I’m proud to share that the November 2024 edition of AI Practitioner magazine includes a rave review of my book Practical Appreciative Inquiry: How to Use This Leading-Edge Coaching Method Confidently with Teams and Small Groups! The review, by registered psychologist and Appreciative Dialogue practitioner Keith Storace, is full of praise for the book: You
A new Practical Appreciative Inquiry training starts soon – click here to get the details and how to book I’m always on the lookout for great Appreciative Inquiry resources to share in my Positive Change Methods groups on Facebook and LinkedIn – here are some of the best that I’ve found in the last few
This week I listened to a fascinating podcast interview with author and journalist Gillian Tett about her new book Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life. The book is about what we can learn if we take useful concepts and methods normally hidden away within the fairly obscure academic discipline of anthropology,
What makes the difference between the average performers and the stars in your team? More than any other factor, it’s emotional intelligence. This new book tells you how to hire emotionally intelligent people – without blowing your budget on expensive assessments. The right questions to ask, how you need to be as an interviewer, and
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Introductory Books Practical Appreciative Inquiry: How to Use This Leading-Edge Coaching Method Confidently with Teams and Small Groups by Andy Smith The Thin Book of Appreciative Inquiry by Sue Annis Hammond Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution In Change by David L Cooperrider and Diana Whitney Conversations
My new e-book, Leadership EQ: How To Lead With Emotional Intelligence, is now out. It’s the first in the ‘Quick Personal Development’ series, designed to provide no-frills, no-fluff answers for specific problems or challenges you may be facing. Here’s what the book is about: How do you get better results from your team by being
Well, most countries not covered by PayPal anyway. The Coaching Leaders online store uses PayPal to take payments. I had not realised, until alerted by a frustrated customer in Egypt, that there are certain countries that PayPal does not operate in for some reason. After some research, I found that Google Wallet is available to
This review is rescued from my old ‘NLP Bookstore’ site and was written way back in 1999, but I thought it was worth saving. See if you agree… We’ve Had 100 Years of Psychotherapy and the World Is Getting Worse by James Hillman and Mike Ventura This gripping and inspiring book grew out of a
“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place where you came from with new eyes and extra colours. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.” – from A Hat Full of
When the first edition of The Solutions Focus came out in 2002 it marked a genuine step forward in thinking about organisational change. It brought the insights of Solution Focused Therapy (developed in the late seventies by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg) into the workplace. The second edition, published in 2007, broadens its
Self-esteem, self-confidence, self-doubt. What are they? Everyone will have their own slightly different definition.
Steve Andreas’ brilliant book "Transform Your Self: Becoming Who You Want To Be" makes these issues a lot clearer. In his model, somebody’s "self-concept" is made up of the qualities and
abilities they think of themselves as having.
For any given quality, they will have a collection of reference experiences, like a ‘database’ – probably with one iconic ‘image’ which comes up immediately when they think of the quality (though the ‘image’ is not necessarily a visual one), and a collection of reference experiences which come up when they think about it a bit more deeply.
So, if someone has a ‘database’ which supports them in feeling they have the quality or ability strongly, then they will feel confident in that context. How strongly they feel they have it will depend on things like number of examples and (for NLP buffs) the ‘submodalities’ of the representations. How the person responds to these will vary from individual to individual.
‘Self-esteem’ comes from how the person evaluates their ‘self-concept’ (or rather ‘self-concepts’ as there is one for each quality or ability the person is thinking about) – if they
value kindness highly and they have a strong self-concept for kindness, they will feel good about themselves whenever they think about themselves in this context.
Conversely, if they only have a weak self-concept for a quality they value, or they have a strong self-concept for something they value negatively, they won’t feel good about themselves when they
think about themselves in that context.
Getting the book will give you a lot more information, obviously, but some things to watch out for in coaching would be:
– if their self-concept tends to be about ‘not having’ certain qualities – e.g. "I’m not cruel" rather than "I’m kind", then all their representations will be of the opposite of what they want – a recipe for unhappiness which will leave them feeling ’empty’ and also probably comparing themselves with other people.
– a ‘robust’ self-concept for a given quality (Andreas found) rather surprisingly includes a few ‘counter-examples’ (of times when they didn’t display the quality or ability), which enables the person to recognise more easily when they are not displaying it in real life, and also to accept and learn from feedback more readily.
I can’t recommend this highly enough. It’s an NLP book, but the NLP content is fairly basic submodalities with very little in the way of jargon. It’s a book for coaches and therapists rather than a self-help book.
As I said, self-esteem and self-confidence are vague terms which are going to mean different things to different people, though I suspect the differences are largely going to be about content – the structure of what it means to each person is going to be pretty much as described in the book.
I’ve used the ideas a lot – they work!
