Merry Christmas to all Clients, Colleagues and Friends

I wish all my clients, colleagues and friends a very blessed Christmas and a happy and successful New Year.

2015 has been another good year for us;

• I continue to have lots of interesting work with interesting people;
• I have finished the long awaited book, and once the graphic work is completed, it will be published (early 2016, I hope);
• I have also started a post-graduate diploma in Coaching, which I am enjoying enormously;
• Jane has wrested complete control of my diary, the back office, the accounts and all the other important parts of the business, which has resulted in a huge improvement in all areas;
• Annie has qualified as a teacher, Clare has spent time travelling in China, working in Zambia, and now has a job with a charity in Manchester; Mike got a First in his Graphic Design foundations course, and is now enjoying life as an undergraduate at Northumbria; and Lizzie aced her GCSEs and is loving the 6th Form.

Here's a family portrait, as we appear to Mike, when we are reading:

I always think Christmas a good time for poetry, so here is one of my favourite poems:

The Journey of the Magi 

"A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter."
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty, and charging high prices.:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we lead all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

T S Eliot

My Dark Side

A number of my coaching clients, and some fellow coaches whose work I rate highly, have spoken well of the Hogan psychometrics, and especially the one that identifies potential career de-railers - the so-called Dark Side assessment.

So I have decided to get trained on these, and as a first step, had  a go at completing one myself, under the guidance of Julia Cater of People Decisions. It was very interesting.

My initial reflections on the report that emerged are that it has quite high face-validity; that is, I recognise myself in it (rather more than, say, a horoscope). Moreover, my wife (if not my greatest fan, certainly my most acute critic) also recognised me in it.  And we could both see, even though there are areas where we both think it gets it wrong, that it is a very useful basis for reflection and discussion with a coach (I have yet to meet Julia for the de-brief).

Overall, it suggests that my high scores (that is, my strengths-that-might-become-weaknesses-under-pressure are being Reserved (Independent can become detached), Imaginative (Imaginative can become eccentric) and Colourful (vivacious can become dramatic).

I also score very low on some areas where perhaps I lack the strengths at all: Diligent, Dutiful and Sceptical.

By and large, that's not too far off the mark.  However, I strongly disagree with Lacking few well-defined beliefs or interests, but with regrets about past behaviour and Lack passion or enthusiasm.

I think the Reserved is somewhat overstated, particularly Not communicate frequently or well,  and likewise the Colourful  especially Talk more than he listens.  And clearly, those two points, Not communicate frequently or well, and Talk more than he listens, sit rather oddly together.

However, I can see how it arrived at all of these, and they (and many of the other points) are worthy of thought and discussion - and even as I type, I am wondering if, under extreme stress, those may have some validity...

The big question, of course, is about the self-report aspect. For instance, I answered some questions based on the literal words, even though I suspected (and I think rightly) that they would be interpreted in a way that is not what I feel about myself. For example, when a question has ‘never’ or ‘always’ in it, I always take that literally so will tend to disagree, as there is nearly always at least one exception; whereas if it has nearly always or almost never, I will answer the opposite way.  So the process didn’t feel very robust in that way. Also, I was aware of what it was likely to be saying about me, and there is always that tendency to answer about the Andrew I’d like to be…

All in all, very interesting, despite these reservations, and as I say, it could certainly be the basis of some useful exploratory discussions and reflections.

Reply from the Suzy Lamplugh Trust

In my recent post about the misrepresentation of Merhrabian's research (that stuff about words being only 7% of the way we understand communication), I mentioned that I had been told it was sourced from the Suzy Lamplugh Trust. I looked at the Suzy Lamplugh Trust Website, and found it did not, in fact, quote these percentages, but did make the claim in words. I gather the text on the WWW is taken from their leaflet Keeping Safe: Dealing with Aggression. I concluded my last post by saying that I would write to them about this.

Therefore, I emailed as follows:

On your website, (here) you say that 'The majority of communication is through body language, a lot through tone of voice and only a little through words.’ (your emphasis). I assume this refers to the work of Albert Mehrabian, but he himself distances himself from such claims, and puts important caveats on how his research is interpreted and applied. 

I think you should re-consider how you present this. If you are interested in my particular thoughts, I have just blogged about it here. 

I am writing to you, as I think the work you do very important - and therefore want to help you to do it as well as possible.

I heard nothing, so wrote a follow up,  

Did you receive the email below? 

I see that your website remains unchanged. 

As I said on my blog on the subject (here): I find this misrepresentation of Mehrabian's work bad enough in corporate life; but in the context of safeguarding, it is worse. For instance, if it becomes widely accepted as fact, what is to prevent a rapist claiming that, although his victim said No, 93% of her communication was saying Yes?... That cannot be a justification that the Suzy Lamplugh Trust would accept.  

I got an apology: my email had apparently been misrouted, and the promise of a fuller reply in due course. Eventually I received this:

Thank you for your email. Suzy Lamplugh Trust is a personal safety charity and we work to reduce the risk of violence and aggression for everyone. The information provided in the leaflet you have referred to aims to help individuals who are in stressful or difficult situations to understand the options available to them. The specific quote to which you refer seeks to highlight the need for workers who undertake difficult and/or stressful tasks to be aware of how their behaviour may be interpreted by the people they are interacting with. This will enable them to complete a dynamic risk assessment and take measures to defuse, de-escalate or exit a situation if necessary. This information is given to educate and empower individuals.  

Whenever a crime is committed, Suzy Lamplugh Trust is clear that the responsibility for that crime lies solely with the perpetrator. Everyone has the right to live their lives safely.

I hope that this alleviates your concern however if you have further questions please get back in touch.

I did not think that really addressed the issue I had raised, so I wrote again:

Thanks for your reply. 

I think you misunderstand my concern. I am well aware of the excellent work and reputation of the Trust. 

My concern is very simple. Your wwwsite says: 'The majority of communication is through body language, a lot through tone of voice and only a little through words.’
I believe that to be untrue, and think I have understood and indicated the source of the error.  

I also think that publishing untrue information may have unintended negative consequences. 

I am sure your intentions are honourable, etc. However what I am not clear about is whether you think that the information is in fact true (in which case I would be fascinated to know your sources); or whether you think it untrue (or simply don’t know), but are happy to publish on that basis in pursuit of a good aim?

Today, I received this further reply:

Thank you for flagging your concern. We regularly review the information on our website and will take your comments in to (sic) consideration when we next revisit our website material. 

So I will re-visit their site occasionally, and see if they make any changes. But if this is a polite brush-off, then I will take it further up the chain, as I believe it to be a serious issue. 

Coaching Supervision

Last Friday, Cumbria Coaching Network's meeting was a session on Coaching Supervision, led by Trish Brady.  Trish led a discussion of the what, why and how of coaching supervision, and then demonstrated a supervisory session, with a volunteer coach, using Hawkins' 7-eyed model.

She also invited us to contribute appropriate questions for the different levels, many of which were extremely helpful in provoking new insights for the coach.

Then on Tuesday, I facilitated a meeting of the external coaches that Newcastle University uses, and as part of that invited the coaches present to share what they had learned relevant to coaching practice, over the last year or so. 

I was struck by how many mentioned the value of supervision. That in itself should not be surprising, of course, as one of the purposes of coaching supervision is to ensure that the coach continues to learn through his or her practice.  But a number of people cited the value of having more than one supervisor, or of having both a single supervisor and attending a group of co-supervisors. 

That closely reflected my own experience over this last year. I have a long term coaching supervisor, the excellent Ann Bowen-Jones, who is both a psychologist and a great coach, and who has helped me learn a huge amount over the years - and continues to do so. 

But this year I have added to that. I have joined a coaching supervision group, in which alternate meetings are co-supervision, and for the ones in-between we invite Keri Phillips to supervise. These have taken my understanding in new directions: the different interests and experiences of the group members regularly surprise me and open up new perspectives.  And more recently, I have established a co-supervision arrangement with Jan Allon-Smith,  as a way for both of us both to improve our coaching practice, but also deliberately learn more about the process of supervision: and again Hawkins and Shohet's work is one of the frameworks we use for that.

All of this has been hugely beneficial in terms of broadening and accelerating my development as a coach; so the upshot of this is simply a reflection for myself, and a piece of advice to other professional coaches, on the high value of multiple supervisory perspectives.

The Story of the Unfinished Business...

At a supervision meeting of volunteers I work with, the issue of Unfinished Business was raised. One of the least satisfying parts of our work is that we often never hear the end of our clients' stories. When they are no longer in crisis and no longer need support, our involvement can end. That can be very unsatisfying, and sometimes unsettling: we know we left them on an upwards trajectory, but rarely is everything sorted and perfect.

That issue of unfinished business reminded me of a story a friend told me over dinner a week or so previously. He had suffered from adult-onset epilepsy. The medication he was given had an unfortunate side-effect. He started to suffer from troubling flashbacks/daydreams. These were all of a similar nature. He would remember some past encounter, of a trivial nature, with someone whom he had only met once, when the encounter had ended unsatisfactorily from his point of view. Many of these dated back years, and he had not consciously thought about them since.

One example was a time he had been stopped by traffic police and one of them had been unnecessarily sarcastic, some twenty years ago. But what troubled him was that each flashback ended with an imagined scene in which he beat up the other person. Needless to say, he is not given to violence, nor even to violent fantasies. So he found these flashbacks/daydreams very troubling, and at one stage was having several a day.

He went for a couple of counselling sessions, and his counsellor suggested a very simple idea. He should re-visit each of these encounters in his mind, and re-write the story by imagining an ending with which he would have been satisfied. So in the case of the police, for example, he imagined that he had had a word with the non-sarcastic police officer about the other's behaviour. He further imagined that the non-sarcastic officer had returned to the patrol car and given his colleague some uncompromising feedback about his sarcastic behaviour.

As he was telling me this part of the story his wife chipped in, to say that she had been extremely sceptical of this idea when he returned from that counselling session. It sounded too easy, too simple, to be effective. Yet effective it was!

From the moment he imagined a better ending to each of these stories, which I suppose must have been lurking unresolved deep in his unconscious mind for years, the flashbacks stopped. 

Just when I thought I had completed my book on Story, too...

Singing to Break the Ice

I was intrigued to read the research from Oxford about singing as the most effective way to break the ice with groups.

I read this just as I was starting running a Leadership Programme with the VC at Winchester University, for 20 or so academics and professional services staff. 

So it seemed a good idea to apply the research. The question was, what to get them to sing.  I decided on monophonic (rather than say, barbershop!) music, as I wanted to work within my own limitations, and did not want to spend too long on the exercise.

But I also wanted something that would be challenging, new to them, and relevant. As it was just before Remembrance Sunday, and also because it is music I know well, I decided on the Introit from the Gregorian Chant Requiem. 

It felt a little risky, but I explained to them why we were doing it (ie I'd just read some research) and then taught them the first phrase, word by word. I displayed the music on a screen (and much help that was, I am sure). They entered into it with a will, and one of them made a point of telling me later that she and others with whom she had talked had really liked the exercise.

Encouraged by that feedback, I did the same thing with a similar group in Cardiff, again with the VC obliged to sing along, on Remembrance Day itself. This time, the exercise was greeted by applause. 

To be honest, I wondered if the applause was at least in part an emotional discharge, as I know some people find the requirement to sing in public embarrassing. So I will read the written (and anonymous if desired) feedback from both groups with particular interest. And if it does mention the icebreaker, I will report back here.

In the meantime, this is how it should sound: from a concert I organised a decade or more back with the Schola Cantorum (School of Chant) with which I used to sing in Newcastle.

For the record, it was a wonderful concert. Eric Cross's choir joined us, and sang the Duruflé Requiem, which is clearly based on the Gregorian Chant melodies, with modern French harmonisation. And the way we programmed it, was to put the movements side by side: so we sang the chant Introit, then the choir sand the Duruflé Introit, and so on.

So here is the Duruflé Introit (and the rest of his Requiem, come to that), for old times' sake.

Emotions, Thoughts and Meditation

I am a fan of Goleman's work on Emotional Intelligence, and particularly as applied to Leadership (see The New Leaders).

One of the many reasons it appeals to me, is that it starts with the self. Rather than describe what a leader should do or say to others, in order to lead, it starts with the leader increasing his or her self-awareness: noticing, and then learning to regulate, what is going on for oneself emotionally.

However, recently I was talking with a leader I know. He is, I think, a good leader and manages his emotions effectively most of the time, which also enables him to lead others well, in the way Goleman et al suggest. However, he was telling me of a recent occasion when he 'lost his rag' in a senior meeting.  

The occasion was relatively trivial: and indeed that was what infuriated him. Senior people seemed to him to be squabbling about something of little or no consequence. It was silly and it was a waste of time, in a meeting when there was much serious work to be done.

All of which prompted me to think that it is not sufficient to notice and regulate one's emotional responses, important though that may be. Under pressure (or for other less obvious reasons, in this case probably a combination of overwork, exhaustion and exasperation) the emotions may leak out and one may lose one's rag.

So there is a prior discipline: of considering how we are making sense of the world, and doing so in a way that does not lead to us having to manage sudden emotional responses. There are many approaches to this, including CBT based approaches, for example, and my work on Story (did I mention, I have finished the book - there is just a little editing to be done now...?). So as well as the emotional component, we have to attend to the rational. But the other component, I think, is the spiritual: the cultivation of serenity, through a spiritual discipline to match the intellectual and emotional disciplines. 

That, I think, is what meditation has to offer, and why it is being rediscovered as an important part of the repertoire for those seeking to be truly effective. I have blogged before about my own developing discipline, here. I was reminded of the impact that this practice is having once again, when a couple of fairly major issues popped out of the woodwork, and I found that I was not only able to cope with them calmly, but also to feel calm throughout - which meant there was no danger of inadvertent leakage of inner turmoil.

Meditation is one of those things for which we feel we never have time: after all, it feels as though we are doing nothing - a terrible waste of time! But increasingly, I am convinced that investing time in meditating (a little, regularly) is saving me huge amounts of both time and energy.