Why some coaching questions can do more harm than good Coaching, if we follow Sir John Whitmore’s definition that it’s “helping people to learn rather than teaching them”, is about asking questions to help the ‘coachee’ find their own answers and…
How To Get People To Change Their Minds
Getting someone to change their mind, especially when they feel strongly about something, is never easy. If you go straight in, and especially if you let your strong feelings on the topic get the better of you, the chances are…
Recent Evidence-Backed Insights On How Not To Come Across As A Jerk – And What’s Behind Them
A recent paper reported in the very useful BPS Research Digest blog suggests that people often make a bad impression because they indulge in counter-productive tactics for trying to make themselves look better. The paper, “Impression mismanagement: People as inept…
Why You Need To Put More Effort Into Empathy As A Leader
Or, How Power Turns You Into A Jerk – And How To Guard Against It The higher up the management ladder you get, the less you care about or even notice how other people feel. Most of us don’t have to…
How To Increase Your Emotional Intelligence 3: Get In Touch With Your Emotions
You probably read about the psychology study last year that asked people to sit alone with their thoughts, with no distractions, for just fifteen minutes. Surprisingly, many of the test subjects (67% of the men and 25% of the women)…
How To Increase Your Emotional Intelligence 1: Own Your Emotions
The biggest block to emotional self-awareness – and how to get through it Self-awareness is the cornerstone of emotional intelligence. Here’s why: if you are not aware of your own emotions, you will have trouble regulating them because you won’t…
Emergent Principles of Appreciative Inquiry 2: The Enactment Principle
Traditionally, Appreciative Inquiry has had five guiding principles (the Constructionist, Poetic, Simultaneity, Anticipatory, and Positive principles as sent out by David Cooperrider in, for example, the Appreciative Inquiry Handbook). In recent years, new principles have started to emerge as Appreciative…
How To Use Surprise To Reduce Confirmation Bias
‘Confirmation Bias’ is when our minds filter what we perceive of the world around us, amplifying evidence that fits our existing beliefs and playing down or ignoring altogether any information that challenges them. Confirmation bias is inevitable – there’s so…
How To Solve Intractable Problems
If you’ve run out of ideas for solving a complex, intractable problem, try this exercise, drawn from the Appreciative Inquiry approach. It works by finding what’s already working well and building on it, rather than trying to analyse the causes…
The Best Way To Motivate Yourself With Self-Talk
You also need to know this if you use (or teach) self-hypnosis, or use affirmations. We now know that it makes a difference if you tell yourself “You can do it” or “I can do it”. A recent study by…