Self Detemined Life
Helping you manage performance and development
Is this the secret to success with personal change?
“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”Rumi Engaging in meaningful, self-focused personal change is at the heart of any kind of serious personal and professional development. It might be a change in your habits, a change in your behaviours or a change…
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Research for coaches: the evidence base for coaching
This is, we hope, a really helpful page of research for coaches, coaching students, and those who want to understand the evidence base for coaching and associate areas of personal and professional development, leadership and behavioural change. This is a continually updated page containing details of some of the best and most relevant research into…
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The importance of perspective taking: a lesson from life
Leadership emerges from the interactions between people and good leadership is exemplified by exchanges that leave all parties feeling that they have been understood and their interests accounted for. Good leadership is therefore relational not transactional. And at the heart of this kind of leadership is perspective taking capacity – the ability to understand the…
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What is mental toughness? A mental toughness resource
So, what is mental toughness and why does it matter? The reason it matter is, in my experience, is that in business, as in most aspects of life, it’s your mental game that has the most impact on how far you can go. If you’re trying to lead in business and you struggle to manage…
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Change leadership skills: 12 critical attributes of great change leaders
Leading change is hard. But good change leaders are essential if any kind of change – organisational or otherwise – is going to succeed. In the context of organisational change, Kotter’s change model emphasises the need for leaders to: create the climate for change, create the conditions for change, and then implement change in a…
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The Kotter change model: 8 steps to accelerating change
The video below (from Flixabout.com), details John Kotter’s change model. This is perhaps one of the best known models for organisational change. Kotter’s model aims to give organisations a road map to follow when they seek to bring about major change. The difficulty I have with the model is that, if applied rigidly, it is…
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The importance of listening skills
As a coach, I know the importance of listening skills and the value of deep and active listening in particular. I know the importance of suspending judgment and I know how critical it is to remove ones own’s biases, interests and concerns from coaching conversations. Yet despite all that knowledge, I know there are times…
The impact of change: finding a new equilibrium
It’s January as I write, the start of a New Year and, unsurprisingly, I’ve been thinking back over the year that has just passed, and in particular the impact of the changes that have happened. For me and my family it has been a pretty big year. We moved from Australia to Scotland.…
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How to listen to unlock: a questioning technique to get someone unstuck
Here is Jennifer Garvey Berger with a really useful questioning and – perhaps more importantly – listening technique that works when you are dealing with somebody who can’t move forward to resolve a problem or issue. The 3 stages of the listening to unlock technique 1. Ask different questions that push to the edges of…
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Tipping point leadership in a complex system: lessons from dancing guy
Here is Derek Sivers’ great TED talk about the role of leadership and followers when it comes to creating a movement. Derek highlight the important moment when it becomes more uncool not to dance than to dance. This is the point where the leaders efforts pay off and the followers take on the leader’s ideas…
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Performance appraisals: How to position the feedback
Conducting performance appraisals can be one of the most challenging tasks for people managers. They are sometimes fraught with tension, largely because of the need to deliver mixed feedback – what went well and what could have gone better. In my experience, some people are fine with recognising that there are improvements they could make.…
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20 Effective leadership questions: the power to motivate and inspire
Effective leadership questions are at the heart of great leadership. This is because great leadership is relational, not transactional. As leadership expert Michael Cavanagh contends, “the quality of the conversation determines the quality of the relationships and the quality of the relationships determines the quality of the organisational system”. And, in my view, it is…
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What is coaching?
Coaching.fm is dedicated to helping managers and leaders improve their leadership capabilities and build high performing teams and there is a strong focus, within these pages, on coaching as the best way to facilitate improvement and growth. So if I’m promoting coaching as the means by which we can best bring about development in people,…
Is this why you can’t solve complex problems?
Are you struggling with an issue that you can’t seem to resolve? Does it feel as if your normal problem solving skills have deserted you? Do you have a sense that you can’t even to nail down the question, let alone come up with the answer? If so, it could be because you’re coming at…
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Productivity and creativity: reaping the benefits of restorative environments
I made this video on holiday. Hence the stubble from a failure to shave for about a week or so. You may have noticed that I make quite a lot of videos when I am out walking, especially on beaches. And, in a way, that fact illustrates the point I am making in this video,…
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Understanding complexity: the Cynefin framework
I write and talk a lot about complexity and working and leading in complex environments. And in doing so, I invariably refer to Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework. Cynefin (pronounced Ku-nev-in) is a Welsh word meaning something like ‘habitat’, but which also implies multiple unknowable factors in our environment and our experience. Snowden first introduced Cynefin…
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