How do you know who you really are?

René Descartes, the French philosopher, mathematician, scientist and writer, known as the Father of Modern Philosophy, coined the phrase, “I think, therefore I am” (From the Latin: Cogito, ergo sum). Fast forward to today, and most people live according to a variation of this phrase: “I am whoever and whatever I think I am.”

On what basis are you who and what you think you are? Is it even true? Who is really pulling your strings?

Picture a mother-board or a system-board: the group of electronic bits and pieces that runs everything from cell phones to computers. It has numerous chips, circuits, nodes, diodes, and other small metal and plastic structures soldered to it which contain all the ‘working parts’ that allow an electronic device to function.

When you were born, your motherboard (your brain) had few of the necessary structures and working parts you need to function as an adult. So how did it happen that you now have all the thoughts, beliefs, world views, assumptions, expectations, inferences, biases, and most importantly, the values, that you use every day? Where did all your neural nodes, diodes and structures on the motherboard of your brain come from? Who installed your programming? Read the full story

“Hurry, Scurry, Worry, Work,” President Truman sighed during the MacArthur crisis. He concluded, “I guess that is the way it is.”

That was the way it is; but, even if many feel it’s still the way it is today, it is not the way it has to be in the future for people and organizations with integrity.

Truman spoke these words during a time of fear and uncertainty in a nation that was still licking its wounds from World War II. The United States was rocked internally by McCarthyism, the threat of the Russian nuclear bomb in Europe and the potential for World War III in Korea. Read the full story

How many times have you regretted an impulsive action — but realized the error too late?

Where’s there’s conflict to be resolved, a problem to be solved, or a dilemma to be unbundled, how often do you jump in, right away, with a quick solution, answer, or retort? How often have you found that, after jumping in like that, you maybe didn’t get the whole story or see the complete picture? What you did or said missed the mark because you hadn’t taken the time to understand fully enough first.

How often in such situations might you be hearing, but not listening?

One reason people have a tendency to jump in is because their minds are working at 90 miles an hour. They’re hyped up, used to making judgments on the fly, wrapped in their preconceptions and assumptions. “Quick! There’s no time. Get on with it!” So they plunge ahead, seduced into making judgments that are too often misguided, off-putting or simply wrong.

“Listen to understand before being understood” is a principle that is bandied about in the ‘effective listening’ literature. We all say we ‘get it’, yet nothing changes. Nearly everyone seriously over-estimates their capacity to listen. Ask almost anyone and he or she will claim to be good at listening. If that were so, many of the problems around us would disappear in an instant. The truth is that rather few people listen properly before reacting. Read the full story

Why do people believe that they can tell what secretly motivates or drives others?

Of all the topics that come up in the leadership and management media, one of the commonest is motivation: how do you motivate people? In my simple-minded way, the answer to the question of discovering what motivates someone else seems simple: you ask them. So why is so much ink spent on theories of motivation, motivation surveys and endless speculation about the topic, some of it rather ill-considered?

On the whole, I think I blame Freud. His notion of unconscious motivation may or may not be well-grounded in psychological understanding — I am not a psychologist, so I won’t get into that morass — but it certainly opened the door to a situation the Viennese doctor may not have intended: you don’t ask people what motivates them, because they don’t know — at least consciously.

This created an even more dangerous belief: that you, the observer, may know better than the person does him or herself why she does what she does, based on using pseudo-psychology to ‘explain’ the links between what may be observed and the supposed underlying or unconscious motivations.

The mischief this has caused! Armed with nothing more than prejudice and pop-psychology, hoards of people believe that they know why others do things, without the need to check. Indeed, if they do ask — or are told — that often discount the explanation given as an example of ‘avoidance’ or because (thanks to Freud) they assume what the person says consciously isn’t true. It’s the unconscious motivation that counts. Read the full story

The fundamental flaws of the conventional approach to getting things done

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The conventional way to achieve success, in your life or in a work project, is to start with careful planning. First you build your plan, then you track progress against it. If you’re in a business setting, you’ll add a detailed budget. Corporations especially measure someone’s success by how closely their results match the original budget and plan. The plan becomes a straitjacket on later action.

Don’t do this!

Using such an approach commits you to a path you almost certainly can’t follow. Events rarely, if ever, work out as you planned. Then you must either stick to the plan — and stray further and further from reality — or abandon the previous plan and put action on hold while you start planning again.

Detailed planning too easily forces you into dangerous actions, like remaining rigid in the face of life’s natural fluidity, or ignoring warning signs and trying to force reality into the path you planned for it. It blocks you from responding creatively to whatever comes along. You become an actor following a script, instead of responding freely to the ebb and flow of events; you judge progress against the plan itself, not against how well you’re moving towards to your final objective.

Even the best plans are only thoughts about what to do if things go as you imagine. Forecasting the future is a risky game with a miserable chance of success. Trying to make the future conform to your plans is downright foolish, since you have no control whatever over what will happen. Reality will run you over like a railroad train hitting a gnat. Read the full story

Are they pushing your buttons — or are you doing it to yourself?

There’s no question that in most every organization (plus home and anywhere else we spend time), we come face to face with folks who push our buttons, antagonize, frustrate, or otherwise annoy us. People who behave in ways that make us want to scream. They’re commonly referred to as ‘difficult’. Some we simply label irritating; some we label rude and some we label “impossible to work or be with”.

In my experience, however, the question is not so much what makes them difficult, but what we tell ourselves about them. It’s often that which makes them difficult. Underlying, supporting and triggering our reactions are the stories we tell ourselves: “She is so (fill in the blank) I could scream.” “The way he (fill in the action) is enough to make anyone mad.” “When they (fill in the situation), I just wanted to throttle them.” It’s not just our negative judgments, criticisms and frustrations that categorize them as difficult. It’s the way we repeat and elaborate them, internally or in conversation.

When we drill down to the truth of the matter, experience suggests that it’s not so much that another’s behavior is all that egregious or aberrant; the “truth” that mires us in anger and resentment comes from the story we have created — a story we assume is true, but which, in reality, is probably exaggerated a little more each time we re-tell it.

When you feel the urge to label another as “difficult”, a first step ought perhaps to be to check out the reality of the story; to review the facts and ward off any tendency to turn a single event into some kind of on-going saga. Read the full story

The perils of following the herd instinct

Photo: Carmem L Vilanova

When it comes to making decisions, choosing what’s important, or thinking about the world in general, it appears that many people are close to imitating sheep, following wherever the herd leads. If this seems harsh, consider the impact of fashion or following ‘industry best practice’ — both ways of choosing based entirely on doing whatever a chosen comparison group is said to be doing. Or think about the current problems with credit and mortgages. How many people made careful, fully conscious decisions about what debt they could handle or which types of credit were correct for them? How many jumped into the market because “everyone else is doing it” and the media was filled with stories about how to make mega-bucks on ’sure-fire’ investing in housing?

The most powerful weapon in the armory of the salesperson, scrupulous or not, is often that same appeal to fashion and conformity. Everyone else (or at least all the ‘right’ people) are doing it. You don’t want to be left out, do you? You don’t want others to look down on you because you didn’t have the courage, or sense, to get on board?

Maybe it’s time to take a hard look at the problems, as well as the upside, of being ‘part of the in-crowd’ and allowing group norms to override your own instincts and concerns. Read the full story

Questions to ask yourself about a habit of putting things off

 
Why am I constantly putting things off? Why don’t I do the things I’m ’supposed’ to do, but don’t really want to? Why do I always seem to be forcing myself to do things? Whether it’s chores at home, work for school, or projects at work, how do I get beyond procrastination?

Most often, something is operating ‘underneath’ the procrastination. Asking yourself questions like these — and spending some conscious time reflecting on your responses — can help you uncover why you are resisting doing what needs to be done and support you to move beyond procrastination.

Start by asking what the benefits of completing a task are and the consequences of procrastinating. Delve deeper by adding these additional questions:

1. What will happen if I do this?
2. What won’t happen if I do this?
3. What will happen if I don’t do this?
4. What won’t happen if I don’t do this?

Reflect on your responses and align with the energy and positivity of doing the right thing, while visualizing successful completion. Read the full story

Matching words and actions is essential to build trust

Photo: Tracy Hunter

I’m experiencing a deep sense of sadness as I reflect on an event at the recent G8 summit meeting in Japan. The event was a six-course lunch followed by an eight-course dinner where the agenda was — hang on to your hat, and take a deep breath — famine and the global food crisis. You can take at look at their meal time here.

First, some details:

• Participants were served 24 different dishes during their first day at the summit — just hours after urging the world to reduce the “unnecessary demand” for food, and calling on families to cut back on their wasteful food use.
• The dinner consisted of 18 dishes in eight courses — including caviar, smoked salmon, Kyoto beef and a “G8 fantasy dessert”.
• The banquet was accompanied by five different wines from around the world, including champagne.
• African leaders — including the leaders of Ethiopia, Tanzania and Senegal, who had taken part in talks during the day — were not invited to the function.
• The dinner came just hours after a ‘working lunch’ consisting of six courses.

This lunch and dinner misstep is an egregious example of the unconscious, hypocritical and insensitive behavior many leaders and managers manifest when they espouse values that purportedly support the well-being of their organizations (in this case, the world is the participants’ ‘organization’) — then engage in excesses and antithetical behavior that undermines their integrity, respectability and credibility. Read the full story

Why we are suffering for decades of free-market business fundamentalism

Britain’s Royal Courts of Justice, London
Photo: Wikimedia

One of my favorite columnists is Simon Caulkin, management editor for Britain’s Guardian and Observer newspapers. Not only is he a powerful writer and iconoclastic thinker, he has the knack of getting to the heart of many of the problems that are currently screwing up the global economy.

One such is the current financial crisis: a product of more than a decade of corporate greed and regulators unwilling to intervene to prevent the kind of boom and bust that enriches a few and leaves the majority paying the bill (“Capitalism’s too important to be left to capitalists”).

Here’s Caulkin at his best, fulminating against injustice like a hell-fire preacher weighing in against sin:

What do the following have in common: sub-prime mortgages; collateralised debt obligations and other instruments by which those mortgages are sliced, diced and sold on; and excessive leverage, whether by banks, private equity or hedge funds? They are all reckless and conscious mis-selling, the product of an amoral, deterministic system that expects and gives individuals the incentive to maximise their gains, while barring them from taking into account the costs their profit-making imposes on society as a whole.

I suspect he’s right about this. The so-called free market is out of hand. By demanding total freedom for the strong to benefit, even if it means the weak will suffer, it offends against just about every tenet of civilized behavior. Worse, it seems bent on destroying the very basis of all commerce: trust. Read the full story