How our brains work – Metaprograms

Geoff Roberts Uncategorized

Brain, metaprogrammesI visited our local farmers market this morning (Leeds – it’s a very good market on the first Sunday of every month and a passable one on the third Sunday, so why not try it if you are local?). Going back to my car I noticed the usual muddle of newly arrived patrons looking for a parking space and then found myself looking on their behalf, indeed I actually managed to direct one car to a vacant space close to mine. This left me wondering about what it was that led me to volunteer to look for spaces on other people’s behalf, yet other people returning to their car would do so head down with no regard whatsoever to others trying to find a space.

I was reminded of the concept of meta programs – relatively hard wired perceptual and thinking filters that influence our thinking and action. Those of you who have studied psychology, or even NLP, will know that we all have a set of unique perceptual filters that help our brains deal with the zillions of bits of information that are continually impacting our senses and zapping around in our brains. Our brains are just not built to deal with this amount of information and so create a set of filters that help us narrow down the information streams to ones that seem most relevant or appropriate to us. One set of such filters has been labelled Metaprograms.

It has been suggested that there are over 100 such Metaprograms, however in this and subsequent articles I will comment on just a handful that I find particularly helpful (and of course, that selection is itself a manifestation of my own Metaprograms).

Some people in the world appear to others to act and think completely selfishly, always putting themselves and their needs first and rarely considering the needs of others. Conversely, I know people who put others’ needs in front of their own, sometimes to such an extent that they can make themselves ill dealing with other people’s issues – they sacrifice themselves for the sake of others.

You recognise the extremes of this scale in some of your friends, colleagues or associates? Self referenced thinking involves a belief that your needs are as important as others’ needs and that there are times when it is important to put yourself first; you might find you like to work alone and find being interrupted distracting or even irritating; you maybe sometimes find yourself too busy to help others do their work.

If you are others referenced (altruistic) you will be especially sensitive to the needs of other people; you are likely to go out of your way to help colleagues and friends even when this means putting your own immediate needs second; you might even find yourself anticipating the needs of others and providing for them before they have asked.

I have described the extremes of the spectrum and recognise that most others can display either of these two extremes or sit somewhere in the middle depending upon the circumstances.

We know that self-awareness is a key attribute of effective leaders and some sense of where you are on this spectrum is likely to help you lead other people more effectively, especially if they exhibit a different thinking style to you.

Getting going again – Wants vs Needs

Geoff Roberts Uncategorized

Relaxation - woman in hammock on beachI have just noticed that it is several days since I made entry to this blog. This, despite the fact that I have loads of material in my head to share with you. It set me wondering, what has got in the way to prevent me making my daily entry? After all, it is a matter of minutes to dictate my thoughts, transcribe and upload them.

Then I got round to thinking how often this happens in other areas of my life, and perhaps yours too – I have something that I want or need to do yet somehow or other I find other things more important. I could rationalise that I have spent the last few days fairly intensively coaching some clients and needed downtime to relax and prepare; indeed I can find all sorts of rationalisations about why I did not do this for the last few days. All of those would be making excuses to myself, the jargon is post-hoc rationalisation – when we look back we can always find reasons for things being done or not being done.

So, what is the diagnosis? I suggest that this is an area where we start to explore what I wanted to do, as compared to what perhaps I think I might need to do. As a matter of personal definitions, my wants are driven by internal values – what is important to me – whereas my needs tend to be driven by what I think other people want me to do. I find this a very important distinction, not least because when stick comes to lift my internal drivers will always win over some externally imposed demand.

Think of the various jobs you have to do, whether they are at home or at work, in this context. Are doing that job, is it on your list, because you really really want to do it, or are you doing it because someone else has suggested or told you to do it? Because the former ones will win out when pressure comes on and you can only deliver so much. The latter ones are likely to be candidates for delegation, to somebody who does want to do that piece of work. Remember that we all have different motivations and values and something that I think is a waste of time you might think is the best thing since sliced bread.

So, go through that Incompletes list, that list of yet to be completed tasks, and decide for every one of them “Is this something I personally want to do, that really really interests me, or is it something that I can delegate to someone else who would find it much more interesting because it meets their wants?”

How to become a leader…

Geoff Roberts Uncategorized

Yesterday afternoon I was listening to a programme on Radio 4 about the development of leaders. The programme had the inevitable leadership coach who not only claimed that he could make anyone into a coach but that he could do so in a single day! On hearing this I fluttered between being hopping mad and dismayed. The dilemma was resolved to dismay alone when he suggested to the interviewer that she can become a better leader by modelling herself on someone she admired – Winston Churchill in this case.

Well, I am all for modelling – indeed this forms a core part of some of what we deliver – and would even agree that we can learn lessons from others in leadership positions, whether we admire them or not (it might be sacrilege to say so, but that bloke Hitler knew a thing or two about organising mass support and even though I was fundamentally opposed to much of Margaret Thatcher’s policy I certainly recognised her leadership abilities).

When I examine the many leaders I have admired over the years, and you can create your own list, I find that some are outspoken and some are quiet, some are highly numerate and some are almost numerically illiterate, some did extremely well at school and some left with no qualifications, some could do every job that their subordinates were required to do and others would barely know one end of a factory from another… The one and only common attribute that these leaders had was integrity – that centredness that allowed them to consistently say what they meant and mean what they say, do what they say they would do when they said they would do it and to be willing and able to explain themselves. These people had a deep knowledge of their own values and motivations and lived them out daily; they recognised that they were not always the experts on a topic and valued everyone’s inputs even when that input challenged their own way of thinking, above all they exhibited a humility akin to that propounded in Greenleaf’s exploration of Servant Leadership.

My own reading of the path to great leadership is that yes it is possible to learn some of the behaviours necessary to act effectively as a leader but learning those behaviours alone cannot make a true leader. True leadership comes from inside, it comes from becoming more of oneself. Richard Branson did not succeed by following Margaret Thatcher, she did not lead by following Winston Churchill, he did not lead by following Gladstone and none of them would have been appropriate role models to Nelson Mandela.

If you want to be a leader learn to become more of yourself.

Networks work

Geoff Roberts change

It’s the received wisdom in business these days, and especially those businesses involved in personal relationships such as consulting, that networking is absolutely critical. Well here is a little story that really demonstrated to me the value of the networks.

I happen to be a trustee/director of a small community organisation involved in using the creative arts to engage more disaffected and disadvantaged members of the community. Now this is a sector that is under considerable pressure at the moment-firstly from reduced grants and other income opportunities and secondly (and this is almost certainly related to the first point) to the need to become ever more effective in managing the limited resources we have available. Now this latter point is of considerable interest to me it’s one reason why I was recruited in the first place so that the company could draw on my expertise.

We have been running the charity for the last four months without a chief executive and as board members shortly need a discussion of whether or not we can continue to operate without a single head honcho. Now the received wisdom is that any organisation needs a single individual heading up that organisation who can be held accountable for everything that it does and also take the lead on behalf of the organisation when necessary. But does this model necessarily apply to a small third sector organisation (we have 8 staff) in these changing times? We want our charity to both successful and a role model for others. And so we will be exploring the possibilities around how to lead and manage whilst leaving the trustee/directors to provide the proper governance role.

Now the networking story. As you might imagine I have an extensive network of colleagues that I could call on for advice. So I wrote to about 30 of them seeking their views on the situation. Within 24 hours I have 13 responses, including a couple from people I do not know who had been passed my original e-mail by my primary contact. The majority, serve up the conventional wisdom that we need someone at the top, however the four of them have offered different perspectives on how we might run the organisation and some have even offered their personal help in sorting it out. Remember, that this is after only 24 hours!

I have been genuinely astonished by the speed of the calibre of the responses I have received from my network, and from second order links. Evidence, if it were, of the value of a clearly worded request to clearly selected individuals from the network. I would not have dreamt of sending an e-mail to the hundreds of people in my address list, perhaps the few receive things so infrequently that they recognise its significance and act on it. This does go slightly against the grain of some networkers-I am in the network worth one or two people who sent me e-mails almost daily. They are shortly to be deleted from my network on the basis that I get so much from that I can pay little or no attention to any of it.

So, what’s the message? Well, nurture your networks, treat them with respect, feed them appropriately so that when you need something from then they will respond as brilliantly as mine on this occasion.

Thank you to everyone who has helped so far. What practical stories can you tell about your networks?

The habit of learning

Geoff Roberts change

I, along with many colleagues in the profession often encourage coaching clients to start a learning diary. There is plenty of evidence out there that if we spend a few minutes every day sitting down reflecting on what has happened to us, trying to make sense of it and deciding how that is going to affect our future actions then we will become more effective in our lives generally. Strangely enough most clients do not actually do this, despite our exhortations, even though they will happily act on advice from other people on saving for a pension or what qualifications to study for next.

Then I started reflecting on what I had learned at school, that 2+2 = 4, that the French for The Sun is Le Soleil, that acids turn litmus paper red and lots of other facts. I do not recall ever once, in that alleged hotbed of learning, being asked to keep a learning diary. Yet there I was surrounded by teachers who, in principle, are familiar with the works of Piaget and Kolb yet don’t seem to want to pass that information on to the students. (There is a separate discussion about whether the teachers really understood these learning theories, or whether they regarded them purely as theory with no practical value!Perhaps that is the paradigm repeating itself?)

I recall someone asking me shortly after I completed my Masters degree what was the most important thing that I learned. Well, that masters degree was in change management and I learned loads and loads of change management theory but I remain convinced that the single most important thing I learned in two years was that when handling change one must start where one is. This very practical piece of advice came from trying to use the various management theories in my work as a change leader and realising that none of them actually recognise that the real world was not as pure as the theoretical world in which they had been formulated.

I recall a colleague on that masters course who was daunted by the reading list; he needed to sit down with one of the tutors and be taught that it was not necessary to read a text book from cover to cover, but that it was okay to work from the contents list and the first few paragraphs of each chapter to identify those parts of the book that might be particularly relevant. He, nor indeed I, had not been taught this at school and certainly for me the lack of instruction in learning how to learn led to a major disconnect when I went from the structured instructional environment of a grammar school to the unstructured find-your-own way environment at the University with the results that I failed my first year and subsequently the degree. My grammar school thought that all I needed to learn was a load of facts, not how to learn.

So to go back to school. My question to you is what do you think is the most important thing for young people to learn at school? You will no doubt have your own answer, mine is that every young person needs to learn how to learn and to acquire the habit of learning

In much of our lives we acquire learning passively and collect habits good and bad without really thinking about how those habits have developed. But how would it be if Boeing designed an aeroplane passively, or an engineer designed a bridge passively? No, they actively learn about how to be more effective at designing aeroplanes and bridges by studying the successes and failures of themselves and others.

So let’s apply this discipline more widely in our lives. Let’s take five or 10 min at the end of every day to reflect upon what happens to us that day, perhaps the most significant incidents or the unusual ones. Write it down and write down what actually happened and how you felt abou;t it think about how it was the same as or different from your previous experiences and feelings and write that down; work out how it fits with your current understanding of the world (or not) and whether it might be necessary to change your opinion or understanding in order to fit this real new experience into your world; then finally work out some way of testing this new world map and using this new knowledge

Your learning diary and the habit of learning may well turn out to be the most valuable 10 minutes you spend every day of your life. Actively acquire the habit of learning. Do let me know how you find your experience of writing a learning diary.

Stretch your brain

Geoff Roberts Uncategorized

Energised brainIf you are anything like me your brain will have been on ‘idle’ for the last week or so – occupied with eating, drinking, socialising…and if you are anything like me, it now needs waking up – the metaphorical stretches that we do before exercise to make sure our muscles are warmed up properly. Anyone who has ever done yoga or other forms of exercise knows that unless we use and stretch our muscles regularly they tighten and weaken. Well, the same applies to our brain. Just imagine what your brain might be like if it was NEVER challenged and stretched from childhood – it’s the challenge and stretch that helps us learn and keeps our thinking gear fit and able.

One of the exercises we often challenge our coaching clients to complete is to do something different(ly) every day. It might simply be to read a different newspaper, or travel to work via a different route or mode of tansport, it might be to brush your teeth with the ‘wrong’ hand or to spend 10 minutes just watching the birds instead of the television…there are thousands of ‘differents’ that you could think of and do and any one of them offers the prospect of some learning and certainly keeps the brain agile.
So our Level 1 exercise is simply to do something different every day.
Level 2 is to record it and consoider what you learned about yourself or the world as a consequence of the action – and there is always some learning.

Go on, have a go – do something different every day for a week and record your feedback as comments on this article.

Twixtmas – Day 5

Geoff Roberts Twixtmas

Twixtmas description

Here we are on the last day of the year and Day 5 of Twixtmas – a time perhaps for reflection and perhaps for ‘foreflection’ (to create a word)

Day 5 – Do something for your future. Maybe you could:

1. Write a list of 10 things you will do during 2011
2. Count your blessings and ask how you can share your blessings for the year ahead.
3. Ask a spiritual question: “Why am I here?”
4. Be more creative – aim to think flexibly and ask beautiful questions for every day of 2011.
5. Identify 3 action steps to make your goals for 2011 happen now.

So, here’s my contribution to my future and I am slightly ashamed to admit that this was the most difficult of my Twixtmas blogs to write. It seems such a simple small committment, yet I know that it will make a difference

I commit to taking action on my ideas sooner rather than later.

Action is a great restorer and builder of confidence. Inaction is not only the result, but the cause, of fear. Perhaps the action you take will be successful; perhaps different action or adjustments will have to follow. But any action is better than no action at all – Norman Vincent Peale

Twixtmas – Day 4

Geoff Roberts Twixtmas

Twixtmas campaigner and GREEN director Andy Green said: “Arm yourself with pen and paper and make some time during the Twixtmas break to give yourself a five-day happiness work-out. Expressing your appreciation and thinking about the positive aspects of your future, or even writing affectionate things, have been scientifically proven to work and make you feel better in yourself.”

Day 4 Make a list of your favourite places visited or places you would like to go. Think about why you liked them so much or what attracts you to want to go there.

Some of my favourite places I have already been:

San Francisco – Val D’Isere – Napoli – Segalas – York – Cairo – Jerusalem – Cuba – Siena

I am attracted to these places for a variety of reasons, many of them to do with how different they are to my relatively comfortable life in West Yorkshire. Any of these places I would happily revisit tomorrow, knowing that I would find something new, interesting, challenging or simply wierd without really trying; they all have some sort of ‘buzz’ that’s partly to do with the place (spectacularly beautiful being a key!) and partly the people; they all have a street culture that is still developing in the UK; there is great food in all of them (yes, even Cairo!); they have a deep history and culture that permeates the whole place.

…and I would like to visit:

Australia – Hadrian’s Wall – The Great Wall of China – India

Why would I like to visit them, well these, and others not listed, have a mix of the same attributes as those places I have already been.

Twixtmas – Day 3

Geoff Roberts Twixtmas

Twixtmas campaigner and GREEN director, as well as my great friend, Andy Green said: “Arm yourself with pen and paper and make some time during the Twixtmas break to give yourself a five-day happiness work-out. Expressing your appreciation and thinking about the positive aspects of your future, or even writing affectionate things, have been scientifically proven to work and make you feel better in yourself.”

Day 3 Write a short email or letter to someone who you like or care for. Why not tell them how good they are and why they are important to you?

Dear L,

I would love you to read this and think about it. You are wonderful; you are intelligent; you are good looking; you can be thoughtful and funny; you are unique; you are and will always remain your own woman.

Always remember that your mum and your dad love you more than you can imagine – they both want the best for you, to be successful and, probably above all, safe. Whatever they say or do to you or for you is done with that in mind – you might not always like it but they always mean well, and perhaps you are now starting to realise that just occasionally they have a point and maybe even do sometimes know best 🙂

As for me, well I never could and never wanted to be anything other than a good friend. I never could and never will replace your dad although I will be here for you when you need someone to talk with, someone to ask for help or even a shoulder to cry on. Friends do not always agree, yet the mark of true friendship is a willingness to let others have their own opinions and ways of doing things without falling out.

Life is full of challenges and struggles, and of delights and disasters – those are where we learn to be strong and become ourselves.  You can have anything you want when you work for it – decide what you really want and go for it; always be willing to ask for help, we will all support you all the way.

Live, love and laugh,

Geoff