Christine Livingston

Part of the magic of coaching is that I can never tell where a relationship will end up.

An engagement that sets out to be about one thing, often ends up being about another. And few people expect coaching to touch them as deeply as it often does.

Take Patricia*.

A successful promotion

A talented woman who has fast-tracked her way through her chosen profession, she hired me to get supported in making a success of her first board level position. She was feeling unconfident.  And, quite aside from wanting to get her head round the rational side of  a more senior job, needed to build her personal resilience to be able to navigate its more emotional and political aspects.

It was a challenging move for sure and we spent a lot of time in the beginning game-planning. She worked through her business strategy and mobilised her team around it. She explored some of the tensions between her and some of her people  – and indeed some of her peers – and developed tactics that allowed her to move beyond them. She delivered some key things that were long overdue and central to the business’s long-term direction.

Within six months she was acing the role.

Confronting doubts

And it was only then, with her doubts about capability and performance put to bed, that she could confront other realities. Central to which was the emerging feeling that her initial lack of confidence was not just about how good she could be for the business, but about how good the business was for her.

Something happened that crossed her deep sense of integrity. She could have walked away at that point feeling angry and wounded, but instead she chose to use it as a lever to understand herself better. Where that took her was into doing a deep inventory of her strengths, talents, values and beliefs.

She discovered some fascinating things.

Discovering truth

First, there was a huge misalignment between her values and her company’s. She’s a people person; a real community player. They on the other hand were bottom-line oriented. And pretty ruthless with it. No amount of exercising her very powerful positive deviance was changing any of that.

So she constantly felt bad about what she was contributing. The culture was not, after all, a fit for her. She was full of ideas for how things could be different or better, but her autocratic managing director seemed only to want to clip her wings, leaving her feeling very constrained.

Then she realised that she did not identify with the company’s core business. And without that strong sense of brand identity, she began to see that she was having to really dig into herself to be and stay motivated. Which was pretty exhausting. It wasn’t safe to be herself in leadership.

You might ask, as I did, why she’d been attracted to such a firm in the first place.

This unraveled a key vulnerability for her: a big need for approval. It had been beyond flattering to have been headhunted into the job. And indeed it was those needs that had for a while been hooking her into believing that she had to make the job work for her. That if it didn’t work, it would be her failure.

But that insight unlocked something for her, allowing her to see that it was neither her nor the company that had “failed”; that indeed “failure” was not a useful way to frame things at all. Instead, she and the company were just not a good match.

That realisation was the one that in the end unleashed her. It gave her permission to think about leaving the business, not just to escape it, but to move to something more positive for her. As I write she’s now armed with a clear list of personal filters, and is using her discernment in looking for something that will be a great fit for her.

Who knew?

Who knew we’d get here? I certainly didn’t when we began our work together, and I guess neither did she. But, like I said, that’s the magic of coaching.

*This person’s name and details have been changed to protect their identity.

photo credit: ND Strupler

What do you want to create for yourself in 2012?

What do you want it to mean for you? What are your hopes for it? What are your fears?

If you watch the news or read the papers, you’ll be hearing just how grim they reckon 2012 will be.

But does it really have to be like that?

Well, no.

And here’s how you can change everything.

Survive or thrive in 2012: whichever, the choice is yours

Of course, there’s  a whole economic thing going on out there. But you do have choice in how you see it and indeed engage with it. And that choice starts in your mind.

It’s a choice about whether you see yourself as someone who survives next year, or someone who thrives.

(And, by the way, you’re already making a choice about this, even before you read this article. Choose to choose, or don’t choose. Either way you’ve made a choice. It just happens that one is passive and less conscious).

The choice starts with your language.

Surviving

If you’re choosing to see 2012 as a year of survival, the kind of things you’re saying – to yourself and others – is that it’s going to be a tough year, with big problems and challenges.

You’re thinking that you’ll just have to put your head down and get through it.

Things you may once have trusted to deliver for you cannot now be trusted.

Money will be tight. Opportunity scarce. Cutbacks inevitable.

You’re feeling powerless. Worried. Fearful.

“Oh, well…” you say, with resignation. “That’s just life. That’s the way things go.”

Thriving

If you’re choosing, however, to see 2012 as a year in which you’ll thrive, you’re more attuned to what you’ll get from it.

What opportunities it will bring that can enrich your life.

Whatever happens, you’re asking yourself what it means for you. What options it throws up.

You focus on what’s still okay, what’s prudent to do to keep yourself bouyant, what new avenues are opening.

You’re self-determining, hopeful, optimistic. Grateful for what you have.

“I will…” you say, with intention.

The choice starts in your mind

Everything is first of all created in your mind. And your mind is very clever. Whatever you tell it about the way life works is how it will run things for you.

If you go into next year wanting to find a man, but telling yourself you’re crap at relationships, that’s what you will constellate for yourself. So, you meet a lovely bloke with whom things seem to go well in the beginning. But you’re crap at relationships, right? So, those little arguments that pop up – those ways in which he disappoints you – these are indicators of how this most recent romance is heading for the rocks as all your other ones have. And so it ends.

If you go into next year, however, wanting to find a man, but telling yourself that you create the relationships that you want, that’s instead what you’ll do. So lovely bloke turns out to be human when he disappoints or argues with you. You’re seeing that you create your relationships, so you see these things as opportunities for conversation. Conversation that may allow you to get to know one another better. Build your shared ability to talk to one another. Deepen the relationship. So it grows.

So, if you’re an entrepreneur or business person waking up every morning telling yourself it’s a bad economy, guess what you’re creating? At least for yourself.

Wake up each day thinking that this one is going to be great for you, and that, by contrast is what you manifest. A great day.

Choosing to thrive

Even the best of us can find it difficult not to get sucked into the vortex of negativity that swarms around us these days. So what do you do if you want to thrive next year?

Well, hiring a great coach is one way to make sure that you articulate what you want and stay in action in bringing it to life for yourself.

In addition, you can create a daily ritual of setting up your world to be whatever you want it to be. Ask yourself: “How do I want my world to be for me today?” And answer that in a way that consciously states your positive intention.

Create your world as fearless, prosperous, loving, inviting, open, full of opportunity, accepting of you. Create it however you want.

The choice is yours. And whatever you begin to create in your mind is whatever you’ll begin to see coming back to you.

How do you want to create your world in 2012? Are you choosing to thrive or survive?

Integrity.

It’s a missing ingredient of our time. Possibly the missing ingredient.

Let me tell you why.

Definition

But before I do, let me ask what it means to you. It’s one of these words that gets slung around in personal and leadership development circles, especially if you get into a discussion about values. But would you really know integrity if you saw it?

And I think that’s been part of its problem till now. It’s been up there as some high and mighty principle. But few people could describe why it’s relevant on a day-to-day basis.

Which is why I like Michael Jensen and Werner Erhart’s work on integrity. Because their definition cuts to the chase.

For them it’s simple. Integrity talks fundamentally of the wholeness of individuals, relationships or systems. There’s no implied value judgement in their view. Instead, they say, wholeness is an aspect of our being. It’s in our nature to expect things to be whole and complete. So when something lacks integrity, it affects us.

Things don’t jive for us the way they should. They don’t feel right. And whether we’re conscious of it or not, deep down we know.

Having integrity means honouring your word

How do you have integrity?

Well, to have integrity as an individual you must honour your word.

In an ideal world everyone would make commitments only to things they could deliver on. But life’s not like that for most of us.

Recognising that’s so – we’re human and goalposts change – we can nevertheless honour our word. Honouring your word means keeping your word, or whenever you won’t be keeping your word, saying so to everyone impacted:

a) that you won’t be keeping your word
b) that you will keep it in the future and by when, or that you won’t be keeping it at all
c) what you will do regards the impact on others of your failure to keep your word

In a nutshell: own your shit and clean it up.

What that looks like to you or me

I got excited about this as a concept because it made me realise how much better the world would be if we all adopted that philosophy.

Maybe you think you don’t have a problem with integrity. Oh yeah? Check out these scenarios:

• You pack your diary full of appointments and then end up late for meeting after meeting. You say “sorry” to the people you keep waiting, but you can’t help feeling that in-the-moment pang of guilt.
• You’ve a report you’ve committed to get done by a certain date and you’ve just been unable to get to it, so you say nothing and hope no-one notices. You feel a mixture of relief and disappointment in yourself when you send it off late with an apology note.
• You promised yourself to eat healthily and get to the gym three times this week. But it’s been a crappy Monday. Wolfing down that tub of ice-cream in the evening gives only a fleeting sense of comfort, before the self-loathing voices kick in again.

You may think that these things count for nothing. That they’re all part of the human condition and “the way things are” when you do a big job. But the impact on ourselves, and on people around us accumulates as, drip after drip, we create the experience of not having integrity; of not honouring our word.

The bigger integrity challenge

When you start to really understand this, you can begin to see just how integrity is missing from life on a wider scale.

Look at Nick Clegg and his now infamous pre-election promise to cut student fees, which he reneged on as soon as he got into power with David Cameron.

Or the whole sub-prime crisis that was caused by mortgage products that had no integrity, sold to people who would struggle to pay, while a number of  derivative traders made billions betting on their failure.

Once the banks had been dug out of their integrity gap, all kind of measures were implemented to ensure “something like this never happens again”. Regulatory frameworks were reviewed. Ethics training and the like was introduced.

I’m not suggesting that these don’t have their place. But isn’t it a little sad that integrity has to be legislated for?

Everything starts with our word

What I’m personally discovering from trying to stay more and more in integrity with myself is that life goes better; I feel better about myself; my relationships are better. And I see the impact it has on my work too.

For example, I recently got the timing wrong of an international coaching call and wrote to my client:

I’m so sorry. This is entirely my mistake. I put our call in my calendar for 2.30 GMT not CET….

Let’s reschedule.

I realise that my error means I’m out of integrity with you and apart from anything would like to ask you how I may meaningfully correct that.

Not only did he write back and say that my putting it that way had really made him think, but also over the weeks that followed I watched him consciously choose to stay more and more in integrity with himself, in what has been a tough business situation for him.

He came to coaching to smash some of his own glass ceilings. I think his insights on integrity served as a bit of a hammer for him.

Because really, if you have integrity, and you encourage others to live with integrity, you can achieve so much more and feel so much better.

It’s not a nice to have thing. It’s fundamental.

Start with yourself

Don’t wait for the government to legislate on it, or for your company to write an integrity policy. Start with you and start now.

Where are you keeping your word to yourself? Where not? What are the ways in which you can clean up your act? How will that serve you? And how will it serve others around you?

photo credit: Ding Yuin Shan ???

The answer depends on how you see both yourself, and your world. And your understanding of what leadership is all about.

Meet John. He’s a hypothetical client, but not that hypothetical.

Needing approval

John was told last week that, in another round of restructuring, his business wanted him to take another, bigger role. One that it viewed with a certain amount of kudos.

He began to explain to me how he should be delighted. How he should be leaping to accept it. How he should be feeling grateful that he was  being promoted at a time of great economic uncertainty.

When we looked at his shoulds we discovered how he was choosing to see himself as a rather well-paid lackey, needing the approval of his world – in this case, his company – to keep going. It was clear that what his bosses thought of him was vitally important. That keeping on-side with them was a top priority.

Listening to yourself

But when I asked him what his heart was telling him, John said that the job wasn’t really “him”. When we unraveled that, he saw his angst was that, as it stood, it didn’t play to his core strengths. In the language of Marcus Buckingham’s StandOut, he’s a Creator and Pioneer. The role seemed to call more for an Influencer and Connector.

Because it involved a lot more traveling than he’d done lately, he was concerned that it would also impact his values around family and faith.

We explored what it would be like for him to own his strengths, to trust that his world was receptive to him, and to negotiate the scope of the job so that he created a win for him and a win for the business.

But that was going to be tough. Because he saw that having such a conversation would mean he’d be uncomfortable, and would risk being ridiculed or told he should leave.

Slow death

In his book Deep Change, Bob Quinn talks about the phenomenon of slow death. It’s where people adapt to changes in their environments by failing to make an active choice either to stay or to go. In slow death, leaders become lifeless. They keep taking the pay cheque, but they don’t rock the boat.

Great for them if their ambition is to leave a legacy that says they netted a ton of money, and paid the mortgage.

Not so good if, inside, they’re feeling that life and work are increasingly meaningless and that they’re just marking time.

Leadership

I’ve had cause to think recently about what real leadership is. Too often these days it has been boiled down to a term that defines a level in an organisation; a series of jobs. But leadership, to my mind, is an attitude. Central to which is having the courage to be who you are and to act from that place, no matter the consequences.

Sure, the world is in the midst of economic crisis. But does that call for more leadership or less?

I’d argue that things may have been different if more leaders chose, however painful, to be themselves. To call the games and the insanity that has gone on in our corporations. They may be personally richer as a result of not doing so. But at what price?

Is it safe to be yourself in leadership?

Maybe we should rather ask the question, how safe is is NOT to be?

photo credit: HikingArtist.com

A lot of my clients have been upping the ante on themselves recently.

Expecting more, or different kinds of success than before.

One of the biggest insights they’ve been having is that it’s they themselves – not the world, not other people, not circumstances – who’ve been holding them back.

Here are 4 common self-made blocks. Which ones do you recognise?

Having too much to do

You know this is one of yours if you are forever more optimistic about what you can do in a day, a week, or a year versus what you ever get done.

It’s not that things don’t get touched, but you never feel able to give anything the kind of attention it deserves. Which means that even though you may be achieving some things, you never quite get a lived-in sense of being successful.

When I work with senior business folks it’s something I hear a lot: “if only I wasn’t so busy”. Like it’s out of their control to manage what they’re doing. Sometimes they struggle to understand that they are at least in part responsible for their own busy-ness. But if they keep believing the answer lies outside them, they keep blocking their own progress.

When they see, however, that they create their own reality, they feel liberated to choose which of all the things that call for their attention will get focus – and indeed what won’t.

Needing other people’s approval

“But I can’t just stop doing things,” was what one person said to me recently in the midst of a conversation about her busy-ness.

She’d been hired for her deep knowledge of a particular market that her hiring firm wanted to leverage. She had ambitions about what she could deliver and could see the breakthrough this would offer her new company.

But her new colleagues were mesmerised by her general ability to open doors, and kept inviting her to be part of their sales process. Which was great for them and the firm, but was leaving her performance targets languishing and her feeling unfulfilled. Not to mention exhausted and cut off from her family due to the hours she was putting in.

When we unravelled what was holding her in this place, she had to admit she was enjoying the kudos she was getting from her colleagues. Pushing back on their requests felt uncomfortable.

Being truly successful, however, means being okay with feeling uncomfortable and not caving into it.

In time my client figured a way to help her colleagues learn some of her magic so that they could have her expertise, but not at the cost of her own success.

Dumbing down

But standing out can be uncomfortable. And there’s often the unconscious temptation to want to fit in and be part of the crowd.

To do that, we can find the lowest common denominator and pitch our bar there It can be cosy just to go with the flow of things, and ignore that our own bar may be higher.

But that can again meaning holding ourselves back from our own success. Which I guess at one level seems good for the group.

At another level, however, it’s not good for anyone. It doesn’t serve us personally. And, if we’re honest, it does the group no favours.

Avoiding

Quitting, leaving, giving up.

The act of walking away from your true success takes many forms.

Obvious ones are saying no to a challenging opportunity, or resigning your position just as your about to make a major breakthrough.

Less obvious ones show up in how you absent yourself.

Like the guy I worked with who found himself in an unexpected and wonderful loving relationship. And concurrently discovered online gaming, to which he could lose entire weekends.

Just as he was on the cusp of creating something real that he’d worked ages for, he sabotaged himself by disappearing into a somewhat unreal online world.

Or the clients who would flourish with coaching support, but choose not to commit.

So many of us talk about wanting to be a success in life. By the same token so many of us hold it at arms length.

Why? Well, I guess it’s because the success we dream of is unknown to us or untested and therefore quite scary. Part of us tells ourselves “it can’t be done”. Safer, then, to stay where we are.

But if you really do want to push through on yourself and experience work and life differently, at least part of the how to is about really facing up to. and moving past your blocks.

How do you block yourself? And how can you move beyond your self-imposed limitations?

photo credit: neoliminal

You know the scene.

It’s been another of those weeks.

You’ve tried hard to make things different, but it hasn’t quite worked out.

Success?

You’re on another plane. Your diary’s still wall to wall. Your inbox is still overflowing with urgent emails. Your gym program is getting neglected. And if you have any home life, friends or interests beyond your job, they’re more in the margins than you’d care to admit.

To many, including yourself, you’re a success. Well regarded in your business or profession. The tangible fruits of your efforts are all around you. Lovely house; prestige car; quality clothes.

But if you’re honest with yourself, your life is not feeling like a success day in and day out. At least not the kind of success you’re really, really worth.

“Things have got to change,” you say.

But how?

If your best intentions aren’t working, how are you going to make things different? How are you going to turn around the big ship that is your life so it’s heading in more of the direction that you want?

Here are 5 rules that’ll get the engines really starting to turn:

1. Commit yourself

Before you figure anything else, figure this: are you up for whatever change you’re talking about?

Without commitment, you won’t last the tough times of working through whatever it is that has to change. You’ve probably been involved in enough business change programmes to know that if people aren’t totally engaged, the change won’t stick. The same applies to you.

You need to take complete responsibility for your life and in a way you never have before. Otherwise you’re just a white collar victim.

2. Know what you’re trying to create

When you say “things need to change”, what does that mean? If your current brand of success doesn’t feel lived in, what would bring you alive?

What can you get really passionate about?

Go on, describe it.

3. Figure out how you’ll know when you’ve achieved it

If your wished for change comes about, how will you know?

What will be happening? What will you be seeing and hearing? What will you be thinking?

How will you be feeling?

4. Keep in action

Change happens by balancing vision and action.

Vision without action is just fantasy.

Action without vision is just stumbling about.

Think of it like a journey. You set out with a sense of where you’re heading and a map. The roads along the way may or may not be what you expected. If there’s an accident or a road block, you deal with it. You either sit in the traffic queue or make a detour. Or you change your plan. But you figure it out in the moment.

Life’s the same. Especially if you’re changing it.

Stay on the road, even if that means at times taking turns you hadn’t expected, or revisiting your ultimate destination.

5. Understand what holds you back

Being in action, of course, brings its own challenges. In life-change, you see, those road blocks are almost all of your own making. Even if you think they’re not.

Still, each time something comes up, it’s an opportunity to bring awareness to your own limits.

To see how you create glass ceilings for yourself.

How if you see them you can choose whether you’re happy that they limit you. Or not.

Tough shit

Life change is tough shit. That’s why most people don’t really do it and opt for society’s version of success rather than their own.

But if you’ve decided that that’s not good enough; if you’ve come to feel that that lacks real integrity for you, use these five rules as a blueprint for kick-starting your own change.

What needs to change in your life? How are you going to make that happen? Have you discovered any other life-change rules? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Over the last weeks I’ve had a cyber break.

Not one I took intentionally. At least not in the beginning.

But over the last months my coaching practice has got busier. Much busier. And I’ve had some holiday time too.

I tried for a while to do it all. Tweet regularly, keep up with post writing. Hang out on Facebook. All alongside being present for my clients’ rich processes. And having down time.

But I ended up feeling scattered and unfocused. That I wasn’t doing justice to anything.

What’s really important?

What I found was that I began to make choices. Choices I can articulate better on reflection than I could have in the moment.

With coaching commitments that extend into the future, I knew I needed to maintain my good personal energy. So I’ve chosen to build in more quiet times to my early mornings, evenings and weekends. Also to maintain healthy habits of good eating and exercise.

And I disconnected from cyber space when I was away in June.

Most important, I’ve tried to honour my closest personal relationships. There are people in my life in whose company I feel nourished, supported and enriched. Without them my coaching would be thin.

All of that has meant that I’ve moderated almost by default how much time I’m online.

Who are you here to serve?

Now, some of my more internet marketing oriented colleagues may challenge me that, if I don’t keep up my online presence, my pipeline is broken.

That’s kind of true and kind of not.

In the beginning of working online I’d imagined having lots of digital products that would provide a virtual coaching experience. But over the couple of years I’ve now been blogging, a number of things have happened. I’ve got clearer and clearer about with whom I best work. I’ve also therefore been more and more able to find them. And, the more I’ve worked with them and discovered what really makes them tick, and the more I’ve asked them whether they’d buy me that way, the more they’ve said not. What they want is access to the experience, intuition, support and challenge of a real person.

Sure, they read my online stuff. But it’s as part of a process or as food for thought thereafter. Not as a surrogate for it.

And that’s all been making me re-evaluate things.

Traffic has been good and I’ve enjoyed Alexa rankings of circa 200,000 (at least I have done, over at A Different Kind Of Work). But keeping traffic flowing is tough work.

And, in all of this, I’ve found myself asking, who or what am I really, really here to serve?

Is it the big audience at one point I thought I might build, many of whom read and leave without comment or email? Or is it rather a smaller circle of current and past clients with whom I have a tighter connection?

Rightly or wrongly these last weeks I’ve chosen to give big focus on the smaller circle. Because that’s where I feel I am of most value and service. And because I’ve put more conscious choice into finding and selecting the people I work with in any case, the more and more I’m loving what I do, and the sharper I feel my work is becoming.

And in the process I’ve chosen to let go of worrying about web presence, or Alexa rankings or Klout scores or whatever. Not that these things are of no value. But there comes a point when I stop and ask myself whether being a great coach isn’t its own form of marketing. Something I don’t think I’d considered before. Certainly not in that way.

The alchemy of change

There has been, and continues to be, a change afoot in my own life and work this year. Part of me wants to be able to logic it out, define it and share it clearly. But I as yet cannot. It’s emerging. As is much of the change inherent in my clients’ unique processes.

I love writing and I love the buzz of social media and I’m not suggesting as I write this post that I’m quitting this arena. Far from it.

But there’s a realignment afoot, meaning that I need to do it in a way that’s in keeping with a shifting sense of myself as a coach and of my business as a result.

Which I’m totally okay about.
photo credit: Ashley Campbell Photography