Sometimes my heart feels like a solid rock.
Time to step back and ask if I am going in the wrong direction? Life shouldn’t be this hard.
“The world is made to be free in.” David Whyte
Leave a CommentTag: listening
Aloha coaching: 3 points for conversations
Published March 26, 2008 by Jo Jordan
I have just rediscovered Aloha Coaching and found their post on conversations:
Bronze is earned from listening to our own voice.
Silver is earned from incomplete conversations.
Gold is earned from voices that are struggling to be heard.
And how do we do this?
In addition to aiming for gold: to hear the voice struggling to be heard,
2. Be patient with silence.
1. Still our own inner voice
Have you seen Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED lecture on her “stroke of insight”?
Jill is a brain scientist who had a stroke quite young. She describes what it felt like to lose the left side of her brain which governs our serial processing – our inner voice. She cries when describes what it was like to be fully aware of the world via the right parallel processing side of her brain. I think they were tears of wonder (though I am sure it was pretty scary too).
I think implicitly she was advocating the idea that we put far too much emphasis on our left brain, serial processing, “I”, “to do” list brain, and not enough attention to what is happening almost imperceptibly around us.
Paulo Coelho
Paulo Coelho advocates similar idea. I have found the idea of looking towards the horizon quite useful and particularly of listening to sounds as far as I can hear.
Galba Bright of TuneupyourEQ has been talking about reflection.
In my experience, some people who are very in tune with the world don’t reflect much. I think that those of us who are have strong serial processors need to make time to relax, reflect and recreate. In the hurly-burly of the world, we can become increasingly inefficient otherwise.
Does stilling our inner voice reduce our own motivation?
I don’t think so. Indeed the opposite. It allows us to hear ourselves too.
Our serial ‘doing’ brain is important. It is what we use during “flow”, I think. Maybe a neuro-scientist could comment on that. When we are in the flow of action, we aren’t listening to anything outside that activity
We need both – action and stillness.
The big dilemma is when we get caught in one or the other!
I am just finishing a sabbatical and have the most awful resistance to getting going again. I know from experience that the adrenaline high of action will take me away from the peace of reflection, and when I am in that place, I will resist coming down.
Have you experienced anything like that?
2 CommentsAre leaders made by followers?
Published February 7, 2008 by Jo Jordan
The first time I encountered this idea, around 25 years ago now, I found it an assault to my classical training as a psychologist. Over time though, I have come to understand that the question of whether leaders are born or made is the wrong question. The right question is a sociological and anthropological question: what role does “leadership” play in organizing society and what are the different ways we use the concept?
At an organizational level, I have become convinced that leadership resides in the followers. There are times when someone is in the right place at the right time and it all comes together.
The process begins with the people talking to each other in a bounded space, such as an organization. These people talking together look for a leader, not to tell them what to do, but to represent who and what they want as a kind of shorthand to themselves and to the world.
The day a leader stops being representative of their collective wishes, either because s/he has stopped listening or because s/he no longer is what they want, then the relationship all falls apart and force needs to be used to maintain the position of “leadership”.
I suppose another sociological/anthropological question is the circumstances in which we allow leaders to run away with power and to use force against us.
It has long been agreed in the democratic English speaking world that the essence of good government is replacing leaders in an orderly way. I wish we could see the same as the standard in business organizations. The use of force against employees is a sign that something has gone wrong. Alarm bells should go off. And HR should be on the scene in a flash trying to understand why the leader believes so little in his or her people that s/he feels the need to bully them.
Young managers often don’t trust their subordinates. A skill that is rarely talked about is the skill of believing in one’s people and seeing their strengths.
I would love to collaborate with someone on this. It could make a great 2.0 app.
2 CommentsTidy catalogue of pop psychology
Published November 20, 2007 by Jo Jordan
Rhetoric, persuasion, listening: pop psychology
For selling, persuading and simple negotiation, have a look at changingminds for a useful miscellany of tips and techniques.
Sensemaking: heavy duty psychology
The psychologist to turn to when we have to lead from the front in times is Karl Weick who gives us the SIR COPE acronym.
- Social
- Iterative
- Retrospective
- Continuing
- Plausible
- Enacted
Elevator speeches
I think I might spill my drink over someone who actually spouted an elevator speech at me, but what do we say when someone asks us “What do we do?”
Can you stand up in front of 1000 people and state your personal elevator speech in 20 seconds?
Up there in the BEST elevator speeches ever!
What is your vision of the future?
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