December 18, 2010

Nice Guy Syndrome

A long time ago (or maybe not so long), it was beyond my understanding how being a nice guy can be a bad thing. I thought that the nicer you were the better results you got: in your relationships, your career and your life as a whole.

Then I learned about the nice guy syndrome and I embarked in one of the most electrifying personal development journeys in my life. If you tend to give a lot more than you get in your relationships with others, it’s a journey you may wanna consider.

What Is the Nice Guy Syndrome?

The nice guy syndrome refers to a behavioral pattern in some men of being very nice to others.

The typical nice guy puts other people’s needs first, always helps others, avoids confrontation, does chivalrous things, and is proud of it. His nice behavior is particularly obvious with women.

The nice guy syndrome has been getting increasingly more attention in the past few years in psychology, as the less than satisfying effects it creates make it start to lose its positive image.

What’s Wrong with Being a Nice Guy?

Quite a lot is wrong with being a nice guy as matter of fact. As a confidence coach, I often work with men who I soon realize have the nice guy syndrome.

As a result of this syndrome, they have mediocre careers compared with how skilled they are and how hard they work, they are in toxic relationships, or they sabotage almost every aspect of their lives. I have seen such effects so often that for me, they became highly predictable.

Nice guy behavior may look good on paper, but in reality it has a pretty ugly face. In order to grasp this, consider that the nice guy syndrome fundamentally means people pleasing behavior. As a consequence:

  • Nice guys come off as needy and insecure;
  • Nice guys are generic and predictable, so it’s hard for them to create a spark;
  • Nice guys end up ignoring their own needs and not taking care of themselves;
  • Nice guys end up not being there for the people who really matter, because they try to please everybody;
  • Nice guys are full of repressed rage and they tend to erupt at the most inappropriate times;
  • Nice guys lie, hide and they try to get what they want in indirect, manipulative ways.

From there, all hell breaks loose.

The Nice Guy Paradigm

The leading authority on this topic is Dr. Robert Glover, a therapist who specializes in working with men with the nice guy syndrome, and author of the best-selling self-help book for men No More Mr. Nice Guy.

According to Dr. Glover, all nice guys operate (consciously or not) on the same basic paradigm:

If I can hide my flaws and become what I think others want me to be then I will be loved, get my needs met, and have a problem-free life.

Of course, this paradigm is unrealistic and ineffective, not to mention a pile of crap.

The point is not to turn into an asshole. Being kind and polite to others has its place. However, nice guys tend to take this too far and they make being nice and getting approval the compass of their social behavior.

Having been both a nice guy and (mostly for research purposes) a jerk, I can tell you that in my experience, none of these are healthy behaviors and there is a path in-between which creates much better results.

Overcoming the Nice Guy Syndrome

As an ex-nice guy and a coach who also works with nice guys (and girls), I came to believe that there are three essential stages in overcoming the nice guy syndrome:

Step 1: Realizing and accepting the fact that being a nice guy may sound noble and some people may compliment you for it but overall, it is not a healthy or productive way of being. The concept is flawed. For many men, this step is the hardest.

Step 2: Creating a deep paradigm shift. Even after you realize being nice does not work, the nice guy paradigm will still exist in your cognitive schemas, from where it influences your automatic thinking and disempowers you. You’ll need to consciously change your thinking and weed it out of there.

Step 3: Being less nice. This step involves changing your behavior, developing key people skills and turning it into a less nice one. Specific actions may include:

  • Expressing yourself more, even when you may upset someone;
  • Asking for what you want and saying ‘no’ to others;
  • Taking more time for yourself and taking care of your own needs;
  • Ending toxic relationships which go nowhere.

The earlier you start, the faster your will enjoy the benefits of being a less nice guy. So take that nice guy smile off your face and go kick some ass!

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Filed Under: Attitude, Inspirational, Relationships Tagged With: , , 45 Comments
December 2, 2010

Why Your Job Sucks

Many of my coaching clients are looking to improve something in their careers.

Some of them like their jobs and they just want to take it up a notch, some of them will tell my plainly at the first coaching session: “My job sucks; I want your help to get better at finding a better one, so I can get the hell out of there”.

My experience is that in the careers of many people, there is a big gap between the kind of job they want and the kind they have. Those big dreams they had somewhere in adolescence simply aren’t turning into reality.

If this is your case, I want to take the time and explain from my perspective why this is happening to you. In my communication coaching, I see certain causes manifest over and over gain. Here they are:

1. You Have No Clue What You Want

Unless you’re one lucky SOB, it’s practically impossible to have an extraordinary job if you don’t know what you want. When you don’t know what you want, you’re like a ship adrift being taken left and right be the wind of the moment. This is exactly what happens to numerous people.

I’m not going to say “try harder to figure out what you want”, that would be pretentious. I will say this though: “Try better!” Asking yourself “What do I want?” is usually not enough to get an unambiguous answer. Take a good personality test, get a 360 degrees feedback, ask yourself more specific questions or work with a coach.

2. You’re Head over Heals in Debt

Here’s a very ‘smart’ career move I repeatedly see people doing: You end up in a job where you earn a decent salary and immediately, you take a huge loan in order to buy a big house, a car, a second car, a huge fucking plasma TV and so on.

However, a few years later, once you get over the excitement of the money you’re making, you realize that you actually hate the job you’re in, it offers you no satisfaction it itself, and you want to change your professional field. The only problem is that you’re so far up in debt that you can’t afford the initial financial drop implied by a career change. Really smart Sherlock!

3. You Do Not Take Risks

Getting to a job you find truly fulfilling involves some bold moves. I’m talking about moves such as: quitting a job, asking for a raise, negotiating hard, saying no to a tempting offer, taking on new responsibilities, failing, exposing yourself to uncertainty or putting your foot in the door.

I find that most people are not willing to take the risks associated with these moves. They want to play it safe and make it big at the same time. Well, if this applies to you, I have some disappointing news: life doesn’t work that way. You need to take some risks if you want to get anywhere.

4. You Don’t Know How to Promote Yourself

This is something I keep saying ever since I started working as a communication coach: your professional skills are basically worth nothing if you don’t know how to sell yourself with high impact. It’s a skill required with your boss, your clients and potential future employers.

Promoting yourself is one of the critical people skills for career success. Many people discover this the hard way: by hitting a wall prematurely in their careers which prevents them from moving forward. The sooner you start consciously developing the people skill of promoting yourself, the better it will be for your career and your life.

Each one of these for reasons can be broken down into smaller ones. For example, some people have problems selling themselves at interviews, some at promoting themselves through networking. I’ll leave it to you to discover the nuances of your context.

I firmly believe that we now live in the best world we as human beings have ever lived. There are more opportunities than ever for you to have a prosperous and exciting career. It all starts with taking control of your own steering wheel.

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Filed Under: Career, Inspirational, Success Tagged With: , , 5 Comments
October 27, 2010

The Worst Job in the World and the Way Out

One of the things I like about coaching is that it creates insights not only for the client, but also for the coach. I recently had a mind blasting insight during a communication coaching session about what is truly the worst job in the world.

It’s not pool cleaner or pig farmer. It’s rather a type of job than a job, which impairs people’s lives in a very cruel way and they often have no idea what’s going on. The worst job in the world, as I see things, is a warm job.

What Is a Warm Job?

You know: it’s not hot, it’s not cold – it’s warm. You may like the company and get along well with your colleagues, but you find the job kind of boring and it’s not really what you want to do. You don’t love it enough to say you have an awesome career but you don’t hate it enough to quit it.

There is a huuuge practical problem with a warm job, because a warm job keeps you stuck. If you truly hate your job, you desperately try to find a better one. I’m not a big fan of negative motivation, but I have seen cases where it helped people move forward to much better jobs.

However, if you have a job which is kind of OK but not really what you want, you will tend to stick with it for a long, long time. The worst job in the world is in my view a job that keeps you in your comfort zone without being highly rewarding, and this is exactly what a warm job does.

I know people who for the past 5-7 years or more, every time I meet, they tell me they would like a better job, as their present one is OK but it’s not exactly their dream job. Nevertheless, they are still in that same job. It is a warm job and it makes these people waste many years.

Escaping From a Warm Job

Because of the odd emotional dynamics it creates, a warm job is probably the hardest to get out of. This is precisely why I say it’s the worst job in the world. However, there are ways to motivate yourself and get out of it.

Working with people to help them improve their people skills and make meaningful career changes, I discovered 3 action steps work best:

1) Have a clear vision of what you want. Know your values, your motivations and your passions very well. This way, you will be fully aware when you are not in your ideal job, instead of just having a vague impression that you’re not.

2) Set big, bold career goals for yourself. You won’t get the motivation to leave a warm job until you make a firm decision to aim for the best job possible for you, to be all that you can be in your career. Big, shinny goals are a prerequisite for good motivation.

3) Set small action steps. I believe this is the most important part and what will truly get you out of a warm job. Small, step by step action steps create that continuous drive to keep moving forward. Set them daily and act on them.

For example, you may aim to spend 30 minutes each day looking for a new job on the Internet, and 2 hours each week networking with people who may be able to help you find a better job.

If you look purely at short term benefits, a warm job is certainly not the worst job in the world. However, if you look at things in perspective, a warm job is one hell of a way to sell yourself short. It’s important to keep improving (not only in terms of people skills) and keep moving.

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Filed Under: Career, Inspirational, Lifestyle Tagged With: , , , 10 Comments
October 6, 2010

Regrets of the Dying / Living

I’ve recently read this article called ‘Regrets of the Dying’ which I found to be breathtaking. The author worked for many years in palliative care, with patients on the dying bed, and the article synthesizes the most common regrets these people had.

Not only that I enjoyed this article, but it also inspired me to write my own reply article to Regrets of the Dying, with a focus on the regrets of the living.

Regrets as Life Lessons

I’ve never worked with people on their dying bed and I hope I never will. However, as a communication coach and a (sometimes) social animal, I did have my share of interactions with people who:

  • Were getting old and becoming highly aware of the passing time;
  • Were getting sick and becoming highly aware of their fragility;
  • Were seriously contemplating their lives and deaths for some reason;

Being sort of a collector of life lessons and people skills wisdom, I was curious to find out what regrets these people had looking back at their lives, to extract valuable lessons. So I asked many of them about this and consequently, I got my data on regrets of the living who are contemplating dying.

The Essential Three Regrets

Since I have a passion for people skills, the regrets I focused on finding out were of course in the area of people skills and how these persons interacted with other human beings. Here are the 3 essential regrets I’ve discovered:

1. I wish I did what I wanted instead of what others wanted.

I had many people telling me things such as:

  • “I wish I didn’t study and work in Engineering because my family wanted me to do so. I whish I had chosen Sociology instead, which was my real passion.”
  • “I wish I didn’t get married so fast because all my friends were getting married and expected me to do the same soon. I wished I had stayed single longer.”

In moments of meaningful contemplation, almost all the people I know seem to discover that living the way they want is or would have been much more rewarding than living a life pleasing others, no matter who those others are.

2. I wish I didn’t take what others thought of me so seriously.

When people look back at how they have lived their lives, many tend to discover they’ve spent a lot of time worrying what others thought of them. Of course, they also discover this was a huge waste of time, because most worrying was pointless.

Knowing they are going to die soon gives people a lot of perspective on how important others’ opinions about them are. Almost every time, they discover they’re not important. You could probably piss off half the people you know and that still wouldn’t have any serious negative consequences on your life, so it wouldn’t really matter.

3. I wish I’d spent more with the most valuable people in my life.

A vast number of people discover they misallocated their time resources. They didn’t spend enough time interacting with the most valuable people in their lives and they’ve spent too much time interacting with part of the rest. Why? Because they falsely believed they didn’t have a choice.

If you think about it, your life is a sum of experiences. So the quality of your life is fundamentally the quality of those experiences. If you realize at a deep level that you’ve wasted your most valuable resource on secondhand human interactions, then no excuse for doing this seems sufficient.

There is one key difference between the regrets of the dying and the regrets of the living. The dying don’t really have the time left to correct their mistakes. They can only teach others valuable lessons, about people skills and life.

The living on the other hand do have the time; but they need to stop every once in a while, look back at their lives and ask themselves: Is this how I want to live the rest of my life?

Yes, I’m talking about me and you…

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Filed Under: Attitude, Inspirational, Lifestyle Tagged With: , , 10 Comments
September 22, 2010

How Badly Do You Really Want It?

Take a moment to ask a person about their dreams and they’ll tell you about a fulfilling career, a great relationship, or their own island in the Pacific Ocean.

Take a couple more moments, as I often do in coaching, to ask them what they’re planning to do in order to make their dreams come true, and you’ll often hear the most unrealistic fairytales.

In my experience, most people are simply not willing to do the things which will realistically make them achieve their big dreams, things which happen to also be pretty hard. Thus, they automatically reject the most effective alternatives, they’re stuck with bad alternatives and they eventually abandon their dreams.

Real Stories

Here are three real examples, of people I’ve interacted with in the past few months:

  1. A person who wants to become a top professional in a Fortune 500 company, but is not willing to leave the small town they live in. Why? Because all their friends and relatives are there.
  2. A person who hates their job and wants to go into a new professional field, but is not willing to take the initial salary cut. Why? Because they would have to sell their fast car and take the subway for a while.
  3. A person who wants to have a successful business, but is not willing to work for 2 or 3 years at developing this business besides their regular job, until it becomes sustainable. Why? Too much work.

In all these examples, the path exists. The only problem is that the person is not willing to take the path. They don’t want to make the necessary compromises.

Quitting In the Face Of a Challenge

Now I’m not saying that all compromises are good. Sometimes, the effort to get to a certain place in your life is just not worth it by comparison with the benefits. However, this is not the case I’m talking about.

The real issue in my view is that many people aren’t willing to make even strategic compromises, which in the end would be worth it: the short-term compromise for the much bigger long-term benefits.

In my area of people skills, I see countless examples of people who aren’t willing to accept a challenge and put in the work to improve key people skills, even though they know how much it would enrich their lives. They stop at the level of: “Yeah, I know: I should probably work on this.” And they pay the price.

Reality Check

Let’s turn the discussion towards you. I invite you to look at your life, your career and your relationships, and ask yourself four magic questions:

  1. What are my biggest, boldest dreams in these areas?
  2. What are realistically, the things I need to do in order to achieve these dreams?
  3. Which of these things have I really accepted and decided to do?
  4. Which of these things am I really doing?

If you’re like 98% of people, you’ll find out that your deeds aren’t exactly aligned with your dreams. There is a gap between them which if you don’t face, can become as big as the Grand Canyon.

You may try to find shortcuts and creative solutions to achieve your goals with little effort or struggle. If your goals are high, chances are that you will not find them or they won’t work.

The roads to great places tend to have quite the bumps at some points. The best thing you can do is to accept the bumps in the road and go through them.

In a way, you could say that making those hard, initial compromises to get what will truly enrich your life is the easy way. I say this because if you look at things in perspective, you end up living a much more meaningful and joyful life.

However, the meaningful joyful life does imply an initial level of work, perseverance and sacrifice which only few people are willing to go through. But if you want something big and you want it badly enough, it makes sense to go beyond what most people are willing to do.

If you decide that you simply don’t want if badly enough, no problem. Just make sure that when you’re an old person and you tell stories to your grandchildren about your life, you don’t say that you could have been a great person but you didn’t have the opportunity. It was right there in your face!

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Filed Under: Attitude, Inspirational, Success Tagged With: , , , 23 Comments
August 25, 2010

Get Off the Therapy Couch! Why Exploring the Past Is Nonsense

Client: “I’ve always been lacking the confidence to speak up. In childhood, my parents were very harsh with me and would always criticize me when I opened my mouth. There was this one time when I was 9…”

Me: “Aham (cough)… I don’t really need to know that. Give me an example of how this lack of confidence manifests itself NOW.”

The fascination many people have with doing a heavy, skilled analysis of their past is something I understand very well and in terms of practical benefits, I find pointless.

Coaches have traditionally been making a lot of fun of some types of therapists for focusing to much on the past and not enough on the present. I guess somebody forgot to inform the potential clients as well about this frequent weak spot of therapy.

Why We Like to Explore Our Past

There are several reasons for which I believe that many of us put a lot of emphasis on exploring our past in our personal development:

  • We have a need to know ourselves, which includes understanding clearly how our past experiences left their mark on us. This is all fine but, do you really want to put a lot of effort and sometimes money in that?
  • We have this idea (probably induced by cheap self-help books) that there is this one negative experience in our past which is single handedly responsible for a certain flaw or fear we have. And we need to find it.
  • We think that in order to change our beliefs or get rid of our fears, we need to understand exactly their source in the past. And when we do and we embrace our past, the change often happens just like that.
  • We sometimes us it as a way of running from the responsibility of acting and changing ourselves. We focus on the past so we can forget about the person development work required in the present.

The Reality of Personal Development

I will sometimes read a psychoanalyst’s opinion on how our present problems are rooted in the past and we need to skillfully uncover the past in order to heal the present. And it will crack me up; because in all my research on this topic, I haven’t found a single convincing shred of evidence to support this.

Analyzing your past, digging dip and unraveling all sort of stuff may sound cool, but it is basically a useless process judging by the improvements it creates. The bottom line is this:

Exploring your past is not necessary or very useful in transforming yourself.

Why? Because our present ways of thinking and feeling may have their origins in the past, but it doesn’t really mater. Our beliefs, thinking patterns and emotions have a life of their own in the here and now.

Consequently, it is in the here and now that we need to address them if we wanna see results. Understanding the kind of experiences that created them may give us some extra clarity and help us discover irrational thinking, but that’s about all it can do. And we only need a small amount of past exploration to get this effect.

This is why I use principles and techniques from CBC (Cognitive Behavioral Coaching) when I assist my clients change their thinking and emotional reactions, in order to improve the people skills they aim to improve. CBC has a focus on the present and on getting real, quantifiable results.

If you’re looking for improvement, focus on the present. Identify those limiting ways of thinking you have now and combat them now. Do this repeatedly, systemically, and you’ll see some real progress. The answer to your personal development is not in the past, it is in this moment.

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Filed Under: Inspirational, Personal Development, Psychology Tagged With: , , , , 22 Comments
August 15, 2010

Beyond People Skills: My 3 Life Lessons

This article is written at the invitation of fellow blogger Abubakar Jamil, as part of the Life Lessons Series. You can find out more about this project and the people involved on his blog.

It’s a very enjoyable activity for me to look back at my life so far, at the experiences I had, to reflect on them and to draw lessons. It’s something I do periodically, in a systematic, pen & paper way, and something I encourage everyone to do.

As I’m doing this process now, there are 3 very valuable life lessons which stand out. They go beyond improving people skills and they’re the lessons I want to share with you.

Life Lesson 1: Your weaknesses are your strengths.

When I was a teenager, I was frequently described as ‘annoying’ because I asked a lot of questions and always wanted details about things I didn’t quite understand. The result of this was that I started asking questions about why it’s bad to ask a lot of questions. I never got a satisfying answer, but I also didn’t want to annoy people so I ended up shutting up a lot more.

As time passed and I got seriously into psychology, I began to see all the potential benefits of my tendencies to ask a lot of questions. I was basically an analytical person, which enjoyed decoding various phenomena. So instead of repressing this side of my personality, I decided to express it and find the best ways to do so.

Now, the fact I ask a lot of questions is what makes me have a good understanding of how people skills work; get a good grasp of my clients’ needs and provide real results through my coaching services. I still annoy some people, but I don’t mind that anymore. I know that if I look in perspective, my weakness is my strength.

Life Lesson 2: Perfectionism kills productivity.

I started writing at the same time I started coaching. I remember that it took me then almost 4 hours to write a one page article related to people skills which I now write in less than 2 hours. Part of this visible increase in my writing speed is due to the fact my writing skills have improved a lot in the passing years, and part is due to the fact I stopped being a perfectionist about my writing.

When I was writing articles for the first time, I felt this need to make them look perfect. I wanted the perfect structure, style, words and ideas every time. Later, I realized that perfection was not necessary. My readers wanted very good writing and high quality ideas (this made them read my stuff and buy my other services) but they did not require perfection.

By being a perfectionist about my writing, I was using a lot of time for each article, without a significant increase in the benefits to justify it. So, I gradually started to tolerate imperfection and give less time to each article. I continued to have a high standard in my writing, but I no longer sought perfection. Because perfectionism was killing my productivity.

Life Lesson 3: Hope is not enough, you need a good strategy.

This is a lesson which fortunately for me, I’ve learned mostly from the experiences of other persons around me. I say fortunately because it was a lesson learned mostly through big failures and loses.

I have seen people in my professional network lose a lot of money and fail miserably with all sorts of business ideas. And most of the time, these people had one thing in common: they weren’t applying realistic business strategies. They had a lot of hope and optimism, but no real understanding what it takes to make their business ideas work. They were very slow to learn from their mistakes, to develop their strategies, and so they’ve made businesses plummet.

I have seen this happen beyond managing a business, in managing a career or a life. And it’s the same pattern: hope is good but it is not enough. At the end of the day, you need to know what the heck you’re doing and have a solid strategy to reflect it. Hope is a good companion, but not a replacement for competence.

These are my 3 life lessons. What are your most important life lessons?

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Filed Under: Attitude, Inspirational, Lifestyle Tagged With: , , , 21 Comments
August 4, 2010

Top 10 Lessons Learned From Coaching 100 People

I have recently reached the number of 100 coaching clients, which I have worked with individually in just under 4 years. It’s been an awesome learning and development experience, not only for my clients but also for myself. I feel like one big chapter in my career has closed and another one is opening.

Like the end of any big chapter, it’s a moment for celebration as well as reflection for me. Looking back at these communication coaching experiences, there are 10 essential lessons I draw, which I want to share with you. The first part of the lessons is about the coaching process in itself, the second part is about people skills and how to improve them.

1. If you want hardcore results, go for coaching

You can read book and articles, you can go to trainings and seminars, but if you want to see the fastest, most powerful self-improvement, often in unexpected ways, choose coaching. The fact that it’s a 100% customized experience and all the focus is on you, provided that you work with a good coach, makes coaching one hell of a learning experience. I have rarely seen people improve and have such breakthroughs as they did in the coaching process.

2. Revealing blind spots is the key benefit of coaching

If there is one positive effect you can get in coaching better than through any other self-improvement process, it’s seeing your blind spots: revealing ways of thinking or behaving you had no idea that you had, or realizing their real impact. Often in working one-on-one with a person, the moment when she sees one huge blind spot she had is very meaningful and emotionally charged. It is an opportunity to make big decisions and create great change.

3. If you don’t follow-through, you are making a huge waste

One of the fundamental roles of coaching is to help you discover things which set the foundation for solid and effective future improvement. This is why strong follow-through is very important. If you don’t apply what you discovered through the coaching process and you don’t practicing between and after the coaching sessions, the results you’ll get will be considerably lower and less impressive. It’s like buying a Ferrari and only driving it at 50 mph.

4. Specialization is power

I don’t do coaching on anything. My niche is helping people put their best foot forward in communication and improve people skills; my approach is based on developing underlying attitudes just at much if not more than actual skills. This specialization helped me grow very fast as a coach and learn how to create the best result for my clients. After working with 100 clients, I feel that I am a true professional in communication coaching, and I have the real-world results to back it up.

5. Honesty is money

I once told a friend that one of the reasons a person or company is paying you in coaching is the fact you are willing to tell and show someone things others are not. For example, to the intimidating manager with poor listening skills that nobody is willing to give some honest feedback about. I am now even more convinced that honest feedback is one of the most valuable things you can provide as a coach. I think it’s a pity that such a scarcity of honest feedback exists, but that’s where a big coaching opportunity lies.

6. Communication skills are the thing to invest in

Sometimes I am asked why I chose to help others improve their communication skills instead of improving something else. It is because I believe that cutting edge communication skills are the thing worth having and worth developing. The right people skills in general and the right communication skills in particular can skyrocket your career, your relationships and your life. Everyday, I see the huge difference having and sharpening them makes.

7. The big difference comes from working on attitudes

You can’t really have awesome communication and people skills without the right attitudinal foundation. This is something which I think applies for many other soft skills as well. At the end of the day, your attitude will make or break your aptitude. This is why I put a lot of emphasis on attitude transformation and I work with many of my clients on changing beliefs, thinking patterns and emotional reactions. Often, it’s all downhill from there.

8. It’s about creating a unique social style which matches your strengths

I don’t believe there is one exact style of interacting socially which works best. I think there are multiple styles, with common patterns between them. This is why I don’t teach exact formulas for communication and social interactions, but rather principle and guidelines. The thing is to find a social style for yourself which capitalizes on your strengths instead of ignoring them or opposing them, and to develop that style.

9. A huge part of the improvement is expressing yourself

Most of us don’t really express ourselves authentically, outside of very specific contexts. We have learned to play games, to put on facades as a way to try and get the approval of others. This rarely works and it does a lot more harm than good in the long term. What we really need to learn more of is how to put our real selves out there, more and better: our needs, our dreams, our ideas, beliefs and feelings.

10. We need to teach people skills methodically from the age of 5

Well, we don’t really need to; we would definitely benefit tremendously from it however. Many of the problems our society has are the result of people not knowing how to relate to other people effectively. Even some of the problems which seem caused by poverty, corruption or crime at a first glance are often generated and maintained at a deeper level by people having bad skills with people.

For me, coaching others to improve their communication and people skills, combined with tuning my own skills is a very fulfilling process. One I will definitely keep at for many years to come. The journey continues…

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Filed Under: Communication Skills, Inspirational, People Skills Tagged With: , 28 Comments
July 16, 2010

Is the Road You’re On Really Necessary?

“What do you want?” – I ask my coaching client.

“I want to advance in my field; to reach the top.” – he replies.

“Do you like what you do, in this field?”

“No, but that’s beside the point”.

I listen, I ask more questions, I try to understand him. Turns out he wants to advance in his field because he believes once he gets to a certain place in it he will obtain the recognition of those around him. And getting that recognition will give him a sense of validation, of self worth.

“What if you don’t really need to go through all this process to feel worthy?” – I ask him. “What If you just need to work on your self-esteem and sense of intrinsic worth, which is a more direct and effective road?” He looks at me puzzled.

I find that most people are going on roads which are not really necessary to get what they want. They struggle working jobs they don’t really like, dealing with people they can’t stand, having a vague thought that this is the only way. But they really haven’t thought things through. It is more of an automatic reaction to the world they live in. And if they do think things through, they often discover that their struggle is pretty much unnecessary.

This happens because most of us chase things like money, fame, status, without asking ourselves two very important questions:

  1. Why do I want these things, what is the final destination?
  2. Is there a better way to reach this final destination?

When you ask yourself these questions and take some time to explore your motivations, as well as your options, you often become amazed at how much simpler, less stressful things can be, and how much you may have deluded yourself.

I think that it’s a fundamental trait of the society we live in, the fact that it teaches us to delude ourselves. Schools, families, commercials and public figures try to get us chasing all sort of stuff, thinking that it will make us happy and there is no other option. Look just two feet beyond their common messages, and you will often see something else.

In particular, I think there are a couple of messages we consistently get, either explicitly or implicitly, which are actually myths and tend to put us on roads we don’t really need to take in order to reach our destinations Messages like:

  • You always need to work hard to get what you want;
  • Work is by its nature un-enjoyable and you just have to tolerate it;
  • More money will make you more happy;
  • The respect and validation of other people is the most important thing to strive for;
  • Your health and your needs come second to the needs of others.
  • You can’t really be happy. Grown people live lives of struggle and compromise.

Do any of these messages sound silly to you? That’s because they are. I can’t name one person I know, who guiding herself by these ideas managed to have a rich and fulfilling life, in a sustainable way. Not even one.

I believe that the best thing you can do is to stop every once in a while, look at the road you’re tacking, fully realize where it’s heading and what alternatives you have. Doing this and acting on your realizations, you will set yourself on a path which is significantly different that the path most people are on, and also much, much more rewarding. It is the path of the wise man.

Image courtesy of Stuck in Customs

Filed Under: Attitude, Inspirational, Lifestyle, Success Tagged With: , , 12 Comments