We all have self-doubt, to one degree or another. Even Paul McCartney. In a recent interview he said that at the start of a new tour he only announces the first two dates “to see how they sell”. When they do, he is reassured that “people do still want to see me after all”. If a hugely successful person like him is prone to self-doubt, then I'm pretty sure the rest of us experience it every now and again.
I’m in the process of writing a series of articles on some of the antidotes to self-doubt that I have benefitted from applying to what I do and how I go about my work. The following is an extract from the first one. I hope you find it useful and do let me have your thoughts and comments on it.

Own Your Outcome
In other words, make sure the behaviours and actions required to achieve them are completely and totally within your control.

This may seem like stating the obvious but I regularly see job targets where the opposite is true with the outcome being dependent on the actions of many other people. This is particularly true in large organisations where departments and functions operate independently yet intrinsically rely on each other.

When I worked such a place, in a supply chain planning role, I typically had targets specifying the accuracy of my sales forecast which, in fairness, made a lot of sense as this sat of the heart of my job. However, it was dependent on a whole raft of factors that I had no control over ranging from the sales teams successfully implementing promotional activity to raw materials arriving as planned at the factories. Even the weather (unseasonable conditions make a big difference to sales of products like soup) and other random ‘acts of God’ could, and did, have an impact. Consequently, when I didn’t achieve my forecast accuracy targets it was usually possible to find a rationale. In effect I was saying ‘it isn’t my fault the forecasts were inaccurate, it is the fault of those other people not doing their job properly’. This type of approach turned the assessment of achievements in annual appraisals into a very subjective matter.

I don’t recall this being an intentional ploy on my part, or that of anyone else. With hindsight the flaw was to make my target the same as the end goal instead of breaking it down to the behaviours and actions that were required to achieve it. An effective way to avoid this is to ask ‘what do I need to do to make this happen?’ and to keep asking it until all of the required actions and behaviours have been teased out.

Going hand in hand with this is the willingness to take responsibility and truly own whatever it is you want to achieve. The key is to make sure that the outcome relies 100% on you.
For example, with this blog post, outcomes that don’t rely 100% on me are:

• It is read by 100,000 people
• The content receives glowing feedback
• It results in requests for additional coaching
  

However, the following outcomes are 100% dependent on me:

• I write with clarity
• I bring it to life with relevant examples and personal experiences
  
• I post it on my website
  
• I publicise it on social media websites

I'm sure there are plenty more so do let me have your suggestions of what I could add to this list by emailing me: michael@triumphcoaching.co.uk
The slight paradox is that I could convince myself that I have written with marvellous clarity and illuminated my experiences with superb examples but I won't truly know unless I hear your thoughts on it (it will come as no surprise that 'receiving feedback' is another of the antidotes - see my earlier post on 'Verbal Feedback') so please do let me know what you think of it.
Phone: 07851 067346
Email: michael@triumphcoaching.co.uk

“What is the biggest challenge that you are currently facing at work?” I asked.

“Breaking down the functional silos in my organisation” was the reply.

This struck me as a not the most resourceful way of describing and thinking about the issue. Having highlighted it, an alternative was found:

“Building closer allegiances with the other parts of the business”.

It may appear to be superficially playing with semantics but the proof of the difference it made came immediately as the person I was talking with quickly added:

“This [new description] also helps to empower as you have to take responsibility for the solution as opposed to someone else causing the problem”.

I am confident that he will now start working on removing the barriers rather than waiting for anonymous ‘others’ to do something about it.

Language is a window into our thinking and consequently an indicator of our likely behaviours and actions. So, it is easy to appreciate how a subtle adjustment in language awakens new possibilities.

What is your main challenge at the moment and how might your language be effecting how you are going about resolving it?

• Listen... and when you have the urge to speak, keep listening. If you are tempted to speak ask yourself 'how do I like the other person to behave when I am giving them feedback?'
• Listen some more.
• Write notes if you want to (in fact that might help you keep quiet).
• Ask for clarification about what you have heard. Make sure to reflect the words that the giver has used. You will probably be tempted to put your own interpretation on what they have said. To prevent that ask them to explain some more. For example, I was recently told that I am more effective as a coach when I am aggressive. 'Aggressive' grated with me because I have my definition of it so I asked "how was I aggressive?" It turns out that it was when I was challenging beliefs and assumptions. That I understood.
• Keep listening. Absorb what you hear.
• Ask for specifics because they bring the feedback to life. When I was given the feedback about being aggressive I asked for an example of when I had been so. Being reminded of a particular question I had asked meant that my understanding soared.
• Listen again.
• Avoid rationalising, defending or explaining the reasons for your actions and behaviours. You will be sorely tempted to do so. The feedback you are being given is a reflection of the impact you were making in that situation. It may, or may not, be what you intended but the giver is telling you how it was for them. Respect it.
• Say thanks. The chances are that the giver has gone out of their way to do this for you.
• Choose what you are going to do with what you have been given. You can do anything from forgetting about it to acting on it. Whatever you decide keep in mind that if you always do what yo've always done, you'll always get what you've always got.

Another short presentation on TED.com provided me with inspiration. It only lasts 207 seconds and watch out in particular for when the speaker describes introducing himself:

Try Something New For 30 Days

I know he has exaggerated it a bit for effect but I love the change that Matt Cutts displays when he goes from describing himself as a computer scientist to a novelist because, as well as changing physically, I think he also changes mentally. In essence, when we change how we think of ourselves it makes us aware of the skills, talents and behaviours that support that identity. In this example, as well as becoming energised and enthused, calling himself a novelist gives Matt Cutts pride and confidence.

A variation on this theme is the apocryphal story of Sir Christopher Wren walking around the construction site for St. Paul’s Cathedral. He meets a young lad who is carrying a hod and asks him what he is doing. “I’m just carrying bricks, sir” is the reply. “No”, the great architect tells him, “you are building a cathedral”.

I did also latch onto Matt Cutts’s point about small sustainable changes being more likely to stick and, as I have recently been to a talk about the benefits of using social media, I decided to return to my abandoned Twitter account and post at least one tweet every day for 30 days.

I completed my 30 days this week and I am pleasantly surprised by the sense of achievement it has given me as well as how the discipline of doing something regularly has indeed turned it into a habit. I am now a Tweeter!

What ‘something new’ are you inspired to do?

A large organisation that I was working with was encouraging every employee to be a leader. One of the people that I was coaching didn’t believe it was possible. I was frustrated by her attitude but I now think she had a point.
As this 3 minute presentation by Derek Siver demonstrates, if everyone was literally a leader then there would be a lot of people standing alone waving their arms in the air:

Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy

This has got me thinking about the qualities of a great follower (as opposed to a blind follower). Supportive yet challenging, yes. Courage, honesty and integrity also  come to mind. Hmm, all similar to the qualities of great leadership. I seem to have come full circle! Maybe great followers are also leaders in their own right. What are your thoughts?

Rory McIlroy was leading the US Masters golf tournament earlier this year by 4 shots with just the last round of 18 holes to play. In a recent interview in ‘The Times’ he explained that as he prepared to take his second shot of the day (an approach shot to the 1^st green) he could feel himself saying “ooh, don’t go left” at the top of his swing instead of just picking the target and hitting at it as he usually does. Having played 3 days of wonderful golf, it became his first tentative shot. Following that his thought was ‘this is going to be tough’ and, sure enough, his game began to unwind and he finished the tournament a distant 10 shots behind the eventual winner.
Rory McIlroy’s experience is a salient reminder of how our unconscious mind deletes a negative command (don’t think of kangaroos).

Don’t remember to send me your examples and your feedback!

On top of that, it was also an ‘away from’ thought (see previous blog posting). In the same interview, he talks about how his mind was tightening. He realizes in retrospect that he was “too focused”. ‘”I wasn’t having the same jokey chats with my caddie that I’d normally do. I felt I shouldn’t, that I had to concentrate”’. He had ‘stopped being himself’.

A fitting postscript to all of this is how Rory McIlroy took what happened at the US Masters not as failure but as feedback and successfully applied his learning a few months later at the US Open tournament. He romped away with the title...by being himself.

In 2005 I attended my first Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) course and that marked the start of my learning about how my thinking influences my language and how my thinking and language, in turn, combine to influence my behaviours and actions. It now seems like an obvious link however the connections and consequences can be very subtle.
One of these subtleties, which has been a huge discovery for me, is my ‘away from’ thinking habit which, in essence, results in my language and behaviours focusing on what I don’t want as opposed to what I do want.
How has being aware of this habit has made a difference to me? Well, one example is my approach to this blog. Initially I was very clear about what I didn’t want it to be (contrived pieces written to achieve some self-imposed abstract objective) whereas I now think of it in terms of what I want it to be (sharing my experiences in a way that others can benefit from them).
From this, there is a temptation to conclude that ‘away from’ is bad and ‘towards’ is good but the former can also be very effective as demonstrated by the ‘no to AV’ campaign prior to the recent referendum on voting reform in the UK.
The ‘Say No’ campaign had a heavy ‘away from’ slant with their message being all about the downsides of changing to an Alternative Vote (AV) system: only 3 countries in the world have AV and 2 of them want to get rid of it; it is costly to implement; it is no longer ‘1 person 1 vote’; the person who comes 1^st no longer wins and so on. As the result proved, it was a very effective campaign and it was all based on what wasn’t wanted.
Does this say something about our national psyche? I certainly do meet more ‘away from’ people than ‘towards’ thinkers (maybe I just attract them!) and people who more readily talk in terms of what they don’t want rather than what they do want (is that a consequence of being told variations of ‘I want never gets’ during our up-bringing?)
So, there is a place for ‘away from’ thinking although I do prefer ‘towards’ outcomes because, for me, they have a positive bias, they are motivating and they come from a resourceful place.
What is your experience?

In completing my census form, the office for National Statistics have learnt something about me...and I've learnt something about me too. It happened when I got to the questions about my main job:

• ‘What is your full and specific job title’;
• ‘Describe briefly what you do in your main job?’

Hmm, how do I answer these questions in 34 characters or less? That’s not even a quarter of a ‘tweet’!

Suddenly everyone else I’d seen during the day had a job that is easy to describe – postman, refuse collector, delivery driver, window-fitter, teacher, call centre worker (OK, maybe that last one is a bit trickier) – but how do I describe what I do as a coach? How do I want to label myself? My mind even sprang forward 100 years as I imagined the researchers in 2111 trying to figure out what this Michael Hughes character meant by ‘helping people realise their potential’ or some such other relatively abstract phrase.

All in all this highlights the importance of the identity that we give ourselves and, more specifically in this instance, the identity that I give myself because it influences how I project myself to other people and into the world.

I love doing what I do. I get a huge kick from helping people overcome their limiting beliefs, silencing the inner talk that holds us back, asking the questions that produce an ‘a-ha’ moment and ultimately enable them to achieve what they what to achieve and be who they want to be.

And that brings me back to identity. Who said ‘we teach what we require the most’?

So, even though it is a bit late for my census form, I want your help: from those of you that know me (and even if you don’t, you can still have a guess), how would you describe what I do?

Moreover, what have you learnt from your own description and what description would you ideally give yourself?

For many years, ‘feedback’ had only negative connotations for me because I thought of it as a euphemism for being told about flaws and weaknesses in my capabilities I always expected it to be criticism and it was a bit of a bonus if I happened to be in the right frame of mind and heard it as ‘constructive’. Over the course of my career I was regularly trained on giving feedback (particularly the classic approach of a failing being sandwiched between two positives) but little time was spent on learning how to receive it.

I was reminded of how receiving feedback is a skill while I was watching Jamie Oliver’s ‘Dream School’ on Channel 4. Jamie has persuaded several well-known experts to teach their particular subject to a group of 20 kids who have ‘failed’ at school. Enter the eminent professor, David Starkey, to provide history lessons - and his first one is a disaster. He threatens to give up at that point but is persuaded to try again and his second attempt is much more successful. At the end of the lesson one student thanks him and tells him that it was much better than the previous one. His immediate response was to deflect her feedback by saying that it was all down to the class behaved. The reaction of the girl was as if she had given him a present and he had handed it, unopened, straight back to her. The head teacher also tells him that he has earned his respect and that of the class to which he reacts by attempting to go into an explanation of how it was all to do with the class and nothing to do with him. All very laudable although the frustrated head teacher stops him in his tracks and points out that he is trying to give him a compliment and feedback.

I recognise David Starkey’s behavior because I do it too. Yes it is tempting, especially in British culture, to be modest and say things like ‘it was down to the other people’, ‘I was just doing my job’ or ‘it was nothing really’. However, such a reaction is disrespectful to the person giving because it is, after all, their opinion.

It is also a lost opportunity because being curious about any feedback unearths the insights that sparked it. In the David Starkey example what would he have learned if he had asked questions like ‘what was it specifically that was much better about the lesson?’ and ‘what did I do in particular that earned your respect?’

I am keen to know your thoughts on what I have written and I look forward, naturally, to being curious about your feedback.

I have just finished reading a book that has been inspired by the findings from this classic experiment (for all you busy people, the video only lasts a couple of minutes).

The main finding of the researchers is that it is very easy to miss some of what is going on in front of us when our thinking is distracted by other tasks. Moreover, in their book, The Invisible Gorilla, they contend that we operate under the illusion that our memory and recall is accurate.

I believe that the price of this is particularly high when we don’t give people our full attention. To put it in context, what do you experience when someone assures you that they are listening to you but you know that their mind is elsewhere? It is easy to make excuses and put inattention down to how busy we all are but our effectiveness and influence relies on strong relationships and being inattentive ultimately damages the relationship.

If you have any doubt about how influential you are when you give somebody your full attention just think of the last time that you were truly listened to. What was that experience like and what impression did the other person make on you?

When I put pressure on myself to come up with a topic to write about my mind tends to go blank. However, I am currently benefiting from being coached by Jacqui (you can too – click here) and her top tip is to put some time aside and just write for 20 minutes on whatever comes to mind. I have followed her suggestion and although I haven’t ended up using what I initially wrote, the technique has succeeded in kick-starting me again.

As I started on my latest 20 minute stint the idea that came to mind was suddenly very obvious - apply the questions at the end of my previous posting to myself:

What I am most proud of having achieved in the last week is providing a friend and colleague with feedback on a workbook that she has written. In doing it I was courageous, thoughtful, articulate and thorough. Courage! Now that really jumps out at me. That is how I want to be! Courageousness, in whatever form it takes, will be my byword for the week ahead.

There has been an unexpected bonus in answering the questions because I now connect being courageous with being influential and caring. That, for me, is an ideal combination.

What good questions or advice are you going to apply to yourself?

It is a conundrum: as we become blunt from constant use, how do we find the time to re-sharpen our performance? By definition, if we are busy how do we step off the treadmill and take stock of how we are doing? This came home to me when a friend mentioned recently that he didn’t realise how frantic his existence had become until he moved to a new role. It was only when he finished the job he was leaving that he realised how enmeshed and caught up in the daily hurly-burley he had become and how it had drained him.

The pace of our working days means that this is all too easy to do and it may seem tricky to find the time to assess what being busy is doing to us but it is a relatively easy step to take. As an introduction, and as a way to start getting into the habit, try this out: put aside just 10 minutes at the end of each week and ask yourself the following:

·         What am I most proud of having achieved this week?

·         Which of my behaviours and skills came to the fore in that moment?

·         What am I going to do more of next week?

When it comes to introductory conversational questions, a common one is ‘how are you?’ (or a variation of it) and it is typically followed by something along the lines of ‘are you keeping busy?’

The importance and significance of ‘being busy’ has become an unspoken measure of success to the extent that our degree of busy-ness has become a key factor in how we rate ourselves and how others judge us. Being busy is considered a worthy state to be in and (to a point) I agree because I know that it gives me a sense of focus, purpose and fulfillment.

However, there is a continuing shift from being able to choose for ourselves where and when we are busy to having busy-ness thrust upon us. Although there is a whole raft of reasons for this, the overall result is that there are increasing demands on our time over which we have little apparent control.

In accepting that this is the way of the world (and that it will continue to go in this direction) then what is important to me is that we acknowledge the consequences of this externally imposed busy-ness and take steps to moderate the hidden impact.

By that I mean the cost to the individual, and the organisation, of being so busy that the focus is purely on getting our tasks completed. In the rush to get task after task completed what gets missed? To paraphrase Stephen Covey, how quickly does the saw become blunt with constant use? Moreover, what is the price of being so busy that we don’t have the time to continue developing and building relationships with colleagues, customers and those who are important to us?

This can all too easily go unnoticed but if we acknowledge that it is happening then we can do something about it. Setting aside time to re-sharpen the saw is a start.

If we don’t then, at some point, we cross over from being efficiently busy to being inefficiently busy. What do you think are the consequences of that?

…and if you want to be seen as being ‘double busy’, you can learn how to do the appropriate walk from the very funny Mickey Flanagan

A couple of days ago I came across a list compiled by a lady called Bronnie Ware. It is poignant because it contains the common themes she heard from her patients when she worked in palliative care. When they were questioned about any regrets they had, or what they would do differently, these were the five most common themes:
1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I didn't work so hard.
3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish I had let myself be happier.

This powerful list has been reverberating in my mind since I read it primarily because I know that I could easily end up having the same regrets unless I change some ingrained beliefs. My first counter-measure is to share this list - let me know what impact it has on you as well as what you will do to avoid having similar regrets.  

Bronnie Ware's website is http://inspirationandchai.com/index.html

It is one thing to learn and another to put that learning into practice so as soon as I’d finished my previous piece I started to write this one. It was all going very well and then I held back from posting it. What happened?

I suspect that I craftily sabotaged myself right at the very beginning (so crafty that I nearly didn’t notice it) by calling it ‘cheating’! In doing so I created a negative connotation and I guess that, at some level, I had told myself that a blog has to be instant and fresh and that to prepare anything in advance could not be considered a valid posting. BLAM! There they are, the little weasel words and phrases that had burrowed into my thinking.

‘Has to be’. Really? According to whom?

‘Could not be’. Again, according to whom?

Behind these little innocuous words lurk the beliefs that drive my least resourceful behaviours so it is time to name and shame some of them. Drum-roll, please:

‘must’

‘need to’

‘should’

‘could’

‘ought to’

‘have to’

Watch out for them in your thinking and language because they drain motivation and make an activity much less compelling. Challenge these sneaky words with questions like ‘according to whom?’, ‘how do you know that?’ and ‘what would happen if you didn’t’. So, I’ve made the shift to post these thoughts about linguistic trip-wires. Being aware of them has made a difference to me and I believe it will to you so let me know what you discover.

The good news is that I proved myself right on two points:

1. The sky has not fallen in – not a huge surprise but a relief nonetheless.

2. I have got learning from giving it a go – only a surprise in what I have learned compared to what I expected to learn.

My biggest learning is to keep the momentum going and this is significant for me in more ways than one. In this instance I left it too long before writing this next piece. In doing so I allowed myself to retreat back into thinking about my next topic and my procrastination strategy had struck again, albeit in a slightly different guise but just as effectively.

Yet another variation on my procrastination strategy is currently at work because I have delayed myself by re-writing these last couple of sentences several times. This thing is bigger than I ever imagined! However, the good news is that I’m getting better at recognising it and I also realise that I allow it to do a good job in sabotaging other areas of my life such as my attempts to develop my work as a coach and trainer.

I’m a bit divided about what to do next. Is there any benefit in delving into the cause and origins of this behaviour? Or is it enough to be aware of it and applying the antidote? Speaking of which, what are your antidotes for moving from thinking to doing?

Well, it is for me because I’ve been procrastinating over starting a blog for a long, long time. It has been very easy, and also very unsatisfying, to have spent all that time thinking about writing. However, thanks to some timely encouragement and support from my coach, Anne, I have finally got on with doing it. As I type these words my palms are sweaty, my heart-rate has increased and I have a sense of anxiety because my inner voice is busily planting seeds of doubt about the relevance of this topic, my ability to write plus whatever else I come up with. As a result, my mind is coming up with an impressively imaginative list of all sorts of negative consequences that might or could happen (there is a rich vein of creativity to tap into there which is a subject for another day) when, in reality, I won’t know until I do it. One thing for sure is that the sky won’t fall in and so I embrace the belief that there is only feedback and learning from giving this a go.

So, what really is going on here? For me, it is all to do with a fear of failure and a fear of the unknown. Maybe it is some deep rooted human survival mechanism in my DNA but I’m choosing to override it today. These fears are so ingrained in me that they are, one way or another, a daily challenge. I’m starting to think too much about this now so the time has come to take this first small step and share it before I talk myself out of it.

One other key point: a critical factor in making this happen has been to share it with someone (in my case with Anne) because in doing so I have put it ‘out there’ and made the commitment to her that I will take action by an agreed date. It seems simple and obvious to spell it out but it is what has made the difference.

What small step will you take today by making a commitment to a trusted supporter?

Leave a comment and let me with how you get on.