all need to laugh more. Children get it. We adults have forgotten to laugh.
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So, maybe our defaults are negative, but we can exercise agency, by choosing consciously positive practices. These may need us to be a little more intentional, but these routines can help us sustain, or even increase, our levels of satisfaction , our physical and mental health, and motivate us to live fuller, richer lives.

So, if you identify with a lifestyle of boredom, negativity and fear, dwelling on past hurts and failures, and finding the familiar now somewhat less than exciting, you don’t have to buy a huge mug; just be more Taylor Swift!

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Positive Outliers Self-Awareness

Our Mental Scripts

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A dangerously underweight fifteen-year-old girl looks into the mirror and sees herself as disgustingly fat. 

Such extreme conditions as anorexia nervosa are shocking in their effects upon people. However, could we all have milder distorting self-beliefs about ourselves, perhaps? 

How about this: We walk into a room and believe everyone is looking at us critically? Or, we believe that we are not creative. The reality may be otherwise. The mirror doesn’t lie, but our perceptions might be.

Most of us carry distorting self-beliefs.
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As we grow in self-awareness, we become aware of our internal mental narratives. These are mental scripts or thought habits. Now, some of these scripts serve us very well; they are empowering. Some scripts, though, undermine us. Some of our scripts are about who we indeed are, and some are lies that we have come to believe about ourselves. Such internal lies limit us; they prevent us from being the best we can be.

Truths about ourselves

So, how do we know the truth about who we truly are? There can be many sources:

  •   What we believe about ourselves in the context of our spiritual faith
  •   An objective record of our achievements, as perhaps we might summarise in our CV or resumé
  •   The people we serve and how they express their value in us (for example, returning to “buy” from us)
  •   The evidence we have in how people speak about us and act towards us.

Of course, we have to sift the truth from the lies carefully. For example, what people may say to us may be pure flattery, which is self-serving deceit. Some can be a criticism of us from ignorance or prejudice. Healthy close relationships can speak truth into us, that we come to believe. Equally, abusive, manipulative relationships close to us can have a very distorting self-image.

Healthy close relationships can speak truth into us.
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So we need to have a care how we receive the evidence, and what we genuinely buy into as truth about ourselves.

Writing down our scripts

One route to sifting the truth from the lies in this sensitive and complicated area is to write them down. When we write something down, it objectifies that script. It enables us to assess these statements with greater clarity and distance. Ultimately, we can resolve these statements into two lists:

  •  Positive, affirming truths about us, that are constructive, if sometimes challenging
  •  Negative beliefs that could remove any hope of our ever learning and improving

These two lists can grow as we grow. We discover more about ourselves as we step into new situations of challenge and develop our skills.

Speak it out loud

So what we can do with the positive truths is to declare them over ourselves. For example, we can say – out loud – something like: I am very competent in leading one-to-one appraisals. So, if we encounter a new, difficult relationship with a new team member, we can back up our positive declaration to ourselves from past evidence.

Speaking these truths out loud privately is very powerful. Purely mental assent does not seem to go as deep into our self-belief as if we speak it out loud. There is some evidence that as the mind hears us speaking, it begins to adjust its frames, its mindsets, to align with what we have spoken.

Asserting positive truths about ourselves – out loud – can be very powerful.
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So, I invite you to declare positive statements about yourself over yourself in a private place. Then notice the effect it has on your confidence, the you that you bring to your different work situations.

The negative scripts we have about ourselves

For most people in challenging leadership roles, this list can be quite long. List everything out anyway. We find that some things happen as we do this:

  • A negative statement or lie about us begins to atrophy as we write it down. It starts to look ridiculous. Good! It should do. Most of us harbour nonsensical negative beliefs about ourselves. Often, as these lies are allowed to persist, they then limit our performance. They are embarrassing. They are faint lies that unspoken in the back of our heads. So the best deterrent for these is to expose them to plain view. They shrivel with full-on scrutiny.
  • We discover more lies as we write them down. This experience can dismay us at first. There seems to be a multitude of them. Persevere. Let them come. Write these little devils down. Expose each one for the fraud it is. We can say something like, “Bring it on.” We can let these lies lay themselves out on our list. Exhaust them. We can then say, “Is that all you’ve got?”
  • We may well discover some rather more painful, deep-rooted negatives. These can seem too painful even to write down at first. We know where they come from. We refuse to be ashamed. We may need professional counselling to help us articulate these. There is no shame in seeking this kind of help either. Making such an appointment is courageous, and we are hunting down these most potent harmful scripts. We remember that these negatives survive by living in the dark, in our liminal consciousness. A good counsellor or therapist can help us learn to destroy them. They help us find healing and freedom from these distortions by walking that journey into the spotlight with us.

Laughing at the lies

So, what do we do with this grim list of negatives?

We weaken distorted lies about ourselves by laughing at them.
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Laugh at them. The lies are not us. We can laugh at them. Often they grip us because we have taken them so seriously. If we can find the opposite truth on our other list, we can laugh knowing the truth about us is otherwise. Again, do this out loud in a safe place.

Some common objections

  • Who’s to say which are lies and which are true?
    Well, we need to go back to those external sources we trust: what people have written about us, the trust others have placed in us, the belief system to which we adhere.
    In this relativist age, we have been sold short. We have been told that whatever is true for us is the truth. There comes a point where we need to take account of external sources; this is faith.
  • Is this such a big deal? Do we really need to do all this writing and speaking and laughing out loud stuff?
    Let me ask you this: Who is the you that you bring to places where there is danger or threat? As a leader, you need to bring your best you, your best identity, to those situations. Others that you lead deserve that from you. We all deserve you to bring your best self to the world.

As always, let me know in the comments below if you do this. Let me know if you try this for the first time, and what your experience was.

Photo by Ivan Karasev on Unsplash

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Leaning to Action Positive Outliers Self-Awareness

Learning from Failure

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I had an experience this summer from which I didn’t emerge very well. Or did I? You be the judge.

I was shopping for summer shoes. So I found a pair I liked in an M&S outlet. So I took these shoes to a stool to try them on. The right shoe did fit me quite well. “This looks promising,” I thought.

Then I tried to put on the left shoe. I struggled. I struggled some more. Putting this shoe on was proving to be harder than I had expected. 

The sort of narrative that was running through my head went something like this: “Maybe this pair isn’t for me. Maybe my left foot is slightly larger than the other; it happens. But why haven’t I been aware of it before? Maybe I should abandon buying this style of shoe.”

Then it occurred to me to check the soles for the shoe sizes.

Yep! Sure enough, I’d picked up a size smaller for the left shoe.

Embarrassing!

I could have berated myself for being stupid, or a useless shopper. Instead, I decided to do something slightly different: I checked my heuristic.

A heuristic, from the Greek to find or discover, is an approach to problem-solving. The problem I was trying to solve was whether a new pair of shoes would fit my feet. However, it wasn’t getting me anywhere until I first checked I had a pair of the same size. My shoe-shopping heuristic missed a step – pardon the pun! 

This incident illustrates how we can learn from instances where our current heuristic fails. We reflect, and we change or augment our learning process. However, we often don’t. 

Check Your Heuristic

Project management is an attempt to systematise, to make repeatable, steps in a project. The problem comes when a project manager moves to a different context; their heuristic often seems to fail them. So when it comes to developing new skills to a higher level, failure is an asset. A skilled project manager becomes so because they experience a widely different set of contexts and levels of complexity. Book learning can fail them, but that is not necessarily the book’s fault. 

So we need learning environments where we are always consciously honing our skills, where we can value failing in a positive way.

What failures have been useful to you? Leave your observations below in the comments.

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Leaning to Action

A Call to Failure

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Failure is not an option.

No, it’s inevitable.

The issue is, first, will I accept that reality? Then can I act so that when I do fail, it is cheap and useful? When I do fail I do not do something worse: take failure as my identity. No, I am not a failure, but I do fail. The question is, did I learn from that failure?

Failure is not an option… it’s inevitable. So, get on with it.
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Time was when we would develop methodologies that tried to avoid failure altogether. I now realise that this attempt was impossible and even dangerous. The way it was typically evidenced in project management was to start further and further back in design:

“We need a plan first.” (This seems like good sense, doesn’t it?)
“Well, we need a business case first.” (Of course, who would argue with that; I wouldn’t.)
“Yes but before that, we need a Project Brief.”
“Yes, but before that, we need a Project Mandate.”
“OK, but before that, we need some Strategic Objectives.”
“Yes, but first we need our Vision, Mission and Values.”

We can carry this seemingly-rational nonsense on for as long as we wish – many consultants and business gurus do just that.
Confession time: I own up to having done that as well.
I have repented!

I sometimes think we have created a sort of management Catch 22, where we never achieve anything substantive because of a fear of failure.
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I sometimes think we have created a management Catch 22, where we never achieve anything substantive.Click to Tweet

But when do we do get around to doing something? Where is the execution?
“Oh, no. We’re not ready for that yet. What if we do the wrong thing or do it badly?”

I sometimes think we’ve created a kind of management Catch 22 where we go around and around in ever-decreasing circles, never achieving anything substantive. Fear of failure has become a sort of management political correctness. It’s time to face this demon.

Is failure always a bad thing? What if the worst failure of all is never achieving a return on our efforts. I believe this is a subtle and sophisticated paralysis by analysis.

The world is always more complex than our models.
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There are three challenges we need to face in breaking out of this syndrome:

  1. The world is always more complex than our models. It is a world where there are unknowns. The unknowns prevent us from planning out all failure. Only as we experiment, execute, are we going to discover more about that complexity.
  2.  We often operate in a management culture of fear. Fear is always dangerous counsellor. Fear is a terrible strategy and a poor modus operandi. We need courage. With courage, we can devise small steps of execution where we are not betting the farm, but instead discovering more and learning from these unexpected results.
  3. Failure can become personal. We can allow it to become our identity. This is a lie. I am not a failure, but I do fail. The question is: Do I learn enough from that failure and adapt?

I remember when I spoke alongside my friend and former colleague, Richard Rose, at an Agile Project Management conference. We found many there who were new to Agile. Others, by contrast, had been so long immersed in Agile practice that they had forgotten the real value of incremental, Just-Enough-Design-Up-Front management.

At one point I said, “Failure is not an option, it’s inevitable.” I saw lights go on all around the room.

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Those weary with traditional management that promised much but delivered little, and those immersed in newer, more empirical approaches both need to be aware of the value of limited failure. We hypothesise about this complex world, test, examine the results, adapt and move on. W.E. Deming had nailed this years ago in his PDCA cycle. See my earlier article on this: Ever-Increasing Circles.

We need an empirical humility about what will happen if we do such-and-such, test and then see if we are right.

Maybe we need a CTF, a Call To Failure.
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Marketers talk about the Call to Action, the CTA. Maybe we all need a CTF, a Call to Failure.

OK. So I have a question for you. How do you make sure you learn from a ‘failure’? I’m really interested. Please share your approach below. The rest of us would really value it!

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Self-Awareness

Course Corrections – Part 2

For a period of time, a friend of mine prevailed on me to take up golf. To begin with, it seemed like I was doing random gardening on a long walk. I became very conscious of my muscle movements in a swing, which club to choose, and experimenting with little rituals, like the number of times I looked up at the target spot I was aiming for. I also became aware of two things that could undermine my performance as the game progressed: my inner emotional state after a ridiculously bad shot, and my physical stamina – or lack of it.

For me, golf was like random gardening on a long walk.

I realised that the inner game of golf was all about self-awareness. What I became acutely focused on was being aware of my muscle movements, grip and so on. If I made a bad shot, I would attempt to adjust and see if I got a better result. I was constantly correcting myself.

In yesterday’s post, we looked at the Apollo 11 mission and how the accuracy of the launch targeting was a delusion; the reality was that they landed within the lunar landing zone by a process of constant correction – a sort of feedback loop.

Then I moved to talk about a more personal kind of feedback loop, the Daily Heads-Up technique that I use for my personal organisation.

At least every week, I review, hone and improve my workflows.
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Feedback loops can operate at different cycles, such as at:

  • the weekly cycle. I ask myself the questions: What could I do differently this week to get better results than last week? What must I complete this week? What results to I want? I have noticed that these questions at the weekly level help me to work on my workflows. I’m continually reassessing and honing, for example, how I compose and publish articles like this one.
  • the monthly cycle. At this level, there is some overlap with the project cycle. It deals with somewhat more seasonal challenges. We are in the run-up to Christmas now, so my questions are centred a lot around being ready for the family visits, gifts, etc.
  • the annual cycle. I’ve just been through this, reviewing where I want to be by the end of 2017. This has really been an adjustment from positively saying ‘no’ to certain kinds of work, and positively saying ‘yes’ to replenishing events such as vacations, and positively moving towards the kind of work more aligned with my passions and chosen destiny. This is a less obvious, but profound level of course correction.
  • the project cycle. I’m coming to the end of a book publishing project. It’s not quite complete: you can’t find my book on Amazon yet (but you can find it here!!) And I’m about to start an online Leading Yourself programme very soon. Of course, there should be course corrections within the project cycle. Agile is very good at this, the traditional waterfall approach, less so.

In each case, the feedback loop provides the opportunity for us to correct our course, to learn, and to get better results.

In the next post, I’ll look at how neglecting the course corrections, the feedback loop can hinder our effectiveness and growth, and why it is so easy to neglect this.

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Self-Awareness

Grow in Self-Awareness

self awareness

In my previous post, Advice from the TOP 30 Influencers in Project Management, I defended my choice around self-awareness.

One of my friends emailed me about this post, and how she had observed that her husband constantly stresses the importance of stakeholder management. She wrote:

The Human Factor that is so often the key to success or failure and maybe even sabotage ( for the passive aggressive) in projects and organisations.   I have seen academically brilliant people appointed into very senior positions and their own insecurities and lack of emotional intelligence have done untold damage to an organisation .

This prompted me to check this diagram:

Self-Awareness: One Thing to Rule Them All

Look at the description on the bottom line of this diagram,  where a self-awareness impacts the behaviour of  Leaning to People. Is it merely an increased ability to identify key relationships? No. I realise it is much more than that.

Quite by chance, I was reading Danny Silk’s brilliant Keep Your Love On,  yesterday morning. In it he writes:

When you don’t have either the courage or the ability to face the truth of what you feel, think, and need, you end up communicating confusing and inaccurate information – sometimes even downright falsehoods.

If you never really learn to value and understand what’s going on inside you, how can you value and understand what is going on with another person?

If you don’t know yourself, how can you get to know another person -– someone with a completely different experience and perspective – and value the truth of who they are?

Keep Your Love On: Connection, Communication & Boundaries, Danny Silk (2013, lovingonpurpose.com)

In recent years, I’ve majored on the critical nature of Stakeholder Engagement. In 2013 I wrote Practical People Engagement: Leading Change through the Power of Relationships. Project management has long marginalised the topic of “stakeholder management,” as they call it. (As if you can truly manage anyone other than yourself.) ‘Leaning to People’ is a central narrative in that book. I’m proud that this book was later adopted as the core reference for an international qualification in stakeholder engagement. I hope it is doing some good to the profession.

This last year I’ve turned to the other three behaviours that distinguish outstanding performance, in my latest book: Leading Yourself: Succeeding from the Inside Out.  Outstanding performance all starts, though, with self-awareness.

So, I’m inclined to re-draw the diagram, now, in the light of my friend and Danny Silk’s observations to something like this:

one-thing-to-rule-them-all

Can you spot the crucial difference?

Categories
Self-Awareness

Advice from the TOP 30 Influencers in Project Management

Advice from the 30 TOP Influencers

This week I was sent a report containing Advice from the 30 TOP influencers in project management. If you are not involved in the project management profession, I can quite understand that this will not set your heart racing! However, it is interesting to see the patterns that emerge from these ‘TOP influencers.’

(Full disclosure: I was chosen as one of the 30. The authors asked me and the other 29 contributors to give our take on what was our top tip.)

Click here to download the report.

Much of this so-called ‘top’ advice focuses on planning and re-planning. Important though planning is, it is nowhere near the top thing for me.

Many others get rather nearer the mark, in my opinion, and focus on stakeholder engagement and developing key relationships. See my own work on this.

However, I suggest – with apologies to JRR Tolkien – that there is one thing to rule them all:

developing your self-awareness.

Now, I recognise that to many people my choice might look pretty abstract and dull. Maybe even a little surprising. “Is that it??! Self-awareness. That feels very psychological and not very practical. What about the Time-Cost-Scope Triangle. What about the Critical Path?”

Thinking about your thinking – self-awareness – is the key to driving all other habits that bring success.
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Let me explain. The research I did a few years ago with my colleague John Edmonds revealed that self-awareness was key to high performance: high performing programme and project managers all exhibited a high degree of self-awareness, of mental clarity about their own thought processes. They all think about their thinking. Self-awareness drives all the other behaviours that give the high-performer real traction in the complex world of project management: behaviours like building and protecting personal margins, leaning to action, and leaning to people. See this diagram:

Self-Awareness: One Thing to Rule Them All

So how do we all develop self-awareness in our work? I show you how in my new book, Leading Yourself: Succeeding from the Inside Out. I have since come to believe that this kind of high-performance is not for the exalted few, any of us can develop the right habits to get exceptional results.

Question: How do you think about your thinking?

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