16 Personal Coaching Experiments to Try Right Now

As you are reading this piece, it probably means you have some interest in your personal and professional development. Great! Perhaps you are unsure what you can actually do, whatever age you are? 

This is coaching practice you can try out now. 

I’ve worked as a Psychologist, with 23 years experience coaching more than 700 people on a one-to-one and over 15,000 in groups. 

  

I want you to take a leap of faith, trust me for a moment and try out an experiment.  You’re worth it, as the advert says.

Like a tennis player who wants to excel, you can’t read a book and hope to significantly improve your game. You need to honestly assess how you are playing and experiment with different strokes. 

Here, the aim is to achieve greater satisfaction within yourself and your relationship with others. 

My job, is to help improve performance, support talent when things go array, help develop a person’s wellbeing,connect with others well, and build high performing teams.

I have one observation about those who command a stronger sense of awareness of themselves and their relating with others - they...

     Ask difficult questions about themselves

    Experiment with new ideas and ways of relating
    in the world

Give yourself 30 minutes to trying at least one of these 16 experiments below. They are all well tested and work effectively. Some people prefer to simply blame others, their childhood, legacy of parents, the weather, capitalism, or their jobs for their conundrums.  Making money is also a favourite excuse for resisting change efforts. Self awareness is never enough - it's like sitting in the river and saying, "hey, I'm wet." We need also, to experiment creatively (play).  My most rewarding clients, who achieve the best results for themselves, always do these sort of experiments between sessions, that lead to more creative living: 

Why not try some of these experiments with people you are close to?

If you want to share about the experiment you tried, send me a mail: julia@julianoakes.com

Why are Leaders so Boring? How to Radiate in Worlds that Matter

Most of the time, it is very difficult to figure out who the modern leader is.

What does he or she really stand for beneath scripted platitudes? Are they simply in search of power at any price, just as Eichmann determinedly soared his way through the ranks regardless of the human cost of his promotions? 

I find myself asking whatever happens to the hearts of such men and women, as they turn a blind eye, whilst the more morally sensitive feel troubled and bemused?
Our increasingly homogenised world seems to be inhabited with excessively dull leaders; cut from the same cloth as Mr Machine, in a drab suit and a mind tailored to care little beyond self-interest. Eichmann was profoundly 'banal' as many writers commented during his trial - he wasn't a wild, foaming at the mouth psychopath at all.

One of the strategies the contemporary leader is often excessively skilled at, is deadening himself from the effects and impact of his organisation’s activities. What we might call the “normotic” leader, to borrow the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas’s term. He numbs himself with action, busyness, gambling, alcohol or other mindless pursuits, so he doesn’t connect with just how out of step he is with his own nature. There is another group of leaders who Freud would say have no moral conscience whatsoever.

 Then there are leaders like Paul Smith.

He falls into an entirely separate category of leader, by aligning his efforts and the impact of his company with his own moral conscience.

Paul Smith is a breath of fresh air, a joyful man, seemingly free of corporate pretence no matter how successful he becomes. My sense is that he doesn’t hide anything from himself in order to soldier-on, dehumanise himself in order to do things he doesn’t want to do. It’s a well know fact how robust his ‘No” can be towards potential investors and partners if he views them as rather money-driven sharks. His growth strategy isn’t the mindless ‘big is best’, “why would I need to open 20 shops a year that have no character and mean nothing,” he says, “when I can open two or three that are really interesting and give people goose bumps?" 

A leader using words like “goose bumps?”

I like it.

In the foyer of the Conrad Hotel in Tokyo, a few years ago, I met this legendary fashion entrepreneur. He was signing autographs, mobbed by fans. He looked fabulous, not just because he looks so funky, but by the sheer gusto of his aliveness.

I was checking into the hotel, proudly carrying one of his holdalls with the trademark image of a striped British Mini Cooper.  

Paul has been a huge success in Japan – as well as worldwide - with over 2,000 local people employed by Paul Smith Ltd., becoming the biggest European designer in the difficult market of Japan with over two hundred shops. Rumour has it that he used to take a small train set into early meetings with his Japanese colleagues and play with it when he got bored.                                                                

Perhaps part of Paul Smith’s success is sustained by the fact that he’s the sort of leader who has a Department of Silly in the basement of his London offices. It houses all sorts of wacky objects to inspire more than creativity.

Such permission inspires play, a sense of fun and connecting that helps us to forget our individual separateness and remember our shared humanity that makes us a team rather than merely a group. Paul Smith’s best leadership advice is perhaps his simple words:

“Everyone gets on better when you just be yourself.”

You cannot do that if you are hiding from the sights, sounds, smells and other forms of knowledge that indicate you are out of step with your own conscience. Who really is that grey, that boring, as the often-dull performances in the corporate office life suggests? Is what we mean when we nickname a leader “The Empty Suit”, someone who has sold his moral conscience to the highest bidder? 

The fantasy of working against one's moral-self for decades, to magically return to an earlier  state of integrity upon retirement, is one of the saddest human illusions. It rarely happens when we've been slowly killing ourselves off, as we perform the false self.

Working in an alive way with the very real dilemmas seems the only way forward.   “You’ve got to somehow keep your purity but still get your income,” says Paul, “ even when each pulls you in an opposite direction.”

To keep your purity means to resist covering your eyes from seeing and looking at yourself and what matters to you. It also means saying you matter, not just the whims of the tribes. 

Don’t give up on yourself, on what makes you truly unique, no matter how high the bribe, tempting the status, or shiny the accolades.

There is surely no higher ambition than to be true to your own conscience. 

With such ambition, people invariably stand a chance to radiate, just like the incomparable Mr. Smith.