Vedere Consulting
There's a sweet spot where fulfillment and productivity intersect. My blog is dedicated to helping leaders find it for themselves and their employees. --Plum Cluverius,Executive CoachTuesday, January 17, 2012
How to Get Where You Want to Go
Like many of us, my son John is a busy man. He’s in graduate school and has big dreams about where he wants to go and what he wants to do. Achieving those goals means a lot of sacrifice and discipline now—hard courses, much research, publishing and presenting papers. There’s a lot riding on how he does now and that means he’s under considerable pressure.
I asked him recently if he ever felt overwhelmed or anxious. His answer taught me a valuable lesson--one I’ve heard before but it was somehow more memorable coming from him. He said that you can’t think about the whole road at once. If you think about everything you have to get done, all the obstacles you have to overcome, it’s easy to get discouraged. But if you focus on the step in front of you right now, complete that step and then move on to the next a big dream becomes much more doable.
Equally important, each day you have to concentrate on the one or two most important things you need to get done that day. Not the easy ones or the urgent ones (think e-mail!) but the important ones. What tasks move the ball down the field toward your ultimate goal?
It’s simple advice, really. But for those of us who have been afraid to dream big or who go through each day stressed out and exhausted, that simple advice is profound. I often encourage my clients to challenge themselves to set a powerful and challenging goal for themselves and then to identify only the first step toward that goal. Complete that first step and then decide the next one. Your progress is organic and takes advantage of the opportunities that show themselves unexpectedly. You stay on track and can end each day with a sense of accomplishment.
So thank you, John, for that great insight. Think big, take it one day at a time and each day do the most important thing.
Labels: Resilience
Click for more information on executive coaching with Vedere Consulting. You can also follow Plum on Twitter.
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Withstanding Life’s Challenges
In the white paper on resilience I co-authored with J. Stephen Lindsey, http://www.box.net/s/oakto94omx3xumvv7aqm, Steve and I talk about specific thing you can do to build your resilience. Resilience is your ability to withstand life’s challenges, to “perform in the storm” as performance researcher Jim Loehr says. In today’s world, we face constant challenge, constant change, greater demands and more time pressures. It’s so easy to get knocked off center, to feel stressed and pressured all the time.
Building our resilience builds our ability to withstand this pressure, to thrive in a challenging environment. The secret to resilience is the stress-recovery cycle—challenging ourselves and then providing a period of time to recover. Jim Loehr goes into this in more detail in this youtube video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybfPNevrF00.
There are a number of ways to build from thinking positively to breaking projects into small chunks, to getting in touch with your deepest values. Many more hints and resources are listed in our white paper, “Resilience: The Key to Peak Performance. I invite you to take a look and let me know what you think.
Labels: Resilience
Click for more information on executive coaching with Vedere Consulting. You can also follow Plum on Twitter.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Motivation: What Does Work?
In my last post, I discussed the dangers of relying on rewards and punishment to motivate people. As Dan Pink (danpink.com) writes in his book, Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us, rewards and punishments often produce lower performance in work that demands creativity, innovation, and independent initiative.
One of the studies Pink cites provides a clue about why. In 1949, psychology professor Harry F. Harlow crafted an experiment to study learning in primates (in this case rhesus monkeys). He created a simple puzzle which the monkeys could solve by pulling a pin out of a block of wood, undoing a hook and then pulling up a hinge. The puzzles were placed in the monkeys’ cages before the test to see what the monkeys would do. Surprisingly, they began playing with the puzzle with what looked like enjoyment until they found the solution. By the time the researchers tested them, the monkeys solved the puzzle easily and repeatedly.
Up to that time, psychologists believed there were only two forms of motivation, our biological drive and extrinsic motivators like rewards and punishments. What shocked Harlow and his associates was that when they gave the monkeys raisins as a reward for solving the puzzles they make more errors and solved the puzzle less frequently. Harlow postulated that a third motivational drive existed, which he called intrinsic motivation. In addition he noted that the introduction of the extrinsic reward, food, “served to disrupt performance.”
Fast forward to 1995 when Microsoft launched its well researched and funded electronic encyclopedia, Encarta. Who could have predicted that by 2010 it would be defunct and Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia written by amateurs who are never paid a dime, would be the largest and most popular encyclopedia in the world? Obviously the volunteers who developed and maintain Wikipedia don’t do it for the money!
Why work on a project for free? As Harlow showed, the reward is the activity itself—in its capacity to satisfy us. Pink identifies three types of intrinsic motivation that create that sense of satisfaction: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Autonomy is about choice. It is about doing something we enjoy, when we want to do it, choosing who we do it with and how we do it. Watch small children at play and it’s clear we’re born self directed.
Pink describes mastery as “getting better at something that matters.” We are engaged and motivated when the tasks we are given allow us to stretch (if it’s too easy we get bored), but they aren’t so tough that we give up. Just as monkeys played with the puzzle until they mastered it, we humans want to be good at something, to master something.
Purpose is “a cause greater and more enduring” than ourselves. It is the part of us that is transcendent, which feels best when we are doing something to make the world a better place.
Pink describes a number of ways to harness intrinsic motivators to boost performance. An Australian software company initiated a practice called “Fed Ex Days” for their engineers. Once a quarter employees have 24 hours to work on any project they choose. It could be a fix to an existing system or try out an entirely new idea. At the end of the 24 hours, employees gather to show what they’ve developed. Many successful new initiatives have come from this practice.
Distributing tasks among employees based on what they do well and enjoy doing taps into mastery. Another method is to give yourself (and perhaps your employees) a “flow test.” Set a timer to remind you to stop what you are doing and write down what you are doing, how you feel at that moment, and whether you are completely absorbed in your work. Do this about 40 times at random intervals for one week. Then analyze the data to determine how you could increase the number of optimal experiences (when you are absorbed in work that engages you) in your work day.
One way to find your purpose is to ask yourself a big question. Pink describes how Claire Booth Luce once told President Kennedy, “ ‘A great man is one sentence.’ Abraham Lincoln’s sentence was: ‘He preserved the union and freed the slaves.” Franklin Roosevelt’s was: ‘He lifted us out of a great depression and helped us win a world war.’” Luce challenged Kennedy to find his one sentence. Our challenge is to find ours.
See Pink’s book for more ways to build intrinsic motivation in yourself, in your organization and in your children.
Plum Cluverius, PCC is an executive coach with over 30 years experience in leadership development. She lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.
One of the studies Pink cites provides a clue about why. In 1949, psychology professor Harry F. Harlow crafted an experiment to study learning in primates (in this case rhesus monkeys). He created a simple puzzle which the monkeys could solve by pulling a pin out of a block of wood, undoing a hook and then pulling up a hinge. The puzzles were placed in the monkeys’ cages before the test to see what the monkeys would do. Surprisingly, they began playing with the puzzle with what looked like enjoyment until they found the solution. By the time the researchers tested them, the monkeys solved the puzzle easily and repeatedly.
Up to that time, psychologists believed there were only two forms of motivation, our biological drive and extrinsic motivators like rewards and punishments. What shocked Harlow and his associates was that when they gave the monkeys raisins as a reward for solving the puzzles they make more errors and solved the puzzle less frequently. Harlow postulated that a third motivational drive existed, which he called intrinsic motivation. In addition he noted that the introduction of the extrinsic reward, food, “served to disrupt performance.”
Fast forward to 1995 when Microsoft launched its well researched and funded electronic encyclopedia, Encarta. Who could have predicted that by 2010 it would be defunct and Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia written by amateurs who are never paid a dime, would be the largest and most popular encyclopedia in the world? Obviously the volunteers who developed and maintain Wikipedia don’t do it for the money!
Why work on a project for free? As Harlow showed, the reward is the activity itself—in its capacity to satisfy us. Pink identifies three types of intrinsic motivation that create that sense of satisfaction: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Autonomy is about choice. It is about doing something we enjoy, when we want to do it, choosing who we do it with and how we do it. Watch small children at play and it’s clear we’re born self directed.
Pink describes mastery as “getting better at something that matters.” We are engaged and motivated when the tasks we are given allow us to stretch (if it’s too easy we get bored), but they aren’t so tough that we give up. Just as monkeys played with the puzzle until they mastered it, we humans want to be good at something, to master something.
Purpose is “a cause greater and more enduring” than ourselves. It is the part of us that is transcendent, which feels best when we are doing something to make the world a better place.
Pink describes a number of ways to harness intrinsic motivators to boost performance. An Australian software company initiated a practice called “Fed Ex Days” for their engineers. Once a quarter employees have 24 hours to work on any project they choose. It could be a fix to an existing system or try out an entirely new idea. At the end of the 24 hours, employees gather to show what they’ve developed. Many successful new initiatives have come from this practice.
Distributing tasks among employees based on what they do well and enjoy doing taps into mastery. Another method is to give yourself (and perhaps your employees) a “flow test.” Set a timer to remind you to stop what you are doing and write down what you are doing, how you feel at that moment, and whether you are completely absorbed in your work. Do this about 40 times at random intervals for one week. Then analyze the data to determine how you could increase the number of optimal experiences (when you are absorbed in work that engages you) in your work day.
One way to find your purpose is to ask yourself a big question. Pink describes how Claire Booth Luce once told President Kennedy, “ ‘A great man is one sentence.’ Abraham Lincoln’s sentence was: ‘He preserved the union and freed the slaves.” Franklin Roosevelt’s was: ‘He lifted us out of a great depression and helped us win a world war.’” Luce challenged Kennedy to find his one sentence. Our challenge is to find ours.
See Pink’s book for more ways to build intrinsic motivation in yourself, in your organization and in your children.
Plum Cluverius, PCC is an executive coach with over 30 years experience in leadership development. She lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.
Labels: Leadership Development
Click for more information on executive coaching with Vedere Consulting. You can also follow Plum on Twitter.
Monday, April 12, 2010
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Monday, April 5, 2010
The Perils of Pay for Performance
In the early 1960’s, a psychologist named Sam Glucksberg conducted an experiment testing the effects of extrinsic rewards on creativity. He divided his subjects into two groups and gave them a puzzle to solve that required identifying a new function for a common object (in this case a box with tacks in it). Half the group was told that they were being timed to determine a benchmark for how long it took to solve the puzzle. The other half was told that they would receive a cash award if they finished in the top 25% of the group and a higher cash award if they finished first. Which group do you think finished the puzzle faster?
If you guessed the group with the cash incentive, you guessed wrong. It took them an average of 3 ½ minutes longer to get the puzzle. Yes, that’s right. 3 ½ minutes longer. Why? Because extrinsic rewards tend to narrow our focus. We look toward the goal, which makes it more difficult to see the wider implications. Solving the problem in the experiment required a wide focus, an openness to new solutions.
Other psychologists have done similar studies that have tested this effect on creativity. What they have found is radically changing our idea of what motivates exceptional performance. It is not, according to Daniel Pink in his new book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, (http://www.danpink.com/) the cash bonuses, the commissions, the high salaries, the pay for performance many companies use to incent employees. He says these types of rewards work fine if the task follows a set of guidelines or rules and is repetitive. But for creative work, for solving problems that haven’t been solved before, for dealing with complex issues where guidelines don’t work, science is showing us that rewards and punishments not only don’t work, they sometimes actually do harm by lowering performance or incenting unethical behavior.
In a second experiment cited by Pink, economists Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini studied the effects of punishment on parents whose children attended 20 day care centers in Haifa, Israel. The closing time for the centers was 4:00 p.m. If parents were late, a teacher would have to stay with the child until the parents arrived. Gneezy and Rustichini began the study by recording the number of times parents were late picking up their children. At the end of four weeks, the researchers were allowed to charge a fine for late parents. Because a punishment had been imposed, the researchers expected the number of late parents to decrease, but to their astonishment, the opposite happened. After the fine was imposed, the number of late parents actually increased, eventually climbing to a level twice as high as the pre-fine level. What Pink concluded is that the threat of punishment crowded out the motivation parents once had to treat their children’s teacher fairly. “The fine,” he says, “shifted the parents’ decision from a partly moral obligation (be fair to my kids’ teacher), to a pure transaction (I can buy extra time). There wasn’t room for both. The punishment didn’t promote good behavior; it crowded it out.”
Pink says our organizations, for the most part, still operate under the assumption that the way to increase desirable behavior is to reward it and the way to decrease undesirable behavior is to punish it. Our pay systems are built on this foundation. But science is telling us that there’s a cost, and the cost is diminished performance, less creativity, lowered intrinsic reward, more short-term thinking, and organizations where good behavior can get crowded out and shortcuts, even cheating, are encouraged. This doesn't mean that equitable pay is unimportant. Unequal or unfair pay creates a distraction. But for creative work, extrinsic rewards often backfire.
Plum Cluverius, PCC is an executive coach with over 30 years experience in leadership development. She lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.
If you guessed the group with the cash incentive, you guessed wrong. It took them an average of 3 ½ minutes longer to get the puzzle. Yes, that’s right. 3 ½ minutes longer. Why? Because extrinsic rewards tend to narrow our focus. We look toward the goal, which makes it more difficult to see the wider implications. Solving the problem in the experiment required a wide focus, an openness to new solutions.
Other psychologists have done similar studies that have tested this effect on creativity. What they have found is radically changing our idea of what motivates exceptional performance. It is not, according to Daniel Pink in his new book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, (http://www.danpink.com/) the cash bonuses, the commissions, the high salaries, the pay for performance many companies use to incent employees. He says these types of rewards work fine if the task follows a set of guidelines or rules and is repetitive. But for creative work, for solving problems that haven’t been solved before, for dealing with complex issues where guidelines don’t work, science is showing us that rewards and punishments not only don’t work, they sometimes actually do harm by lowering performance or incenting unethical behavior.
In a second experiment cited by Pink, economists Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini studied the effects of punishment on parents whose children attended 20 day care centers in Haifa, Israel. The closing time for the centers was 4:00 p.m. If parents were late, a teacher would have to stay with the child until the parents arrived. Gneezy and Rustichini began the study by recording the number of times parents were late picking up their children. At the end of four weeks, the researchers were allowed to charge a fine for late parents. Because a punishment had been imposed, the researchers expected the number of late parents to decrease, but to their astonishment, the opposite happened. After the fine was imposed, the number of late parents actually increased, eventually climbing to a level twice as high as the pre-fine level. What Pink concluded is that the threat of punishment crowded out the motivation parents once had to treat their children’s teacher fairly. “The fine,” he says, “shifted the parents’ decision from a partly moral obligation (be fair to my kids’ teacher), to a pure transaction (I can buy extra time). There wasn’t room for both. The punishment didn’t promote good behavior; it crowded it out.”
Pink says our organizations, for the most part, still operate under the assumption that the way to increase desirable behavior is to reward it and the way to decrease undesirable behavior is to punish it. Our pay systems are built on this foundation. But science is telling us that there’s a cost, and the cost is diminished performance, less creativity, lowered intrinsic reward, more short-term thinking, and organizations where good behavior can get crowded out and shortcuts, even cheating, are encouraged. This doesn't mean that equitable pay is unimportant. Unequal or unfair pay creates a distraction. But for creative work, extrinsic rewards often backfire.
Plum Cluverius, PCC is an executive coach with over 30 years experience in leadership development. She lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.
Labels: Leadership Development
Click for more information on executive coaching with Vedere Consulting. You can also follow Plum on Twitter.
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Getting Through a Job Transition Successfully
“I can’t seem to focus—it’s taking me three times as long to get anything done.” “One day I feel fine, the next I’m in a panic.” “It’s strange, the day just seems to go by and at the end of it I haven’t accomplished anything I set out to do.” “No one will hire me, I’m too old.”
A number of my clients are going through a career transition. Sometimes they are the ones making the decision, other times someone made the decision for them. What all of them have needed is a clear understanding of what happens to them emotionally when they make this kind of significant change.
Why is that important? Emotions are the drivers of our behavior. We move and act based on how we feel. Any kind of change produces all kinds of emotions, and some of those emotions make it difficult to do anything. When we enter the unknown, as we must when changing a job or a career, most people don’t know what to expect emotionally. They don’t know that there are predictable patterns of emotional states that are a natural part of the transition process. They believe they are alone, that no one else is experiencing what they are going through. Worse still, they may believe that something is wrong with them.
William Bridges (http://www.wmbridges.com/ )has written several books about the emotional stages of transition and his work has helped my clients and many others make sense of the myriad of emotions they experience as they move from the old to the new. He first distinguished the transition process (the emotional response to change) from the change process (the actual change that is triggering the emotional response) and divided the transition process into three phases: ending, chaos or the neutral zone, and new beginning.
In the ending stage of transition, one has to come to grips with the fact that with change something has to go away. People experience a sense of loss and all the emotions that go with it—denial, anger, bargaining, sadness and resignation, acceptance. In the chaos stage (Bridges now calls it the neutral zone) people have accepted that something has ended but they don’t know what the new job or career will look like. This middle period is full of ups and downs—at times it seems like there is nothing to hold onto. People are upbeat one day and depressed the next. It becomes difficult to focus as familiar markers go away. It’s sometimes hard to get up in the morning or to get motivated.
It sounds pretty miserable, doesn’t it? But there’s an upside to the chaos. It’s an incredibly creative period. The old blinders are off and people can see their situation in new ways and develop solutions that were unthinkable before. I have watched clients come up with innovative ideas for networking and marketing themselves or their businesses—things that would never have been on their radar screens under normal circumstances.
The third period is called the new beginning. This is the stage where the future starts to take shape and people can see where they are headed. It has some challenges too, as people struggle with developing the confidence that they can take on this new role. But the path is much clearer and in general the emotional roller coaster has smoothed out.
I have found four things to be of tremendous help in moving through the stages of transition. The first is to recognize that the ups and downs of the transition period are normal and usually temporary. You are not alone—and you aren’t crazy! The second is to question your negative assumptions. If you think your age is an issue, consider this. Research has shown that energy and vigor are more important than age to employers. Pay attention to what you accept about yourself and your situation as true. Is it really? Experiment with alternative, more hopeful, assumptions. Third, focus on what you do well rather than your shortcomings. Creativity is expanded in a positive frame of mind. Fourth, create a schedule or routine to replace the old one you had while working. Include satisfying and fun activities as part of the mix. Bring some things into your life you couldn’t fit in while you were working.
Understanding and working with the emotional side of change helps make positive change possible. It makes it easier to navigate the unknown.
Plum Cluverius, PCC is an executive coach with over 30 years experience in leadership development. She lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.
A number of my clients are going through a career transition. Sometimes they are the ones making the decision, other times someone made the decision for them. What all of them have needed is a clear understanding of what happens to them emotionally when they make this kind of significant change.
Why is that important? Emotions are the drivers of our behavior. We move and act based on how we feel. Any kind of change produces all kinds of emotions, and some of those emotions make it difficult to do anything. When we enter the unknown, as we must when changing a job or a career, most people don’t know what to expect emotionally. They don’t know that there are predictable patterns of emotional states that are a natural part of the transition process. They believe they are alone, that no one else is experiencing what they are going through. Worse still, they may believe that something is wrong with them.
William Bridges (http://www.wmbridges.com/ )has written several books about the emotional stages of transition and his work has helped my clients and many others make sense of the myriad of emotions they experience as they move from the old to the new. He first distinguished the transition process (the emotional response to change) from the change process (the actual change that is triggering the emotional response) and divided the transition process into three phases: ending, chaos or the neutral zone, and new beginning.
In the ending stage of transition, one has to come to grips with the fact that with change something has to go away. People experience a sense of loss and all the emotions that go with it—denial, anger, bargaining, sadness and resignation, acceptance. In the chaos stage (Bridges now calls it the neutral zone) people have accepted that something has ended but they don’t know what the new job or career will look like. This middle period is full of ups and downs—at times it seems like there is nothing to hold onto. People are upbeat one day and depressed the next. It becomes difficult to focus as familiar markers go away. It’s sometimes hard to get up in the morning or to get motivated.
It sounds pretty miserable, doesn’t it? But there’s an upside to the chaos. It’s an incredibly creative period. The old blinders are off and people can see their situation in new ways and develop solutions that were unthinkable before. I have watched clients come up with innovative ideas for networking and marketing themselves or their businesses—things that would never have been on their radar screens under normal circumstances.
The third period is called the new beginning. This is the stage where the future starts to take shape and people can see where they are headed. It has some challenges too, as people struggle with developing the confidence that they can take on this new role. But the path is much clearer and in general the emotional roller coaster has smoothed out.
I have found four things to be of tremendous help in moving through the stages of transition. The first is to recognize that the ups and downs of the transition period are normal and usually temporary. You are not alone—and you aren’t crazy! The second is to question your negative assumptions. If you think your age is an issue, consider this. Research has shown that energy and vigor are more important than age to employers. Pay attention to what you accept about yourself and your situation as true. Is it really? Experiment with alternative, more hopeful, assumptions. Third, focus on what you do well rather than your shortcomings. Creativity is expanded in a positive frame of mind. Fourth, create a schedule or routine to replace the old one you had while working. Include satisfying and fun activities as part of the mix. Bring some things into your life you couldn’t fit in while you were working.
Understanding and working with the emotional side of change helps make positive change possible. It makes it easier to navigate the unknown.
Plum Cluverius, PCC is an executive coach with over 30 years experience in leadership development. She lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.
Labels: Career and Job Transition
Click for more information on executive coaching with Vedere Consulting. You can also follow Plum on Twitter.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
How to Build Your Emotional Intelligence
“Emotions . . . are at the root of everything we do, the unquenchable origin of every act more complicated that a reflex. . . In all cases, emotions are humanity’s motivator and its omnipresent guide.”
--Thomas Lewis,MD, Fari Amini, MD and Richard Lannon, MD, A General Theory of Love
If you want to motivate people to give you their best every day and inspire them to keep moving forward despite the inevitable obstacles that get in the way of achieving a goal, you have to know how to touch them on an emotional level. That requires emotional intelligence, the capacity to identify and understand one’s own and others emotions, and to manage oneself in relationships. There is a plethora of information on emotional intelligence, but when it comes to developing emotional intelligence, the material that appeals most to me comes from Learning in Action Technologies, www.learninginaction.com, a Seattle-based company specializing in EQ related assessments, workshops, teleclasses, and coaching.
Learning in Action focuses on the basic building blocks of emotional intelligence. The competencies and skills Daniel Goleman and others use to predict leadership performance flow from these capacities. If you want to improve your ability to use your emotions intelligently, it makes sense to work on these foundational capacities first. These are:
Self Reflection is the ability to recognize your own experience—your thoughts, feelings, wants, bodily sensations and actions. Self reflection is the capacity to observe yourself in the moment and to use your internal experience to inform what you do. Much of our internal experience is so automatic that we remain unconscious of it. As we build our capacity to observe our own reactions to a situation, we can consciously choose how to act instead of responding automatically (and often ineffectively).
Self Regulation and Self Soothing is the capacity to calm ourselves when we experience tension and to soothe ourselves when we experience emotional pain. By calming ourselves in healthy ways, we clear our brains so we can assess the situation more accurately, identify more possibilities for action, and choose more wisely. With this capacity, we are able to regain a sense of balance on our own, without requiring others to change.
Empathy is the ability to recognize what someone else is experiencing, to see something from their perspective, and to accept that perspective even if you don’t agree with it. It is being able to put yourself in someone’s shoes. Empathy is both the ability to accurately assess what someone else is feeling and to feel for them—to care about their experience.
Learning in Action has developed an assessment to measure these capacities, the EQ in Action Profile, and a handbook of practices for strengthening each area. The EQ in Action Profile uses videotaped scenarios to measure how you respond to stressful situations rather than self report or a 360 assessment. The handbook offers 150 suggestions for strengthening your EQ fitness, and is available to individuals who have taken the assessment.
Plum Cluverius, PCC is an executive coach with over 30 years experience in leadership development. She lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.
--Thomas Lewis,MD, Fari Amini, MD and Richard Lannon, MD, A General Theory of Love
If you want to motivate people to give you their best every day and inspire them to keep moving forward despite the inevitable obstacles that get in the way of achieving a goal, you have to know how to touch them on an emotional level. That requires emotional intelligence, the capacity to identify and understand one’s own and others emotions, and to manage oneself in relationships. There is a plethora of information on emotional intelligence, but when it comes to developing emotional intelligence, the material that appeals most to me comes from Learning in Action Technologies, www.learninginaction.com, a Seattle-based company specializing in EQ related assessments, workshops, teleclasses, and coaching.
Learning in Action focuses on the basic building blocks of emotional intelligence. The competencies and skills Daniel Goleman and others use to predict leadership performance flow from these capacities. If you want to improve your ability to use your emotions intelligently, it makes sense to work on these foundational capacities first. These are:
Self Reflection is the ability to recognize your own experience—your thoughts, feelings, wants, bodily sensations and actions. Self reflection is the capacity to observe yourself in the moment and to use your internal experience to inform what you do. Much of our internal experience is so automatic that we remain unconscious of it. As we build our capacity to observe our own reactions to a situation, we can consciously choose how to act instead of responding automatically (and often ineffectively).
Self Regulation and Self Soothing is the capacity to calm ourselves when we experience tension and to soothe ourselves when we experience emotional pain. By calming ourselves in healthy ways, we clear our brains so we can assess the situation more accurately, identify more possibilities for action, and choose more wisely. With this capacity, we are able to regain a sense of balance on our own, without requiring others to change.
Empathy is the ability to recognize what someone else is experiencing, to see something from their perspective, and to accept that perspective even if you don’t agree with it. It is being able to put yourself in someone’s shoes. Empathy is both the ability to accurately assess what someone else is feeling and to feel for them—to care about their experience.
Learning in Action has developed an assessment to measure these capacities, the EQ in Action Profile, and a handbook of practices for strengthening each area. The EQ in Action Profile uses videotaped scenarios to measure how you respond to stressful situations rather than self report or a 360 assessment. The handbook offers 150 suggestions for strengthening your EQ fitness, and is available to individuals who have taken the assessment.
Plum Cluverius, PCC is an executive coach with over 30 years experience in leadership development. She lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.
Labels: Emotional Intelligence Self Mastery
Click for more information on executive coaching with Vedere Consulting. You can also follow Plum on Twitter.
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