September 2nd, 2010

Leadership Skills: Being a competent leader

So I’ve been training leadership programs for the last few years and looked at my participants. Firstly, not all of them are leader material to begin with. Why do we develop them? Secondly, not all of them need leadership because they already have it. I’ve also been working with, as some of you might know, the Army in various capacities. What strikes me is that the motivated workforce in a reservist camp carries much different energy than leadership in an average MNC. I believe it is all about leadership competence.

Here’s what I’ve discovered in leadership competency development.

  1. Good leaders know what they need to do. They may not be given the bible of standards to follow, but they think through it and understand it thoroughly in order understand their task at hand. This guides them in their ability to solve problems and make decisions (it’s always in relation to what goal needs to be achieved).
  2. Good leaders know what skills are required to achieve what they need to do. They begin to consider the team and human elements as well as the technical requirements to get their task achieved.
  3. Good leaders know how to win over what they require. This means that their level of persuasiveness is high on the scale. They enroll people into their vision of the future and excite them through their language. In order to win people over, the leader also needs to listen and understand constraints. He needs to identify if the gaps are reasonable and whether changes need to take place.
  4. Good leaders find innovative alternatives to gaps. It’s not always possible to find a direct solution all the time. Often, it requires a constraint to help a good leader move in an alternative but plausible direction.
  5. Good leaders look at the global scale systemically. They not only have an eye for vision, but also have an idea about other things that have an impact of the achievement of their goals. They are wary about the things that influence their goals negatively and take measures to correct them. They do their best to identify things that support their goals.
  6. Good leaders make things happen. It’s easy to be a leader on the ground but you wait for things to happen. If a goal is there to achieve, leaders are the ones to guide the way. This basically includes everyone in an organization because leadership is not a “position” – it’s a sense of responsibility and good leaders across the hierarchy recognize this.
  7. Good leaders make their intentions known and valid. They know how to argue the right way, support things well and ensure that people get the idea. They seldom use force to impose their ideas. They want to be predictably clear and this allows the people around them to be open to them. Their intention allows people to have clear direction and be empowered toward whatever needs to be done.
  8. Good leaders learn fast. They learn from others, and learn from mistakes. Both are good, because the leader implements new ideas based on learnings and enjoys sharing them for others to learn from as well. A good leader learns fast so that he enables others to learn as well. If they need to pick up skills, they do it.
  9. Good leaders build better leaders. Through their experience, they help to hone the leadership capabilities of other people within their team.
  10. Good leaders do less but achieve more. They don’t have to be present in a project or event for it to be successful. They have already empowered their team to achieve this willingly and reap their rewards accordingly. If the reward is not available within the organization, they look outside of the organization to offer rewards to deserving people.
  11. Good leaders take on big goals and move toward them. In fact, they let people know they are doing it and shamelessly let people know how they are doing.

CategoryBusiness, Executive Coaching, Leadership | CommentView Comments

September 1st, 2010

Executive Coaching Singapore: Reaping Results With Coaches

It’s getting more common to get coaches to guide executives in organizations, in order to generate better results. Generally, a coach doesn’t just come into the organization to tell others what to do – that much is known. But how do you really reap results?

Difficult meetingCreative Commons License photo credit: Simon Blackley

In executive coaching sessions, you should go through several sessions focusing on goals and targets. Each of these goals and targets may require one or two sessions itself to define. The strategy you implement will require proper thinking through, and your coach will guide you through the process of gaining awareness of your thinking and provide insight as to what you want to achieve. Business results are pretty simple to assess, and they usually relate to return on investment. However, not all business results are cheap to assess. For example, if you want to conduct a proper assessment on return on investment for training, it may take some doing. The more accurate the measure, the more likely it is going to be more expensive and time consuming.

However, sometimes, this coaching has nothing to do with the business itself. It may be that the individual wants some new direction, sense of self, communication problems resolved and the like. In these cases, the goal being set is not necessarily “I want to achieve an extra $1m revenue” but “I want to feel confident speaking to my new group of managers” for instance. The less well defined the goal, the less likely you can measure it.

Evidence Procedures

In my coaching, I introduce the concept of ‘evidence procedures’. It’s basically a way of defining your end result through some kind of assessment of evidence. Just like in a financial result analysis, we can see a lot of evidence for certain kinds of goals being achieved, and easy to see, evidence procedures give us a subjective measure of how well you are reaching a particular goal. Here’s an example:-

“I want to believe in my people again”

This is tough because it is a morale issue. I’ve taken a scale and gotten this executive to measure on a scale of 7 how much he currently believes in his people, so let’s suppose he gives a 1. The intervention is to get the client to move from 1 to 7 where he now believes in his staff and employees. There are several ways to do this that are based on procedures I’ve defined when working with clients.

Here’s yet another example:-

“I can’t decide whether or not to push on for this project. Both seem to have their inherent dangers and risks, and I’m just not sure”

Basically, this executive needs to be able to make a decision. But more importantly, looking forward, there must be some understanding about what the consequences are for making such a decision. In assessing the decision making process, I first model after his other effective decision strategies using a modeling process in NLP, then test that strategy, with the measure being whatever he defines for me after he is aware of his decision making strategy.

What I want to emphasize therefore is that the ability to reap rewards does not just lie in previously known measures of return on investment alone. Sometimes subjective measures need to be implemented for less tangible goals that still affect a human being and his sense of self. Do spend time with your coach in defining your targets and deliverables so that effective collaboration can take place.

CategoryBusiness, Executive Coaching | CommentView Comments

August 31st, 2010

Handling Negative Emotions: Plutchik’s Wheel Of Emotions

I found this quite interesting and thought it might be a good idea to share it with you. This wheel of emotions shows the position you are at, and is a useful tool for emotional literacy.

If you’re not sure what that word means, perhaps you can check it up and find out what it means because you’ll have some days when you run out of words to express your emotions!

CategoryAwareness, Negative Emotions, Personal Development | CommentView Comments

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August 29th, 2010

Teacher Training: Simple Steps To Good Education

Have you ever been surprised at how good educators somehow bring out the best in their students? Have you also wanted to do that for yourself as an educator?

Joseph's PlaywayCreative Commons License photo credit: peruisay

In my work as a trainer, I’ve met many brilliant teachers. We’d already run our Transformational Teaching program since 2005, covering aspects of learning and teaching strategies, life skills and how to re-ignite the passion in some of these very dedicated teachers.

Some of them are very good at what they do. Yet, no matter how good they are, there’s so much more they can do to bring out the best in their students if only their methods change just slightly.

  1. Student rapport. I’ve seen many teacher stumble on the issue of student rapport. A lot of times, teachers are unable to manage a classroom full of what they call ‘attention deficit’ students. It’s not an easy task, but you can achieve great success if you learn strategies for rapport building.
  2. Deeper communication. Yes, it is important to learn communication, no matter how much of it you already know. More importantly, it’s not about talking. It’s about really going into the mind of the other person to understand what they are thinking and how they might react. Putting yourself into their shoes will also enable you to read them better, understand their mental processes and also create for yourself a set of strategies to better teach your students once you know how they think.
  3. Leveraged support. Many students today learn through the net. If, as a teacher, you’re not yet connected to the internet with your own blog or podcast, you might want to look at these tools for education, so that you won’t have to keep repeating certain things and also keep your teachings consistent.

 

CategoryMy Trainings, Transformational Teaching | CommentView Comments

August 29th, 2010

Personal Development: Negative Emotions

Many of us struggle with emotions and don’t admit it.

Right??

It’s in your head somewhere, but we don’t talk about it, we don’t think through it, and we certainly don’t process them in a way that makes us resourceful.

It seems that there’s lots of us who are unable to deal with emotions constructively in order to create the necessary changes in our lives. Negative emotions act as a weight that prevents us from moving forward a lot of the time. Sometimes, a negative emotion puts you into a point of making a decision, and depending on the way you make a choice, you can get ahead, or get into trouble.

sunday morningCreative Commons License photo credit: woodleywonderworks

This is the issue with negative emotions. Without confronting them and processing them, these feelings can eat us up and ambush us at certain points in our life. To learn how to deal with these negative emotions, you’ll need to learn some skills. Personally, to feel more resourceful, you could do with learning NLP.

However, feeling resourceful may not always help you to deal with obstacles that were already there. In which case you’ll need a way to be able to remove that obstacle.

Negative emotions often are not handled very well. Most of the time here’s how we deal with them.

  • hide it,
  • avoid it or run away,
  • blame someone else for it

What is likely to happen is that these emotions pop up in times and places where you least expect it. I’ve had the experience of looking at clients who have sadness that completely engulfs them. Yes, there was an event that triggered it, but over time, they associate sadness with everything in their lives, which of course prevents you from getting a lot of things done. I’ve been surprised at how some people actually carry their negative emotions into their lives, but not surprised that they don’t have the necessary skills to handle them. I have a couple of suggestions for those of you who want to rid yourself of these negative feelings.

  • Recognize that negative feelings can harm you further. It’s like wearing your shoes with glass in it. It’s not a pleasant feeling, especially for something that you can’t even identify. Hiding it won’t help, and once you recognize this, at least you can do something about it. If you’re cut, letting bleed by ignoring it is hardly the thing you want to do.
  • Find a professional you can work with. I’ve realized that there are a lot of counsellors (counselors) and therapists in Singapore and even other parts of Asia who don’t work past a certain time (usually office hours). Some clients are also in need of more of a spiritual nature of healing, which a lot of counselors and therapists don’t do (usually you go to a religous leader in your organization for such forms of intervention). Some people think that looking for a therapist means that there is something wrong with them. Well, think of yourself as a person looking for the necessary healing that is appropriate for the wound you have sustained. That’s it.
  • Stick with your routines. You’ll be tasked to do certain things over the time of your work with your therapist. I’d encourage you to stick with the relationship and do your best to get your homework and routines done so that you can be healed further.

Process the negative emotions, and find freedom in whatever you need to do!

 

 

 

CategoryNegative Emotions, Uncategorized | CommentView Comments

August 26th, 2010

EMDR Therapy: How It Helps

Wow — three days of EMDR training has really come and gone. Fortunately for me, I had the opportunity to practice further to hone my clinical skill in EMDR therapy, and it has been astoundingly powerful and convincing.

So… I’m accepting new clients now who might want to work with me using EMDR.

The basic process of EMDR is quite straightforward. As a client, you will have an opportunity to allow your brain to do the reprocessing on your own without really needing talk therapy as the lead. We basically believe that your brain will do it’s emotional healing on its own. The EMDR therapist uses EMDR as part of a repertoire of skills to lead the client toward resolution of the situation.

Often, the emotional situations you might experience are clustered around a variety of things. This may include fragmented memories (memories that you haven’t really processed or are confusing, possibly traumatic) and a cluster of memories associated to other memories (called feeder memories). In this case, we process the entire series of emotions until you reach a resolution on your own without the therapists intervention.

You probably will not expect the therapist to carry out EMDR until after the therapeutic alliance has already been set, as we as practitioners have been warned not to jump into it. The EMDR process itself is not as important as collecting the right kind of information from the client so as to be of better support to the client.

The process tends to draw out emotional issues that express themselves in the beliefs we have that are primarily unconscious. The client, however, is given the chance to make those changes happen through a deceivingly simple method. Yet, converting emotional events and negative beliefs into their mirror opposites are no longer difficult using EMDR. This is not to say it cannot be hard for some people (especially with long-term psycho-pathologies) but I believe that for most who need to change their thoughts about certain things can work with an EMDR therapist in practice.

I’ve set aside some time to take in some new local clients, as I will be looking at getting those who are interested in EMDR therapy to connect with me via this website.

CategoryPsychotherapy & Counseling | CommentView Comments

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August 25th, 2010

Career Development: Understanding Difficult People

You’re in the workplace and you encounter a really nasty person.

Wow! What did you do to deserve such a person, you think! Almost immediately, you might have vindictive thoughts or possibly think of a therapist (such as me haha) to refer him or her to for anger management therapy!

Actually, wouldn’t you be jumping the gun if you did that? You won’t know what’s happening in the mind of the other person, and maybe what’s worse is that you don’t really care. Perhaps, when you want to learn to deal with difficult people, you need to first understand them first. That would be, in my mind, the best first step.

Why should you “understand” the other person?

Well, let’s do a quick experiment.

Think of the last time you burst out in anger. Was it solely because of the person that you blew your top, or because of an associated series of events?

Chances are, if you think properly, most of the time when you blow your top, you’re really reacting to the straw that broke the camel’s back. However, you did have a series of things that were bugging you and that really affected you. Here’s an example.

Jim is angrily shouting at his subordinate for not getting his job done on time.

Now, logically, there’s really no explanation for Jim’s behavior. You could think he was a really unreasonable person. However, let’s review some build-up mechanisms.

  • his grandmother, who was his primary caretaker in his younger years, passed away a few weeks ago;
  • he is in the middle of handling a bad tiling job by his contractor for his new house;
  • his 15 year old daughter has just been bullied by a classmate with bruises on her arms to prove it.

Well I don’t quite care how much EQ you’ve got, sometimes a series of these events can trip people up mainly because they’re human.

As a team member, you can easily shirk your responsibility by believing that understanding others is not your job. But do remember that team dynamics begins with the relationship that team members have with one another. Difficult people sometimes appear that way because you’ve uncovered a minefield of past memories that affected them. Just because they got upset with you doesn’t mean that they are against you. It may simply mean that your ability to connect with them is not good enough.

Perhaps you might think that it is the other person’s responsibility to take charge of the feelings, right? Heh… so you tell me – when you are angry, what level of logic do you have control of, and how well can you “take charge” of these feelings? In short, be realistic of what you expect others to be able to do. Since you’re the one who’s more emotionally grounded, it should fall on you to be able to pick it up and connect with that team member. Mind you if you did that, they will look out for you next time as well!

Here are some simple tricks to empathy:

Working Together Teamwork Puzzle Concept
Creative Commons License photo credit: lumaxart:

  • Be patient. Not everyone opens up to a question like “why are you so angry”. Offer an open door, or a listening ear if they find it tough to speak up, and any other form of emotional support where possible.
  • Stand in their shoes and reflect on the feelings you feel before you communicate with them. It can be difficult to stand in another’s shoes because you’ve never really had training in that (of course you can attend my Life Coaching training and you’ll get there!) but nonetheless it will be good for you to be able to give it a shot to understand where they are coming from.
  • Don’t judge or add further expectations. This would probably destroy the relationship because it simply doesn’t show your support for such a person. Don’t even provide “feedback” unless you have investigated and understood the other person’s input first, lest they think you are simply jumping to conclusions based on what others say.

 

CategoryCareer Development, Leadership, Organizational Leadership, Team Building | CommentView Comments

August 25th, 2010

EMDR Therapy: Follow the process

I wrote yesterday about my first day’s training experience with EMDR Therapy. So far, I must say that the implications for using EMDR in a therapeutic setting as I have experienced are pretty intriguing.

MRI brain scan on VimeoCreative Commons License photo credit: Jon Olav

It focuses a lot on re-organizing the memories in a client’s mind. So, what’s the difference between doing this and, say, Re-imprinting Therapy?

  1. EMDR has been explored through academic rigor. You need a big team of people to research this area and I can see the end result of a very organized team that put the EMDR training curriculum together.
  2. EMDR follows a process that need not focus on content. In certain kinds of reimprinting, it may be necessary to get content information (which I don’t prefer to do). EMDR allows the client to be the pilot, and that any changes of experiences are shifted purely as a result of the client’s change of condition. Memories accessed are controlled and re-processed by the client; negative beliefs (negative cognitions) are handled by the automatic processes within the client’s brain. For instance, in a phobia cure, some people may experience the therapist as doing most of the work and that it was the level of skill of the therapist that made it work. However, in EMDR, the charisma of the therapist and how much more competent the therapist is above the basic level of adherence to process does not factor into the end result. Of course having said that, it would require a relatively experienced clinician to understand how these processes work and to be mindful that EMDR is an intervention and presumes competency in other areas of therapy such as client rapport, among other things.
  3. EMDR is complementary to other theoretical approaches. You don’t need to be a client-centered / psychodynamic / systemic / solution-focused therapist to learn EMDR. In fact, it is essential to use EMDR only at the appropriate time (i.e. it is highly unlikely that you will use EMDR on the first session). When it is time to begin the processing with the client, EMDR can be instituted anytime because it is process oriented.

More to come :)

CategoryPsychotherapy & Counseling | CommentView Comments

August 24th, 2010

Leadership Development: How to really choose a good program

I’ve been involved in helping people in their personal development goals and over the last few years, to also develop leaders within organizations. I’ve found that there are a few things that are necessary in order for a proper Leader Development Program to benefit organizations.

LMSCreative Commons License photo credit: oar4me

  1. A willingness to seek and accept feedback. This is necessary because before actually developing leaders, you’ll need to find them and listen to what they need. With a proper set of feedback, you can better tailor the program to suit your organization’s needs. You might need to set up a representative task force at different levels of hierarchy. This will enable the program to focus on essentials within the organization.
  2. A properly structured development plan. This leadership development plan should span all hierarchies and also include proper guidelines for supervision and appraisal, as well as a chance to demonstrate these competencies. A competency development or assessment center can be created to pool resources, for instance.
  3. Follow through. It is imperative for such an exercise to include team members who are committed to ensure that the entire system works, and continues to find ways to keep the system running.

In an attempt to keep things flowing, however, are some of these elements:

  • Drivers/champions to keep the energy flowing in this project;
  • Complementing team members;
  • A team of dedicated trainers (for knowledge transfer) and coaches (for long term assessment and development of leaders);
  • A competency and assessment team (people who are concerned about pushing leaders to the next level, not just policing the system);
  • A performance enhancement and learning transfer team that focuses on ideas to improve assessment methods and to measure how such assessment results in real returns back to the workplace.

As you probably can tell, this can cost the organization a lot. But if organizations are really serious, they have to begin to engage their leaders at this level and initiate the evolution of their human resource and performance enhancement systems.

CategoryOrganizational Leadership | CommentView Comments

August 24th, 2010

EMDR Singapore: My Level 1 Training

Ah… fresh report from the oven.

90.365
Creative Commons License photo credit: Vix Walker

Just so you know, I’m studying EMDR, which is an area of interest I had developed over the years since learning the similarities between NLP’s Eye Movement model and Francine Shapiro’s Eye Movement Desensitization process.

After looking at EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, for the uninitiated) training for day 1, one of the most important things that has struck me is the level of order and clarity that an EMDR therapist has in the treatment modality. It’s not trying to be a cure-all or panacea, and I suppose that makes it easier for the specific treatments to work.

NLP, of course, does not claim to be a cure-all. In fact, I’ve stated over and over again, it is not even a treatment modality. Some people have taught NLP from the standpoint of psychotherapy and personally, it just doesn’t work. It’s like saying you’re drinking coffee by mixing some coffee powder into a glass of water. What you get is really diluted psychotherapy. Sure, the flavor could be there. In fact, there could even be some effect from the caffeine. However, what NLP “therapists” really miss out is the huge amount of knowledge they haven’t gathered through the academic rigor of studying and comparing different psychotherapeutic approaches and the theories supporting the approach.

I’ve used NLP in therapy because I am a counselor and I have sufficient knowledge to apply certain things in the area of therapy. I also happen to be a student of linguistics that makes me understand the language structures that makes this work.

Not surprisingly, the language structures and the processes in EMDR do not deviate from my understanding of good psychotherapy. A good NLP practitioner can easily model after an EMDR specialist and generate very similar results, provided they share the same theoretical background. :)

So in any case, EMDR is interesting, and fit in with my expectations of a useful model of psychotherapy, especially for the purposes of dealing with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). A formal study of NLP to explain the underpinning processes in EMDR, in my opinion, could actually help an individual better understand psychotherapy as a whole.

CategoryMy Trainings, Research | CommentView Comments

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