Need to rebuild your self-esteem or reconnect with your faith in yourself? Here are some thought experiments, visualisations and writing exercises that will help you strengthen your self-belief. 1. See yourself as a friend sees you – ‘how to’ instructions here 2. Identify your values, what’s important to you. Studies have shown that this
If you suffer from ‘impostor syndrome’, or your friends sometimes ask why you don’t have as much self-belief as you should have when you are so good at what you do, this article is for you. Belief in yourself comes from experience. If you are in a challenging situation and you can remember a number
The UK’s recent referendum on European Union membership seems to have exposed deep fault lines in British society, if the strength of feeling shown in arguments on social media is anything to go by. I’ve certainly seen the normal rules of civilised conversation set aside, people on either side calling each other terrible things, and huge
This exercise will work at the end of pretty much any soft skills course, and especially an NLP-based course. The aim is to help participants transfer their learning from the training room into real life, and anticipate challenges so as to meet them successfully. How it works: In pairs, 15 minutes each way. One ‘planner’,
Even for experienced coaches and therapists, it’s not easy to help a person change when it’s someone close to you, because you’re emotionally involved yourself. If they’re stuck with a belief system that they know is holding them back, but they just can’t let go of by themselves, there are some things you can say just in
How do you make sure your team members are all aligned with the team’s goals? Step one is to make sure that you are clear on your vision for the team. You need to bring it to life in your own mind before you communicate it to others, and make sure you have a strong
Authenticity In Leaders Is Not Enough For Their Followers Some thoughts inspired by the discussion about ‘Are Leaders Getting Too Emotional?’ between Gautam Mukunda of Harvard Business School and Gianpiero Petriglieri of INSEAD on the always excellent HBR IdeaCast. There is a whole sub-industry of leadership advice telling us that you must be an authentic leader, and
Yesterday, I wasted most of a beautiful sunny Sunday morning trying to fix an email problem. Today, five minutes work made it a non-issue. What changed in between the two? I took a step back, rethought, and discovered there was an easier way that had been staring me in the face all along. In brief, my
Get your Appreciative Inquiry process started off right with this quick and easy guide to defining an affirmative topic The affirmative topic for an Appreciative Inquiry is important – ‘fateful’ as many books about AI describe it – because the topic sets the frame for what you will be inquiring into. So it’s important that
Our self-awareness is necessarily limited. As Daniel Kahneman and other researchers have found, the reasoning that drives our actions is often hidden from our conscious minds. Our motivations are usually no clearer to ourselves than they are to others. Even if we had perfect knowledge of our own motivations, other people have their own viewpoints and may
Why You Should Listen To Your Emotions In a business world where we strive to be cool-headed and rational, it’s easy to treat emotions as things to be controlled and to detach from, so as not to cloud our judgement. But your emotions, positive or negative, are messages with valuable information, and you ignore them
Some initial thoughts on leadership and innovation prompted by David Bowie’s life and work, and reading various obituaries and think-pieces about him: 1. What you are is as important as what you do, and more important than what you say. The ‘gender fluidity’ of Bowie’s early 70s persona forced many of his straight fans to
