Impact

One of the most rewarding aspects of working in this domain is to see people make significant shifts in their lives. There is no magic in the approach outlined in this book. Over the last 20 years, however, thousands of people have used it to create ‘magic’ in their lives.

To do so not only requires a high level of courage, passion, and curiosity, but also, and maybe most importantly, a willingness to be honest about who you are being in the present and who you believe you can become in the future.

What follows below is a small collection of testimonials from people with whom the team and I have been privileged to work in recent years.

All of these people were successful in their own right, long before they began to work with us. They didn’t need the work in that sense, and neither do you.

All of them, however, were willing to approach the work from a place of possibility and a belief in their continued ability to grow and develop their private and public identity. The subsequent impact on their lives that they describe, speaks for itself.

Marcus Marsden

* * * * *

“I have been working with Marcus and TWP for three years, on work ranging from individual leadership coaching to transformational team dynamics. Their approach is unique as it addresses the human being, not just the corporate layer of the person.

It brings out a deep level of authenticity and vulnerability that allows the team to form a deep connection with each other as well as with the team objectives.

Only when the relationship is built from the profound understanding of each other, beyond just the work mask, does it translate into outstanding team performance, especially in such challenging times. TWP has made this possible for me and my team.”

—  Angela Chen

Vice President, La Prairie

“#LifeAltering. That is the first phrase (with associated emotions) that comes to mind when I think of my (ongoing) journey with Marcus and TCP, both as a student and a practitioner of this exciting space.

When I started the journey several years ago, I expected that I would benefit as a coach and as an organisational leader. What I did not anticipate is the impact that I experienced in my life as a whole. The impact was not just intellectual but also physical and emotional. I look back with gratitude and look ahead in anticipation of what else awaits to be explored.”

—  D. N. Prasad, Father | Friend | Coach;

Senior Director (Strategy, People, & Organisation), GovTech Singapore; Founder & Executive Coach, Noetic Step Pte Ltd

“My journey started with an incredible coaching experience with a coach from TCP. As a result, I decided to sign up to both the TCP and TWP programmes; giving myself a fully holistic experience.

The experiential nature of the interventions and the powerful distinctions that were introduced, completely changed the relationship that I had with my body, the value that I saw in emotions, and how I used language to create my future.

Choices started to open up that were previously invisible to me. I overcame existing self-limiting beliefs that ultimately led to me getting married. A priceless win!

Professionally, I started to see my corporate life through different eyes. My increased capacity for energy and action has positively impacted my performance, relationships, and peace of mind. The change in me has not only been visible to me, but also my family, friends, and colleagues.

I am very grateful for TCP and TWP. I believe the world is a more inclusive and better place because of them.”

—  Steffen Schick

Director, Global Net Revenue Management, GSK

“My coaching experience with TWP lasted around four months and resulted in quite the impact, right from the start of the first module.

Initially, the journey started with a combination of learning and deep reflection which allowed me to define a number of personal and business orientated objectives that I saw come to fruition by the end of the four months.

The journey was much more than just defining and meeting goals; it deeply impacted the way I looked at and handled many situations in my life.

Perhaps the most unexpected outcome for me is the impact it had on my personal life, where I was able to repair and significantly strengthen a very important personal family relationship. The learning, coaching sessions, and reflection will all stay with me well beyond the course. The whole experience supported my growth, openness, and approach to authenticity in a way that will live with me forever.”

—  Adam Aatar

Senior Director, Digital Security & Global SOC, Prudential

“Marcus and his team have spent decades supporting people to change their lives for the better, with an incredible coaching system that is highly relevant and much needed in today’s volatile and hectic world.

I should know, because I was one of those people who was deeply moved and inspired by what I learnt in the TCP programmes. I can honestly say that I would not be the coach and author I am today if it weren’t for TCP.

I recommend their programmes to any coach or leader looking to take their abilities to a new level.”

—  Marcel Daane, MSc Neuroscience of Leadership;

2020 Executive Coach of the Year (Singapore);

Critically Acclaimed Author of Headstrong Performance and Five Energies of Horrible Bosses

“My journey with Marcus started in 2013 during a Tension Release Exercise (TRE) workshop. Following that, I was introduced to the TCP and TWP learning and coaching programmes. The experiential nature of the learning processes helped me to explore important areas of my life, assisted me in balancing my feelings and emotions, as well as to understand and accept my fears.

Throughout the learning process, emphasis was given to ‘practice and then more practice’ of the tools and techniques that were introduced. These tools have proven very useful, and I am still practising them today, as they are now firmly established in my toolbox.

Professionally and personally, I have experienced an amazing difference and I am still on the learning curve, as my old habits and fixed beliefs require constant attention. I am grateful that even today, many years later, I am still having conversations with Marcus, and he is still holding the mirror.”

—  Fotis Kampouris

Managing Director, LRQA Inspection Services

“When I was first introduced to TCP and TWP, little did I realise the personal and professional impact that meeting would have on my life.

I have had the pleasure of being a participant, a practitioner, and most importantly, a partner to their business. I have found deep partnerships to be rare in the world of personal and professional development, but TWP and TCP have been an exception to that rule.

I have personally experienced first-hand the deep change their work has created for people. The world is full of ‘hacks’ and shortcuts to personal growth that turn out to be nothing more than a mirage. The TWP and TCP work took me on a challenging journey of discovery and creation, and the results are real.

Sustainability is the cornerstone of development work and the whole team lives and breathes their work in all aspects of the experience.”

—  Alex Talbot, PCC

Head of Human Resources Asia-Pacific, SimCorp

“The Foundations programme run by TCP, quite frankly, changed my life! Throughout the programme, I got an opportunity to better understand and accept myself. I explored emotions that were long dormant. In particular, my somatic work with Beatriz Garcia brought joy back in to my life! The programme contributed vastly to the person, the coach, the mother, and the wife I am today.”

—  Nithya Venkataraman

Leadership Programme Architect, Facilitator, and Coach

“My journey into the world of coaching began with TCP’s ontological coaching programme. It provided the input and space I needed to uncover a key self-limiting belief that had held me back from experiencing healing for a long-standing medical condition. The nine-month journey—supported by passionate trainers, coaches, and mentors—has led to me to become physically, emotionally, and mentally stronger.

Continuing with the Health Coach Certification programme, I was able to further expand my range as a professional coach to include the foundations of health and wellness and better support my clients on their personal and professional journeys.

The TCP programmes have been, by far, the most life-changing programmes I have experienced as a leader, and I am extremely grateful to the TCP community for the generosity and support towards my learning and professional growth.”

—  Michele Lum

Former Chief Leadership Officer, Group ICT, PETRONAS

First published 2022

Copyright © 2022 Marcus Marsden

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except for inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

Candid Creation Publishing books are available through most major bookstores in Singapore. For bulk order of our books at special quantity discounts, please email us at enquiry@candidcreation.com.

START WITH WHO

REVEAL THE HIDDEN POWER OF IDENTITY TO CREATE A PURPOSEFUL LIFE

Author :  Marcus Marsden

Publisher :  Phoon Kok Hwa

Editor :  Patricia Ng

Cover designer :  Shena Honey Lagapa Pulido

Layout :  Corrine Teng

Published by :  Candid Creation Publishing LLP

167 Jalan Bukit Merah

#05-12 Connection One Tower 4

Singapore 150167

Website :  www.candidcreation.com

Facebook :  www.facebook.com/CandidCreationPublishing

Email :  enquiry@candidcreation.com

ISBN :  978-981-17135-4-5 (Paperback)

978-981-17135-5-2 (Hardcover)

Contents

Acknowledgements

Forewords

Preface

Introduction

PART I The Ontological Approach

1        Single and Double Loop Learning

2        Distinctions

3        Distinctions of a Human Being

4        Distinctions in Language

5        Distinctions in the Limbic System

6        Distinctions in Somatics

Postscript

Key Learning Points

PART II Who Are You? (How Do You Know?)

7        Context and Content

8        Observer and Identity as Context

9        Context Development

10      Problems with Identity

11      Opportunities with Identity

12      Declarations, Authority, and Authenticity

13      The Power of ‘Who’

Postscript

Key Learning Points

PART III Feedback

14      What is Feedback?

15      Misconceptions of Feedback

16      Why is Feedback Useful?

17      Master Assessments

18      Barriers Surrounding Feedback

19      Effective Feedback

20      Adding Speech Acts to Feedback

Postscript

Key Learning Points

PART IV Bringing It All Together

21      Barriers to Starting With ‘Who’

22      Sustaining the Change

23      Building Belief

24      Case Studies

Postscript

Key Learning Points

PART V Conclusion

25      Storytelling

26      Knowledge, Truth, and Facts

27      It’s All Made Up

28      In Closing

Postscript

Key Learning Points

Appendix

A1      The Sarius Squares

A2      Start With ‘What’ and ‘Why’

A3      Start With ‘Who’

About the Author

The Works Partnership

The Coach Partnership

Selected TCP/TWP Coaches and Trainers

Suggestions for Further Reading

“All I can do is be me, whoever that is.”

Bob Dylan

Acknowledgements

While this book is genuinely the product of everyone I have met on my personal and professional journeys, there are some people without whom this book simply would not have been written.

Firstly, my incredible wife, Sari. You might not be a co-author on this occasion, but you are just as much a force behind this book as you were for Fit To Lead. Put simply, this book does not exist without you, because I would be an entirely different human being if I had not met you. I speak a lot in this book about ‘keeping the mirror clean’. You help me do that every day of my life. How you stay sane in the face of my insanity never fails to amaze me.

Secondly, Mark Hemstedt, my late business partner, and co-founder of TWP, whose spirit hangs over the book. Mark and I had many conversations over the years regarding writing a book that went against ‘received wisdom’. For those of you who knew Mark, you will not be surprised to hear that he had many more ‘contrarian ideas’ than I do. I like to think he would approve of this one as a starting point.

Special mentions to Tini Fadzillah, Mark’s co-founder at TWP, Kelly Poulos, our long-time TWP coach, and Terrie Lupberger, the heartbeat of our ontological TCP work. The approach I outline in this book is a synthesis of the work that the three of you have patiently introduced me to, over the past 20 years. I know I didn’t always make it easy.

Not forgetting the team at The Works Partnership and The Coach Partnership: Joylynn, Sarah, Dr Kat, Clemence, MJ, Sarah, Sheila, Amanda, Nabil, and Martin, with a special shout out to Jenice, for your help with the diagrams. Your levels of passion and energy are a constant source of inspiration to me. I could not ask for a stronger team and I am proud to be a part of what we are creating together.

One of the true blessings of this line of work is to encounter so many dazzling individuals along the way. So, to all of our programme coaches, training faculty, participants, and clients, I say a big “thank you”. All of you have played a role in the creation of this book, whether you realise it or not.

To Andrew Leci. Sometimes a British guy needs a British guy. Thank you for your sharp eye, quick wit, and demand for excellence. You got me over the line.

Finally, to the publisher of both this book and Fit To Lead: Kok Hwa of Candid Creation Publishing. The spirit you showed in the face of your own recent personal challenges was inspiring, and a major reason I wanted to work with you and your team again. You walk the talk.

Forewords

I have taken the slightly unusual route of including two forewords because this book is really a fusion of the two methodologies that underpin our TWP and TCP work. Both methodologies ‘start with who’ and are ontological in nature. While they are consistent and aligned, they do also illuminate different parts of the approach outlined in this book.

Kelly Poulos is an international management consultant, performance coach and bestselling author. She is also the matriarch of TWP coaching. I was fortunate to meet her more than 20 years ago and it has been a whirlwind romance ever since.

The second methodology is the one that underpins the work of The Coach Partnership. I first met Terrie Lupberger more than 10 years ago and it was as though we had known each other for years. Terrie is a kindred spirit on the path of human development and growth. Someone I am proud to call not simply a colleague, but a friend.

* * * * *

Start With Who, Marcus Marsden’s contribution to the landscape of creating success, is unique.

There is a tsunami of content available to us on ‘how’ to achieve our professional and personal goals. In my view, most are not that useful.

Marcus is unusual in that he combines an Oxford University academic background with real world, multinational business experience and now, leadership of boutique leadership, coaching, and coach training companies: The Works Partnership and The Coach Partnership.

In addition to being a great coach and facilitator, Marcus has the wonderful ability to translate complex ideas into useful, elegant, practical applications. Like I said, he is unusual.

Based on my own experience of more than 40 years of consulting, this book gives you the key to unlocking full potential in yourself and your team. It may surprise you to find that he is not advocating the traditional approach of ‘Do more, faster!’.

He is indeed a fresh voice. Don’t just read it. Apply it!

You will be thrilled with the results.

Kelly Poulos

International management consultant, performance coach, and bestselling author

* * * * *

As I read this book, an old saying from our line of work came to my mind: “If you always do what you’ve always done, then you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten.” That sums up so much of the well-worn approaches to leading and change management that, with this book, Marcus aims to disrupt.

Two game-changing questions—“who are you being?” and “who are you becoming?”—are at the core of a new approach to change leadership. Our answer to these questions informs everything we think and do as human beings.

Sadly, while absolutely fundamental to being human, they are largely overlooked, resulting in consequences that keep us stuck in old habits and limiting beliefs, that shape our results and often the lack thereof.

In this book, Marcus offers a useful, relevant, and practical way to think about these questions as it relates to our drive for success. Beyond asking about ‘why’ and ‘what’, Marcus offers us models and distinctions for how to get at who we are being that might just be in our way of generating the future we want.

Marcus and I, together with the TWP and TCP team, regularly engage our participants, executives, teams, and organisations in this work with outstanding success. The distinctions he offers here are well-tested and applied, not just interesting theory.

Be warned, however, that after reading this book, you can no longer use the excuse that these ‘who questions’ are ‘personal’ and that they don’t belong in a business environment.

These ‘who questions’ are fundamental drivers of our behaviours, beliefs, and actions. The willingness to explore questions such as these will support others (and yourself) to move in the direction of possibility and greatness, rather than to stay stuck in limitations.

Terrie Lupberger, MCC

Director of Training and lead trainer with The Coach Partnership

Preface

After my wife, Sari, and I finished Fit To Lead, I didn’t expect to write another book. That book was the logical consequence of the paths that Sari and I were travelling together at the time. This book snuck up on me over 35 years. It combines thoughts from my Oxford University Philosophy degree, my Unilever business education, and my TWP and TCP coaching experience.

While it is not necessary to read Fit To Lead in order to understand this book, the earlier book certainly operates as a good precursor to this one because it establishes much of the philosophy and underlying beliefs that underpin the approach outlined in this book. The two books are best seen as partner volumes.

As with Fit To Lead, the inspiration to write the book came from an area where my own experience and observations diverge from generally accepted wisdom. In the case of Fit To Lead, this divergence was centred largely around the role of the body in leadership and personal development. In this case, the divergence is based around the setting and achievement of goals and visions.

One of the things that I find saddest and most frustrating in this area is when I hear people say with great certainty: “Because I am (or am not) like this, I can’t be like that” or “Because I have (or don’t have) this, I can’t have that.”

There are countless other variations on this theme. Common examples include:

• “Because I have this job, I cannot have a close relationship with my spouse or my kids.”

• “Because I am married/have kids, I cannot become a senior manager.”

• “Because of my gender, nationality, race, height etc., I can’t be or do X.”

Sometimes, people are unaware of these conversations that they have about themselves. At other times, people are very aware of them, and treat them as immutable facts. Some people become resigned to what they see as their ‘fate’, while other people rage about it, full of resentment. In either case, people begin to see themselves as prisoners of who they are and who they believe they can become. Hence the need to address these conversations and ‘start with who’.

When I hear statements such as these, I like to ask people to finish the sentence, and when they look puzzled, I ask them to add: “… and stay in my comfort zone”.

This changes everything. For example: “I cannot have this job, have a close relationship with my spouse and kids … and stay in my comfort zone.” So, it is entirely possible to have that job, do it well, and have a close relationship with your family, but you might need to begin to have different conversations with your boss (or your spouse) in order to generate that new possibility. Maybe you need to begin to negotiate with your boss on work deadlines, for example, or make requests of your team members. It is the same at home. Perhaps you need to set some clear boundaries with your spouse or children. Boundaries that you have been reluctant to set, because of the need for a conversation that you know you will find uncomfortable.

New conversations such as these are highly likely to be uncomfortable at first, especially if you have been avoiding them for some time.

There are no guarantees in life, but if you are willing to get uncomfortable and experience the awkwardness of new and different conversations and experiences, then new results become possible.

When you stay inside your comfort zone, play safe, and avoid taking risks, it is often the biggest risk of all, and what you are risking is your future and your dreams. Similarly, don’t imagine that you can avoid being judged when you stay in your comfort zone. You do not become invisible. Some people will judge you for risking and some people will judge you for playing safe. The only difference is that while the former offers the possibility of you achieving your dreams, the latter does not.

The impetus to write this book came from an unwavering belief in the power of human beings to achieve their dreams. In my line of work, I meet so many people who, while working very hard, still experience the frustration and disappointment of not achieving what they set out to do in life. In these pages, together we will explore a simple (not easy!) way of challenging this seemingly never-ending hamster wheel of frustration.

While the traditional approach of starting with specific goals (the ‘what’) and a powerful motivation (the ‘why’) certainly can create success, I also see it creating a lot of frustration, pain, and disappointment.

When I compared that with the approach that we use at The Works Partnership and The Coach Partnership, it seemed that this traditional approach was missing a crucial first step.

Rather than starting with “what do you want?” and “why do you want it?”, we start with “who are you being?” and “who do you believe you can become?”

The big difference is that we start in the present, rather than the future.

This point of entry not only establishes a more powerful foundation, it also opens up a whole different scale of possible futures.

We will explore the reasons for this together over the pages that follow.

In summary, the power of the ‘start with who’ approach is that it seeks to harness the strength of two of the most powerful forces commonly experienced by human beings: Creating stories and then being right about them.

Introduction

BACKGROUND

The driving force behind this book is a passion for creating success, both in the lives of others, as well as my own. As far as I know, we have limited time to live on our planet, so why not use it to create as much success as we can?

Of course, your definition of success will be unique to you and elements of it will change with age and life-stage. Your definition of success might be financial, it might be health-focused, it might be based in the success and happiness of other people. No matter what your definition of success may be, the approach that we will explore together here is relevant.

I do not claim this approach to be unique to me or that it is a guarantee of success, but I do claim that it has proven extremely powerful in my own life, as well as in the lives of thousands of people with whom The Works Partnership (TWP) and The Coach Partnership (TCP) have worked over the last two decades.

The most effective way to approach this book is to read with a mood of curiosity and to be willing to make this approach real for you, in your situation. I will also give examples to help illustrate the approach, but the real power will emerge when you have the courage to apply it honestly in your own life. To facilitate that process, I will pose questions at the end of each chapter, and I urge you to take the time to explore them, in real time.

If you do this, then you will inevitably experience moments of confusion and resistance. Pay special attention to these moments, because they will be the most revealing part of the whole process and will likely offer you the most value.

The book is divided into five parts.

• Part I: The Ontological Approach

• Part II: Who Are You?

• Part III: Feedback

• Part IV: Bringing It All Together

• Part V: Conclusion

This structure is designed to take you on a step-by-step process, where each step builds on the next. We begin with the ontological model that provides the foundation for the ‘start with who’ approach and then we add in the key concepts that distinguish this particular approach, most notably: context, content, identity, and feedback.

Having done this, Part IV shows you how to apply the process and provides a number of short case studies. Finally, Part V pulls the curtain back on some of the methodology and beliefs that underpin the approach. It also provides further food for thought, should you wish to expand your usage of the TWP/TCP ‘start with who’ methodology into other areas of your life.

THE ONTOLOGICAL APPROACH

The first section of the book gives a brief overview of the methodology that provides the operating system for the thoughts contained in this book. This is the methodology that underpins both the TWP leadership development and the TCP coach certification work. The methodology is a rigorous and theoretical framework, rooted in the study of ‘being’. The approach is human being-centric in that it puts the emphasis on the person themselves—how they are constituted and how they constitute their world.

This book is not intended to be a textbook or deep dive into the theory of ontological living, leading, or coaching. Because the ‘start with who’ approach leans heavily on ontological distinctions, however, a working understanding of the methodology is necessary in order to fully grasp it.

WHO ARE YOU?

The second section of the book deals with the primary driver for change, development, and visioning work. The generally received wisdom is to ‘start with why’. If you want to create a powerful journey, then understanding and aligning around the ‘why’ of that journey is where it all begins.

This was my take on things for many years, in my own journey as a leadership development facilitator and executive coach.

• To myself:

Why do I want to lose weight?

Why do I want to get promoted?

Why do I want to live overseas?

• To my individual coaching clients:

Why do you want to save money?

Why do you want to be promoted?

Why do you want to change career?

• To my team coaching clients:

Why are you merging these divisions?

Why are you entering this new market segment?

Why are you changing the logo?

The logic certainly makes sense: The ‘why’ provides the motivation, the rocket fuel that will determine how far and fast your rocket will fly.

You can go on to make distinctions within the ‘why’ to make it even more powerful: Is it an extrinsic or an intrinsic motivation? The belief being that an intrinsic motivation is somehow purer, more deeply rooted and stronger than one that is external.

There is no doubt that this is an absolutely critical question to ask early on in the process. It provides clarity as to the underlying drivers of the change and can unlock the crucial emotional connection to the goal that will provide both the initial impetus and the sustaining belief, so important in the inevitable, darker days of the project.

You hear this in everyday phrases such as ‘financial independence/security’. “What I want is the money in the bank, but ‘why’ do I want it?” I want the money because I want the emotional experiences of independence and security that I believe come with that money. That’s the driver.

Of course, as many people discover, it is very possible to have the money and not have the experiences of security/independence, or to have the feelings of security/ independence without the money; but that’s another story.

In any case, it is easy to see how ‘starting with the why’ has become the generally accepted wisdom. Our work at TWP and TCP has, however, long stressed a different start point, the success of which has been reinforced by my own personal experience with vision and goal achievement.

It became impossible to ignore the large number of people that I encountered who had not achieved their dreams, despite being very clear on their purpose and motivation. As a result, I came to question the advice to ‘start with why’.

While ‘Why?’ is clearly an extremely powerful question at this early stage, does the journey really start there? The title of the book might give you a clue as to my point of view.

I have come to believe that the most effective journeys are the ones that start with ‘Who?’ This is the critical initial step that gets overlooked and is often the cause of the frustration and pain experienced by those who fail to achieve their targets, despite a clear sense of purpose.

The problem with rushing to the ‘why’ question is that it must be answered by somebody/something (an individual, team, or company) and 99 times out of a hundred, that person (team/company) will be operating from a perception of themselves that is either driven by unconscious beliefs, attitudes, and mindsets or beliefs, attitudes, and mindsets of which they are aware but which they see as facts.

An important element of this approach is to realise that these beliefs, attitudes, and mindsets are not bad or negative in any way. They do not exist to harm you. In fact, they actually exist to protect you. One of the consequences of this protective function is that they also serve to limit you, both in terms of what you are achieving now and what you believe you can achieve in the future.

These unconscious beliefs will not only colour your answer to the ‘why’ question, they will also limit what you are willing to declare as a vision in the first place.

If a client is to answer the ‘why’ question in the most powerful way possible, I believe they must first explore two key ‘who’ questions:

• Who am I being in the present?

• Who do I believe I can become in the future?

Creating awareness of the unconscious beliefs, attitudes, and mindsets surrounding questions such as these, opens up a very different space from which to answer the ‘what’ and ‘why’ questions. In my experience, this space provides the key to generating lasting change, in contrast to starting with the ‘why’ question, which all too often propels people to a success that ultimately proves to be only transitory, if it is reached at all.

The ultimate problem with the traditional approaches is that they set up your willpower against one of the most powerful forces in human nature: the need to be right.

This line of thought will take us into a discussion of critical concepts such as ‘assessments’, ‘assertions’, ‘context’, ‘identity’, and ‘authenticity’.

FEEDBACK

The third section of the book deals with the area of personal development that I see as the most misunderstood, abused, and disparaged of all: feedback.

Feedback is a critical element of any change or personal/leadership development journey, and it fits particularly well with a journey rooted in ‘who’ questions and identity. It is through feedback that you gain knowledge of how other people experience you.

Their experience of who you are being may (or may not) be very different to your own experience. That is not to say they are right, and you are wrong, but differences in this domain are especially powerful to uncover, as they are often the cause of much frustration and disappointment, both for you and for the other person.

Unfortunately, ‘feedback’ is routinely mixed up with advice and judgement and often beset with beliefs that classify it as positive or negative, right or wrong, good or bad. All of these elements detract from the great potential benefit of feedback.

The leadership development work that we have been doing at TWP since 2000, and the personal development and coach certification work that we have been doing at TCP since 2010, both rely heavily on feedback. Used correctly, it is the lifeblood of growth and development, be it personal, professional, or organisational. Used incorrectly, it can tear relationships apart.

BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER

The fourth section of the book begins by addressing some common concerns that arise with regard to the ‘start with who’ approach. Clients sometimes worry that the approach is too theoretical or psychological. Once we get going, they soon see this need not be the case, however, and enjoy the exploration and the depth of the reflection work required. Other clients are concerned that the approach will fundamentally change who they are (it won’t!).

The most pressing concern, however, tends to arise when clients realise that their old assessments are not disappearing. This is a very important part of the whole coaching, leadership development, and personal development scene and one that is often misunderstood and misrepresented, resulting in disappointment and confusion. In short, as we will discover, we do not want these old assessments to disappear.

Following this, this section looks at how to work with, not against the power of assessments and the human desire to be right about them, before outlining potential strategies that have proven useful to clients in the past.

It then concludes with a series of short case studies from TWP and TCP coaches, that illuminate the approach in action, in different settings.

CONCLUSION

The conclusion serves not only to conclude the ‘start with who’ approach but also to illuminate some of the thinking behind the approach and how it can be used in wider contexts than the ones discussed here. In particular, the section looks at how the propensity human beings have for stories consistently trumps knowledge, truth, and facts in today’s world. This results in a provocative declaration that has occasioned much discussion in my coaching and training work over the years.

The section ends with one of my favourite metaphors for the work that TWP and TCP deliver. It’s a memorable one that I hope you find useful as you move forward on your own professional and personal journey.

Finally, the appendices bring in a model first outlined in Fit To Lead that is also very relevant to this work, before giving more detail on the TWP and TCP companies and some of the coaches with whom we currently work. The final section gives suggestions for further reading.

As a way to begin, we need to set the scene, and to do that, we need to look at the underlying operating system of the whole process.

CHAPTER 1

Single and Double Loop Learning

INTRODUCTION

The ontological leadership development and coaching model provides the framework for the ideas presented in this book. So we need to begin with an overview of its constituent parts.

This exploration is not intended to be an in-depth analysis of what is a very broad and deep subject. Should you be inspired to want to dive deeper into this fascinating domain, there is a list of recommended reading at the end of the book that will meet that need.

There are elements of which you need to have at least a rudimentary grasp, however, in order to to makes sense of what follows.

The word ‘ontology’ itself is derived from two Greek words that, when put together, give you the ‘study’ of ‘being’. Accordingly, this approach largely focuses on what it means to be a human being, how we experience and make sense of the world around us, and other related issues. In essence, it is a form of double loop learning.

SINGLE AND DOUBLE LOOP LEARNING

Single loop learning is adequate for simple challenges: You want a result ‘R’ and so you take an action ‘A’ (Fig. 1). If the action is successful, then no problem. If the action is unsuccessful, then you loop back to ‘A’ and take a different action. You keep doing this until you get the result ‘R’ that you want, or you give up. This is how much of the world works, and how much of the world’s population routinely operates.

Fig. 1: Single loop learning.

Double loop learning, however, is more suitable for complex challenges. Much of the frustration in the world today is caused by using single loop learning for challenges that would be better addressed with a double loop approach. A classic sign that you are using a single loop learning approach for a challenge better suited to the double loop approach is when you create the ‘R’ that you want, but it does not last.

This is a particularly common phenomenon with health and wellness goals. You lose weight, but three months later, you are back to where you started. Why? Because there is something in your set-up as a human being that does not allow for the ‘R’ to stick. We will revisit this idea in Part II, when we look at the concept of ‘context’.

In double loop learning, you do not just look at the ‘A’ in the equation, you also look at the person doing the ‘A’. In the ontological model, this person is generally referred to as the observer ‘O’. The ‘observer’ is simply the human being who is taking the action and creating the results.

Although this is the commonly used term in the ontological coaching model, it suffers a little from implying that the human being is somehow on the outside, passively looking into an objective external reality.

In actuality, a human being is better understood as an integral and active part of what they are perceiving. Hence, I prefer terms such as the ‘Distinguisher’ or the ‘Discloser’, both of which have the added advantage of sounding far more like a superhero.

Studying the human being involved in the equation allows for a far broader examination of the situation and ultimately, significantly increases the range of ‘A’s available to the observer ‘O’.

The ontological approach immediately pierces through the illusion that everybody sees the world the same way that you do (or at least they would, if they wised up!)

Fig. 2: Double loop learning.

This simple model (Fig. 2) is at the heart of the Newfield ontological coaching methodology employed by The Coach Partnership coach training school. It is both simple and profound. Your Observer (‘O’) determines the world that you see and therefore, ultimately the range of Actions (‘A’) available to you. Consequently, the ‘A’s that you see (and don’t see) reveal information about your Observer ‘O’. It is even more powerful to notice that the same is true of the Results (‘R’s) that you have in your life.

If you avoid judgement and justification and remain curious, then you can use the Actions (‘A’s) and the Results (‘R’s) that you have in your life to greatly deepen your levels of self-awareness. This is something that we will return to in more detail in the next section. It is at the heart of this approach.

Another advantage of the ontological approach is that it offers an alternative to the seemingly never-ending stream of judgement and argument that permeates the world today.

For example, Person X and person Y enter into a conversation and have a disagreement. The most common responses (Fig. 3) are to:

• Judge the other person as stupid (or lacking in some way);

• Judge the other person’s arguments as stupid (or lacking in some way);

• Judge yourself as stupid (or lacking in some way).

Fig. 3: Three common responses when two people have a disagreement.

In general:

• The first develops on the primary school playground: “You suck!”

• The second at secondary school: “That opinion sucks!”

• The third in early adulthood: “I suck!”

By way of contrast, the ontological approach (Fig. 4, overleaf) asks you to approach the situation with a mood of curiosity:

• How come I see this issue in the way that I do?

• What is the benefit to me of seeing it that way?

• What am I not seeing?

• What does this show me about me and the way that I am experiencing the world/this person?

• How else could I see it?

• What would I need to give up or shift in order to see it differently?

• What are the consequences of seeing it this way? Are those consequences ones that I truly want?

Of course, you can also apply this approach to the other person: “What can I infer about them and the way that they see the world?” …

Fig. 4: The ontological approach prompts you to explore and observe, rather than judge and assess.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. Which challenges in your life do you consistently find the most difficult to overcome? (Maybe you solve them for a while and then they recur, or maybe they are just never resolved.)

2. Which current challenges in your life would be best served by the single loop learning approach?

3. Which current challenges in your life would be best served by the double loop learning approach?

4. Where are you currently using the single loop learning approach for challenges better served by a double loop learning approach?

5. Where are you currently using the double loop learning approach for challenges better served by a single loop learning approach?

CHAPTER 2

Distinctions

Another important characteristic of the ontological approach is the idea of distinctions. In this context, a distinction is something that is different from something else. I am not using it in the sense of a ‘distinction grade’ in university.

We learn to make sense of the world through discovering distinctions. For example, imagine a young child walking through a park with mum and dad and consider what they see. Trees? Grass? A path? Flowers? No. None of that.

They just see ‘the world’, although they don’t know it’s called ‘the world’ at this point. They don’t even know they are in a park, because they don’t see any distinction between ‘park’ and ‘not park’. They might notice that things look different here to when they left the house, but it makes no difference because they do not have the language with which to articulate that difference.

Until they obtain the language and can apply it to what they see, it does not exist for them in any real sense. That is the first thing to notice about distinctions: they always live in language.

Now imagine that mum points and says, “Oh look, there’s a tree.” Now the child has a distinction. The distinction they have is ‘tree’ and ‘everything else’. That’s not a particularly powerful distinction, but it’s a start.

As they continue walking, the young child points to something small on the ground and says, “That’s a pretty tree.” Now mum is going to say, “Oh no, that’s not a tree. That’s a flower.” Now the child has another distinction: ‘tree’, ‘flower’, and ‘everything else’.

Maybe they carry on walking and the little child says, “Look at that lovely flower!” and then mum says, “No, that’s not a flower. That’s a weed.” So, the process goes on and that’s very much how we learn as human beings. We learn by distinguishing one thing from another thing.

Now, let’s say that the child returns to the same park 25 years later, having become qualified as a botanist. Do they see the same park? It is the same park, but in another very real sense, it is a completely different park, because they now have thousands of distinctions in flora that allow the park to exist for them in a completely new way. Those distinctions were there 25 years ago, but as a child, they could not see them or name them.

Incidentally, this is why parents are so keen for their baby to recognise them as ‘mama’ or ‘dada’. Only when the baby can do this, do they actually exist as ‘mum’ and ‘dad’ in their baby’s eyes. Until that moment, they are just ‘world’.

Think about your life. Think about your chosen career and your hobbies. In the areas where you have studied, practised, and played, you will have many more distinctions than you do in areas where you have not.

I have friends and colleagues who love their wine. They can taste all sorts of distinctions in the wine they drink. The oakiness, the depth, the smokiness, vintage, even on which bank of a river the grapes were grown. They might be kidding me about that last one, I am not sure.

I am not interested in wine. I essentially have three distinctions: red, white, and rosé. If I was blindfolded, I am not sure I could tell them apart from the taste alone. I ordered a cabernet sauvignon at a restaurant the other day and was surprised when red wine was brought to the table (true story).

Now this might all sound very interesting (or not) but what’s the relevance and importance in the ontological approach?

Distinctions are critical for three main reasons:

1. The distinctions you are able to make, determine the world you are able to see. If you don’t have the distinction, then that part of the world does not exist for you. Result: We all see our own personal version of the world.

2. The distinctions you see (and don’t see) reveal the observer that you are. Result: If you listen to someone, you can tell a lot about how they see the world. For example, you already know not to ask me for advice about which bottle of wine to order at a restaurant.

3. If you have a distinction (and have practised using it) then it enables you to take effective action. I am a coach and facilitator, but if you get sick, then please go and see a medical doctor, not me. Why? Because they can make distinctions in health and sickness that I do not and cannot make. If you see a general practitioner with a pain in your back, then they are likely to refer you to a back specialist because the specialist can make more distinctions in back health than they can.

Result: The distinctions that you have and learn to work with, are the areas where you can be most effective.

A common misstep is to assume that because you are effective in one area, you are automatically effective in another, despite lacking distinctions (and/or practice) in that other area.

I have already introduced high level distinctions in the ontological approach: Observer, Action, and Result (O.A.R.), which are distinct from each other. Now, let’s go a step underneath that and make three macro distinctions that exist in every Observer or human being.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. In which areas of your life do your results indicate that you are consistently effective and what are the key distinctions that allow you to be so?

2. In which areas of your life do your results indicate that you are not as effective as you would like to be and where/how could you discover and practise distinctions that would support your improvement

CHAPTER 3

Distinctions of a Human Being

Every human being possesses a body (B), emotions/moods (E), and Language (L) (internal and external). While these three domains are distinct, they do all interact with each other. For example, if I am experiencing the emotion of anger then my language is impacted (I may shout) and my physical body shifts (I may lean forward and the pace of my breathing may increase).

When these three domains are all in sync, we call this ‘congruence’ or ‘authenticity’ (Fig. 5, overleaf), an important term to which we will return in a later section.

In the world today, the language domain is generally held to be pre-eminent. Logic, data, and rationality hold sway, while emotions are messy, and the body is just the inconvenient thing that transports your brain around.

As students of our coach certification programme will know, however, the domains of moods/emotions and the body are hugely important in learning, development, and life in general. As an example, learning is often seen as a purely cognitive phenomenon, existing purely in the rational, language domain.

Fig. 5: Congruency or authenticity is attained when the body, emotions, and language are in sync.

Consider, however, the relative depth of learning of these three examples:

• You are told not to play in the traffic. (L)

• Someone you love is badly hurt while playing in the traffic. (E)

• You are hurt while playing in the traffic. (B)

Your body (the somatic domain) and your emotions (the limbic system) retain information every bit as much as your language (neo-cortex) does, maybe even more so.

I had a good example of this in my own life recently. I have studied nutrition for many years. I can make a lot of distinctions in that area, and I practise them regularly. I am passionate about it. Most people would agree that I am pretty solid in the cognitive and linguistic areas of nutrition.

Recently, I was nearing the end of a 20-hour fast and I broke the fast with a sushi salad. Raw fish. Not smart. Stomach pain for the next 36 hours.

Intellectually, I knew this was a bad idea, but the knowledge was unconsciously trumped by my body (I had a stronger than usual sensation of hunger) and an emotional need (to connect with my friends who were eating in the restaurant).

As a human being, you experience the world through all three of these domains. When you walk into a room, you hear the language being spoken by others. You hear the voice in your head; you have physical sensations in your body. You pick up on (consciously or not) the body shapes and movements of other people. You enter that room in a certain mood and with certain emotions closer to the surface than others and you sense the moods and emotions of others and/or the room as a whole. This is how you make sense of the world. You are both a receiver and a transmitter in all three domains and the way you do both of these things gives you (and other people) more information about you and your ‘observer’.

You can walk into the same room at the same time with a close friend or family member and receive/transmit totally different things.

There are also distinctions that exist inside each of these three ‘macro domains’ and that’s what we will explore next because they are going to be very important in the sections that follow.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. Which memories live most vividly for you?

(e.g. being laughed at while making a presentation at school)

2. What emotions are linked to those memories?

(e.g. embarrassment)

3. What physical sensations are linked to those memories?

(e.g. shivering and blushing)

4. What beliefs are linked to those memories?

(e.g. speaking up in public is dangerous and you should avoid it, because you are not good at it)

5. What do you notice about your most evocative memories? Are they ones that you enjoy recalling, or are they ones that you dread to recall? In either case, what are the consequences of that?

CHAPTER 4

Distinctions in Language

The key linguistic distinctions are termed the ‘speech acts’. They are so called in acknowledgement of the fact that language, far from being the passive descriptor of events and things that it is often taken to be, can also be highly generative of your future and your public identity. In that sense, language is an ‘A’ capable of producing an ‘R’, in just the same way as a physical act of doing.

Imagine you had said “no” to all the requests you actually said “yes” to this year, and vice versa. Your world would now be totally different. The words that you use—such as saying “no” rather than “yes” to the same requests—create very different results in the world and impact your public identity in a very real fashion and in very different ways.

Here’s another example. Imagine that you are leading a meeting and you end the proceedings with a request that one of your teammates join you to discuss the issues more fully over dinner that night. Immediately, your public identity (how the other people in the meeting see you) is impacted, and the world is altered. The way that the person you asked responds will also impact their public identity (how the other people in the meeting see them). Whatever their response, the world will have changed, purely through the use of language.

There are five speech act distinctions in language:

• Assertions;

• Declarations (an important category of declarations are assessments);

• Requests;

• Offers; and

• Promises.

The following are brief elements of each distinction.

ASSERTIONS

Assertions are the least generative of the speech act family. They are either true or false, capable of verification, historical in nature (it existed before you actually said it), and tell you primarily about what is being described.

They are distinct from ‘facts’ because assertions, unlike facts, can also be false. If you get a reputation for making false assertions, then people’s trust in you will be compromised and public identity is heavily impacted: People will experience you as a liar.

Example:

• You are reading this book in the English language.

Maybe you are reading it in English or maybe you are reading the Bahasa Indonesia translation. It doesn’t matter. It may be a true statement or a false one. In either case, the statement is an assertion: It describes the book, it can be verified, and you were reading the book before the assertion was made.

DECLARATIONS

Declarations do not deal with truth and falsehood. They are never true or false, but they can be valid or invalid, depending on who makes them, in what place, and at what time.

They have four purposes:

i. They start things;

ii. They stop things;

iii. They assess; and

iv. They adjudicate (assess with power).

Examples:

• When the boss says the meeting is starting (i) or ending (ii).

• When you say this book is good or bad (iii).

• When the judge presiding in a case says “not guilty” (iv).

Notice that the authority, time, and place are crucial if the declaration is to be valid. If a junior person declares that the meeting is over, the declaration has no power. Similarly, if the boss says it in a company where they are not employed, it has no power. If a judge says not guilty in a case where they are not presiding, then it makes no difference to the outcome. If the presiding judge says not guilty after the trial is over, then it is too late, and their declaration makes no difference.

Critically, also note that a valid declaration trumps the facts. So, if the meeting was due to end at 5:00 p.m. but the boss calls time at 4:30 p.m., then the meeting is over. If you did the crime, but the presiding judge says you are not guilty, then you walk free. Sports fans throughout history have stories where, according to the rules of the game, the goal was scored, the point was won or the batter was out, but the referee or the umpire said otherwise. I will go to my grave believing that Tom Brady fumbled the ball against the Raiders in 2002. Sadly, my declaration was invalid and the referees did not share my assessment.

It is this phenomenon that makes declarations extremely powerful in the domain of leadership: Declarations set context and create the future.

When Steve Jobs first went on stage at the Apple conference in 2007 and announced to the world: “This is an iPhone”, his declaration created a phenomenon. Ever since that moment, whenever anybody said, “This is an iPhone”, it was no longer a declaration; it was an assertion. It was true or false.

This is an extremely important factor to which we will return later.

ASSESSMENTS

Assessments are such an important subset of declarations that they are generally split out and compared directly with assertions. In sharp contrast to assertions, assessments are never true or false, but can be grounded or ungrounded (more on that later). Rather than being historical in nature, they are concerned with the future. They are also highly generative and ‘sticky’. Assessments also reveal more about the person speaking (and their standards) than they do about what is being assessed.

Example:

• Assertion: You are 6 feet 3 inches tall.

This statement can be verified and will be proven true or false. It will reveal information about the person being described.

• Assessment: You are tall.

This statement cannot be verified and is never true or false. It will reveal the standards for height held by the person speaking.

Personally, I am 6 feet 2 inches tall. My Asian friends generally assess me as tall. When I worked in Rotterdam, it was not unusual for me to be the shortest person in the room. The Dutch tend to hold different standards in the domain of height to Singaporeans. Dutch people rarely call me ‘tall’ but I am still 6 feet 2 inches in height.

So, how are assessments generative and ‘sticky’?

Imagine that you have assessed someone in your team as ‘lazy’, ‘unreliable’, or ‘untrustworthy’, based on your standards. Because human beings love to be right, once the assessment has been made, consciously or not, you look for more supporting evidence, to bolster your point of view. Then, if assertions start to appear that seem to contradict your assessment, what do you do? You either ignore them, explain them away (“oh, they are only working hard now because it is performance review time next week”), or you don’t even see them. Even if you do grudgingly acknowledge the difference, you say, “They were not as lazy as usual today!”

This ‘stickiness’ is especially apparent with assessments that we assess as negative. The reason for this is that we are hardwired to pay more attention and cling to the ones we assess as negative for our very survival. Assessments that human beings assess as negative have performed a protective function for thousands of years. Once your caveman- or cavewoman-self formed an assessment that a certain fruit or animal was dangerous, then they literally clung to it for dear life.

Indeed, assessments are so sticky that you often take on other people’s assessments, with no evidence of your own. This happens all the time at the office.

You hear you are getting a new team member, and a colleague calls you and says, “Watch out for him. He is very political.” What happens? You are on your guard when he joins and when you act guardedly, guess what happens? The new team member starts talking to other people, instead of you, and now you start to get evidence about how political he is!

None of this is to say that assessments are bad. Human beings must make assessments in order to make sense of and give meaning to what is necessarily an uncertain future. They give a sense of order and predictability.

The problems begin when you are either unaware of the distinction or you collapse it and start to treat your assessments as though they are assertions (true or false).

However much evidence you have for your assessment,

it never becomes an assertion.

This is a good example of what was stated earlier. Being able to make and use distinctions enables you to take effective action. If you are skilled in the assessments/ assertion distinction, then you can operate far more powerfully in the world than someone who collapses the distinction either through a lack of knowledge (they don’t even see it, like the child in the park), or they see it but they are not practised at using it.

Assessments are going to play a big role in this book, especially in relation to context, identity, and feedback. They are at the heart of the ‘start with who’ process.

REQUESTS

This speech act is made when you assess that the future is not going to turn out the way that you desire. They all have broadly the same structure:

I request that you do ‘X’ by time ‘Y’.

You do not have to use the verb ‘request’, of course, and the verb that you do use will reflect the power balance in the relationship and/or how critical the request is to you, e.g. I demand…, I beg …, I implore …

Well-formed requests have the following elements:

• a speaker

People commonly use phrases, such as “It’s cold in here” or “The proposal needs writing”, expecting another person to take action as a result. In contrast, a well-formed request has a clearly identified owner. Someone who is asking for something to happen or a change to be made: “I request that …”

• a listener

Conversely, people also use phrases where there is a clear owner but no identified listener, e.g. “I’m hungry” or “I feel cold”. Statements such as these are interesting statements, but they do not serve as effective requests. A well-formed request has a clearly identified person to whom it is being addressed: “I request that you …”

• a clear statement of the future action

In both the cases above, there is another issue. In neither case is there a clearly articulated statement of the future action that the speaker is requesting. “I feel cold” might be held to imply that I am requesting you to turn off the air conditioning or bring me a blanket. It might, however, be a simple statement of fact. A well-formed request has an explicitly stated future action: “I request that you turn off the air conditioning.”

• a clear time element

One of the most common elements lacking in requests is a clear time element. In some cases, it is left out completely, but more often classic phrases, such as “I need it yesterday”, “ASAP”, or “at your earliest convenience”, crop up.

This phenomenon can be magnified in multicultural teams, where people from different cultures often relate to time very differently. During my time working in Europe, this was especially true between people from Northern and Southern Europe. It can also be true for different generations and different functions in a business.

A well-formed request has a clear time element: “I request that you email the report to me by 5:00 p.m. on Monday.”

• requires a ‘shared background of obviousness’

This is what I alluded to above regarding time. It is important on a wider scale, however, than just time. Assuming that the person to whom you are making your request shares your understanding of the terms you are using, is a very common way of setting yourself up to be disappointed. I often see this phenomenon in team coaching, where people from different departments or new team members take action on what they understand, only to find out, at the next meeting, that something else was actually required.

This is another good example regarding the power of distinctions. If the person to whom you are speaking makes different distinctions to you, then they are essentially living in a totally different world and, accordingly, they will take very different actions to the ones that you expect.

A simple example is asking for ‘chips’ in England and America.

A well-formed request will be accompanied by clarifications of the words used, so as to ensure a mutually agreed upon understanding of these words.

• conditions of satisfaction (time is only one of them)

Exactly what do you want to happen? Exactly what does a successfully completed response to your request look like? Sometimes, even when there is a shared background of obviousness, the request fails to create the required response because the requirements are left vague.

If you are asking for someone to complete a ‘report’, then have you clarified exactly what you are expecting to receive? Your understanding of the word ‘report’ might be very different to the understanding held by the person to whom you are making the request.

This is an area where excuses and justifications often pop up: “They ought to know that by now”, “I shouldn’t need to spend time outlining exactly what I need”, or “They will be insulted if I specify this too exactly.”

These assessments may be grounded but if the request is important to you, then is it not worth just double-checking that the person to whom you are speaking is clear on your specifications?

The simplest way to deal with this is to ask the person to play back to you what they have heard before they go off to do it. That way both you and they have an opportunity to clarify, and if they were already clear, then no harm was done.

• presupposition of competence

Another very common cause of frustration with requests is that they are made to people who are incapable of completing the request to the required standard.

A request may be well-formed linguistically, but if it is addressed to someone who is incapable of fulfilling it, then it will not produce the desired result. This seems very obvious, but I see it crop up time and time again in my coaching work, where the two parties involved have very different assessments of capability. Sometimes pure capability is the issue, but oftentimes, while the capability is present, it is the bandwidth or the motivation that is absent.

If the request is to be fulfilled, then it is important for the speaker to check regarding the capability and willingness of the person to whom they are making the request.

• sincerity

A request is more than a string of words. If a request is to elicit the required response, then it also needs to be spoken in a conducive mood. Examples of conducive moods would be sincerity and urgency. A perfectly formed request that ticks all of the above boxes, but which is spoken in a mood of boredom, flippancy, or nonchalance is unlikely to generate the response you desire.

While I have focused here on the person making the request, also note that the person receiving the request has a big part to play. Are they willing to speak up if they do not understand the conditions of satisfaction, or if they assess that they lack the competence, for example? Failing to do so is a huge contributor to the general inefficiency of requests that I see in my coaching.

Very often, the receiver wants to save face by not clarifying what is being asked of them, but then ends up paying a bigger price further down the line when they return with a result that is different to that requested by the speaker.

Similarly, saying “yes” to a request that asks you to deliver something “yesterday” is really not smart!

OFFERS

This speech act operates in a similar way to requests. An offer contains the same elements as a request with one difference. This time, the presupposition of competence refers to you. If you make an offer when you are incapable, unfit, or unwilling to fulfil it, then the offer will be ineffective. An effective offer is made to someone when you assess that the future will not turn out in the way that they desire.

Successful businesses are essentially offers made to a significant group of people, whose future would be worse off without that business. Your job is essentially an offer to the business. If it did not exist, then the future of the business would be adversely affected in some way.

You are essentially an offer to the people in your life. How would their life be adversely affected if you were not there? This is a favourite coaching question of mine—especially if the client is willing to look underneath the trappings of money, qualifications, contacts, etc. and instead look at the human qualities that they believe they possess or do not possess.

PROMISES

A promise is made when someone says “yes” to a request or an offer. “Yes” is one of four effective responses to a request or an offer. The other three are:

• “No”;

• A renegotiation;

• A promise to respond at a specified time in the future (not “later”).

One of the most common breakdowns in relationships, both personal and professional, is the unwillingness to say “no” or even to renegotiate in any serious fashion.

Saying “yes” when you mean “no” and then failing to fulfil what others are expecting you to deliver is one of the quickest ways to undermine trust in a relationship/team situation. And as we saw earlier, a ‘negative’ assessment, such as untrustworthiness or unreliability, once formed, is very difficult to shift.

This unwillingness to say “no” can have many driving factors but the most common are either not wanting to be seen as incapable or as unhelpful.

Gaining a reputation for breaking promises is one of the most damaging ways you can impact your public identity. Good justifications will only mitigate this to a limited degree. People need to know if they can count on you to deliver, not just to tell a good story about why you didn’t.

Developing a habit for breaking promises also impacts the internal conversation you create about your own private identity and can seriously undermine your own self-confidence. Stories such as these that you begin to form about yourself will play a big role in this book.

It is also valuable to look at this from the opposite direction. Do people around you assess that they can say “no” to you? If they don’t, then you cannot trust their “yes” and that is a very dangerous situation for the effectiveness of your team or the health of your relationship. If you realise that you have not heard a “no” for some time (either at home or the office) then it is worth checking in. Do the people around you assess that it is safe to say “no” to you?

The people in history with the least ability to say no? Slaves.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

ASSERTIONS/ASSESSMENTS

1. What are the main (true) assertions that you could link to yourself?

Be careful with this as it’s very easy to slip into assessments!

Examples might include your gender, your age, your nationality, or your height. Examples would not include your preferences or your proficiency levels.

Look at the following:

I like giraffes, I love Bob Dylan, or I am a Liverpool FC fan.

I am good at cricket. I am bad at public speaking.

None of these are assertions. They sound like assertions, but they are actually assessments, because they are all relative. They depend on your standards for ‘liking’, ‘loving’, being a ‘fan’, or being ‘good’/’bad’ at something.

Collapsing this distinction, or simply being unaware of it, is a major element of this book. Thus:

• “I play golf” is an assertion.

• “I like to play golf” is an assessment.

2. What are the most important (according to you) declarations/ assessments that you attach to yourself?

Remember that assessments are not bad, or inferior to assertions. They are a necessary and critical part of being human. The trap lies in treating your assessments as though they are assertions.

3. Which major declarations/assessments that you make about yourself, the world, other people, and the way things ‘are’/’should be’ do you hold as self-evidently true?

4. What are the consequences for holding the declarations you wrote in answer to Question 3 as self-evidently true (i.e. as assertions)?

If you look hard enough, in most cases, you will uncover both good news and bad news.

Examples:

• “I am shy.”

Good news: I don’t embarrass myself by speaking to people I don’t know very well.

Bad news: I tend to get overlooked at work because I don’t speak up

• “Democracy is the best form of government.”

Good news: Most people agree with me

Bad news: I don’t investigate the different forms of voting that purport to be democratic.

REQUESTS AND OFFERS

1. Which elements of requests/offers do you most commonly drop out? (If you think you do not drop out any of them, then look for occasions where your request/offer did not elicit the response that you were looking for.)

2. To whom do you assess it as ‘okay’ to make requests of? In which domains (e.g. work, household chores, etc.)? Why?

3. To whom do you assess it as ‘not okay’ to make requests of? In which domains? Why?

4. What are the consequences of your answers to Questions 2 and 3?

5. In what domains and to whom do you consistently make offers? Why?

6. In what domains and to whom do you consistently refrain from making offers? Why?

7. What are the consequences of your answers to Questions 5 and 6?

PROMISES

1. To whom do you find it difficult to say no?

2. In what domains do you find it difficult to say no?

3. Who do you allow to say no to you?

4. Who do you not allow to say no to you?

5. Before you automatically say, “Everyone can say no to me”, ask yourself where you have not heard a “no” for a while. Remember, the way you see it may not be the way they see it.

6. In general, do you find it harder to say “no” or to hear “no”? Why?

7. What are the consequences of your answer to Question 6?

CHAPTER 5

Distinctions in the Limbic System

Your limbic system is the one that deals with your moods and your emotions. While there are many distinctions inside this domain, the one that is most pertinent to our needs in this book is the distinction between moods and emotions.

Before we look at that, however, it is important to realise that as a human being, you are an emotional being. In the same way that we cannot escape that we live in language, we also cannot escape that that we live in moods. You cannot not be ‘in a mood’ in that sense.

Some moods are intense, such as anger, passion, and excitement and others tend to be milder, such as calm, peace, and acceptance. Whatever their intensity, a mood is always present.

It is also important to appreciate that all emotions have their part to play. There are no ‘negative emotions’. Emotions such as anger and sadness, commonly thought to be ‘negative’ have very powerful roles to play, if we let them do their job. For example, anger arises naturally when you experience what you perceive to be an injustice (often to do with your boundaries being crossed). Sadness arises naturally when you experience losing something of value to you.

Emotions such as these put you in touch with what you care about, shape your possible responses, and ultimately drive you to action (‘e-motion’). For example, anger drives you to want to punish the person crossing the boundary and sadness drives you to withdraw from the situation.

The rational, linguistic part of your brain (neo-cortex) often tries to control the moods and emotions that you experience, but this is a no-win game, because your moods and emotions and your limbic system, as a whole, does not respond to instruction. Telling yourself to “relax”, for instance, generally has the very opposite effect.

The distinction between a mood and an emotion lies in their provenance and duration. An emotion arises in relation to an event and once that event has finished, the emotion subsides and fades away. In contrast, a mood is not linked to one event, and it hangs around over a period of time.

For example, imagine that you see a spider and experience fear. If the fear dissipates after the spider disappears, then that was an emotion of fear. If you are continuing to experience fear hours later, however, and maybe even wake up the next day still feeling fear, then that is a mood of fear.

It is important to be aware, however, that your fear was not caused by the spider. The fear is generated by your assessment of the spider in that situation. The spider itself is not ‘scary’. Spiders do not possess a property called ‘scary’. Some people do not find them scary at all.

This is another example of the power and importance of the distinction between assessments and assertions:

• “This is a spider” is an assertion.

It is a statement that can verified.

It is true or false and the result of the verification will tell me about the creature being described. It’s a spider or it isn’t.

• “Spiders are scary” is an assessment.

This statement is neither true nor false.

It cannot be verified, and it gives me information about the person making the statement, rather than the creature they are talking about: This person fears spiders.

The person sitting next to them may authentically say that “spiders are not scary” because they have different assessments in the domain of fear. Therefore, the second statement would more accurately be expressed as: “I assess spiders as scary.”

Moods are critical because they set a frame of possibility, in action, language, body, and also in emotional range. Let’s use an example to understand this.

Imagine your client or your team is in a mood of resignation. Immediately, the range of possibility diminishes in all domains: Actions, emotions, and body movements are all impacted and limited. Imagine, instead, that that same client or team shifts to a mood of enthusiasm. Suddenly everything is different, and yet nothing in the outside world has changed.

Moods are a classic example of a domain where people often lack distinctions, and consequently, lack the power to take effective action. When I begin my coaching and I ask people how they feel, the most common answers are: “good”, “not bad”, “okay”, or “fine”. None of these are moods. They are all assessments about moods.

Learning to recognise, name, and then make distinctions in moods and emotions is one of the key aspects of working in the ontological space. Until you are able to do this, you are like the young child walking in the park that we discussed in the section on distinctions. Once you are able to do this, then a whole new world opens up, however, and you can intervene in the world of your client (or your own) with far more power. For example, in the scenario of the team above, a skilled ontological coach would be able to support the team to recognise their mood, to name it, and then distinguish it from other similar moods (e.g. resignation as opposed to resentment). This process will enable the team to see the cause of their mood, discuss it, and begin to take effective action with regard to it.

For this reason, learning how to work with moods is a key part of becoming an effective coach and leader.

We will see later in the book, how moods in particular, play an important part in identity and feedback.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. What do you assess as the primary moods in which you live? What evidence do you have for those answers?

What would your parents, spouse, children, or teammates say?

2. When was the most recent time that you:

• Became so happy that you laughed out loud or cried tears of joy?

• Became so sad that you cried tears of sadness?

• Became so angry that you screamed out loud?

• Became so excited that you could feel your heart rate increase?

• Became so nervous that you could feel your heart rate increase?

• Became so resigned that you said (out loud or to yourself) “I give up”?

3. What can you learn about yourself from your answers to Question 2 and the assessments that you have about the emotions it asks you to consider?

CHAPTER 6

Distinctions in Somatics

‘Somatics’ (from the Greek word: soma) is the domain that pertains to your body. The body was the focus of Fit To Lead, so I will not be referring to it in any great detail in this book. This is certainly not to downplay its importance or relevance to the topic. Indeed, in my own personal journey, it is the somatic element that has proven to be the most revelatory.

Simplistically, the four basic somatic distinctions (Fig. 6) are created by the direction of the energy in our bodies.

Fig. 6: The four basic somatic distinctions, created by energy flows.

• Stability = Energy down

Imagine the Queen of England walking down a red carpet. She is still moving forward, but her energy is ‘grounded’. She moves with a sense of serenity, calm, and dignity.

• Resolution = Energy forward

Imagine yourself at the airport ready for a holiday and your boarding gate is closing. You are not moving like the Queen of England. Your energy is very much forward. You may or may not be running, but your motion is very much ‘to the front’.

• Openness = Energy backwards

Imagine yourself looking to soak up the sun (standing or lying down) or faced with a wide horizon that you want to take in. In either case, you will notice your energy shift back a little as you aim to open up to something (or someone) and let it in.

• Flexibility = Energy upwards and/or random

Imagine yourself walking through a jungle and you realise that you have walked into a spider’s web. Your next few moments are unlikely to resemble the Queen of England walking on the red carpet. Your arms and legs will move fast and randomly in order to rid yourself of the web and any spiders that might be therein.

If you really did imagine yourself in those situations, you will have noticed how integrated the body is to your moods and your language. Our body shape, energy, and breathing patterns make some moods and language almost impossible to experience, while making others almost inevitable.

For example, can you imagine experiencing calm and serenity as you walk into the spider’s web, or anger as you gently lean back and open up to the warm rays of the sun?

The importance of the body and its central role in performance and leadership was the focus of the book I co-authored with my wife, Sari, Fit To Lead.

In addition to these four distinctions, there is a place of neutral or balanced energy, called ‘Centre’ (see Fig. 6). This is a place of choice where you can learn to move to, before you consciously shift your energy to one of the four distinctions listed above. ‘Centre’ is typified by slow and conscious belly breathing (Body), silence (quietening your internal and external Language) and (an Emotion of) acceptance.

Learning to work with and through the body, using these (and other) distinctions, has been one of the most important factors in the development of hundreds of students in our Coach Training School. The majority of the coaching clients with whom I work, live predominantly in the world of Language. As a result, it is the body that often offers the most powerful door through which to enter the coaching work. It is as clients begin to work with and through their bodies (B) (initially by becoming aware of distinctions) that they fully experience and shift long-held moods and emotions (E) and patterns of language (L).

People often confuse somatic work with ‘body language’. Somatic work can certainly include some elements of body language, but it encompasses a far wider perspective. For example, it also includes what is happening inside your body. Your posture, the way you hold and move your body is not just transmitting to the outside world, it is also sending signals to your own internal processes. In turn, these processes are then a major factor in how you receive and transmit information in the world.

For example, your fight/flight response, while visible to the outside world, is also triggering all sorts of internal processes, such as an increase in heart rate, the secretion of adrenaline, and a shuttling of blood away from non-essential functions such as digestion and towards the muscles that will help you run away or fight your ground. This is why people with chronic stress also commonly have digestion problems. It is also why we become more ‘stupid’ under threat. Your system readies itself for a battle, not a debate or an intellectual discussion.

The somatic and limbic responses operate on a primeval level, concerned with your very survival. This is what makes them such powerful areas in which to intervene, for yourself as well as with your coaching clients.

You can have all the coaching knowledge in the world,

but if your limbic system is experiencing sadness

or your somatic system is experiencing danger,

then your coaching abilities are going to be massively impaired.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. What are the major assessments that you make about your body?

2. What are the consequences of these assessments?

3. If your body could speak, what would it say to you?

4. In which of the four body dispositions mentioned do you spend the majority of your time?

5. What is the consequence of your answer to Question 4?

Two final questions to consider in this chapter:

6. What do you notice about the way in which you have engaged with the ‘Questions to Consider’ sections so far?

7. What purpose is it serving for you to engage in this way?

e.g. I have ignored them because I want to finish this book quickly.

I have dismissed them as unnecessary because I want to avoid discomfort.

I have engaged with them seriously because I want to really give this process a try.

There are no good or bad answers to this question, but it will serve you to take an honest look at it, because it is the type of question that will crop up a lot in the next section. If you answer it honestly, then you will begin to generate information about your observer and the context within which you are reading this book.

PART I

Postscript

This concludes our brief run through the ontological methodology and some of the important distinctions it utilises. This will suffice for the purpose of this book.

If this introduction has whetted your appetite, however, then you can explore the Newfield training offered by The Coach Partnership in Singapore and/or dig into the wonderful in-depth books written on the subject by Chalmers Brothers and Alan Sieler. Additionally, there are excellent books written by Chris Balsley and Amanda Blake on the somatic element, and Carol Courcy on the limbic element. These titles are all listed at the back of the book.

With this complete, it is now time to move to the second major part of the book. Before we do so, however, here is probably the most important sentence in the whole book:

The amount of value you derive from this book

will be almost entirely driven by

the emotional and physical state in which you read it.

I am stressing and highlighting this because, whereas Fit To Lead focused predominantly on the physical domain, this book is going to focus predominantly on the linguistic (mental) domain.

This is not to suggest that the linguistic domain is more important than the somatic and limbic domains. Far from it.

Indeed, anytime you get stuck or you notice nothing is really happening as you read the book, pay attention to the mood and the body position in which you are reading. The invisible, comfortable, and familiar habits that you have in these domains will play a critical role in your ability to create value from reading this book, just as they play a critical role in your ability to create value in your life as a whole.

If, for example, you read this book in a mood of resignation, characterised by an assessment that sounds like this: “Oh, this will never work for me” and you then follow that up by collapsing your body and letting out a big sigh, then there is very little space for anything new to emerge.

If you read this book in a mood of curiosity, however, characterised by an assessment that sounds like this: “Hmm, that is interesting; let’s see what’s possible for me here” and you follow that up with a widening of your eyes and a slow, big exhalation of breath, then a lot can happen.

The thing to notice is that in both cases, it is the same book. This phenomenon will be a central factor of the whole ‘start with who’ approach.

PART I

Key Learning Points

1. Single loop learning can be perfectly adequate for simple or ‘technical’ challenges.

2. Double loop learning, as evidenced by the ontological coaching methodology, is more effective for complex or ‘adaptive’ challenges. (The terms ‘adaptive’ and ‘technical’ are taken from The Practice of Adaptive Leadership by Ronald Heifetz. Another great read.)

3. You experience the world according to the distinctions that you are able to make.

4. Effective action in a domain requires you to not only be aware of the relevant distinctions, but also to practise applying them.

5. All human beings are constituted in three domains. While we are able to distinguish between body, emotion, and language, they are inextricably linked and integrated. They influence and are influenced by each other.

6. The key distinctions in the language domain are commonly referred to as the ‘speech acts’: Assertions, Declarations, Requests, Offers, and Promises.

7. Assessments are a form of declaration and can be grounded or ungrounded.

8. Assertions are either true or false.

9. Declarations are either valid or invalid.

10. In the limbic domain, the key distinction is between moods and emotions. Emotions are linked to a specific event. Moods are emotions that exist regardless of specific events. They determine the range of emotions that are available to you as well as the range of actions and conversations that you perceive to be possible for you in a situation.

11. In the somatic domain, the key distinctions are exemplified by the location of your energy: Stability (down), Flexibility (up), Resolution (forward), and Openness (backward).

12. ‘Centre’ is another important somatic distinction. Here your energy is balanced. It is a place from which to choose and is characterised by silence (Language), peace (Emotion), and slow conscious ‘belly breathing’ (Body).

CHAPTER 7

Context and Content

In order to explore the primacy of the ‘who’ question, we will first need to establish the importance of another critical concept: context. The best way to do this is to use the idea of distinctions that was discussed in the introductory session: Context is distinct from content.

Of all the ideas in this book, this one is probably the most fundamental and important. Unfortunately, ‘context’ is not the easiest concept to nail down with a precise definition.

The Latin root of the word gives some help, but is still a little obscure: contextus means ‘a joining together’ or ‘weaving together’. The prefix ‘con’ is generally held to mean ‘with’ or ‘together’. So, ‘context’ can be thought of as something that weaves the text together, something that enables the text to be understood. It gives meaning to the text by bringing it all together.

This is why you frequently hear people (often politicians) defending a previous utterance by saying, “You are taking my words out of context.”

In everyday life, people tend to focus on ‘content’ which refers to the words that you say, the actions you take, the results that you have, etc. That is all certainly very important. Without an appreciation of ‘context’, however, the ‘content’ becomes impossible to accurately interpret and understand.

Metaphors sometimes used to describe context include a picture frame or the walls of a room. These can be useful but are lacking in one important detail: Frames and walls are visible. That’s the other element that makes context tricky to define and work with: It is invisible.

Let’s look at this example. Somebody you have never met before tells you that they exercised twice this week. How do you interpret that? You cannot do it. Is it good news, bad news, neutral news?

Content is meaning-less, until the context becomes visible.

Are they a professional athlete? Are they a sedentary office worker who is just starting an exercise routine? Or something else?

Once you know the context, then you can make sense of the content.

Context adds meaning to content. It allows you to interpret the content.

Because of this, great leaders are able to shift contexts, very often using the declaration speech act to do so. Great coaches are able to listen for context and illuminate it so that it becomes visible to their client.

One of my favourite ways to demonstrate the power of context in this respect is to use politics. Politics is great because it is a domain where people often have a lot of assessments that they like to treat as assertions.

I write this statement on the flip chart:

We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States, undetected, undocumented, unchecked, and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently, and lawfully to become immigrants in this country.

Then I ask for thoughts on it.

It is pure content at this point and people say whatever they say.

Then I begin to add context.

First, I add quotation marks to show that it was actually spoken by someone.

Then I tell them it was spoken in a press conference.

Then I tell them it was spoken by someone who became President of the United States.

Then I tell them the date is was spoken (2005).

Then I tell them who said it (Barack Obama).

Watching people’s interpretations and reactions change, as more context is revealed, is fascinating. As the context is gradually revealed, most people assume that it will be a Republican President.

What is equally interesting is what people who want to explain and justify the quote do next: They seek to re-contextualise, usually by saying 2005 was a different era to 2021 and/or looking for the rest of the press conference.

I end the discussion there, because (thankfully) I am not teaching political science. I am demonstrating the power of context and that job is done.

This example also shows that ‘time’ is, in itself, another critical context: 2005 is a very different time in history to 2021. You live in the 21st century. Most of what seems self-evidently true to you today, would not have been so to people living in the 19th century and will not be so for people who live in the 23rd century.

CONTEXT IN COACHING

Let’s now turn to the importance of context in coaching, leadership development, and in the ‘start with who’ methodology in particular. We start with The TWP Time and Space Matrix (Fig. 7).

Fig. 7: TWP Time and Space Matrix.

This is one of the fundamental TWP models. It underpins a lot of our work, and it will underpin a lot of the remainder of this book.

How would you fill in the four boxes?

Most people have no problem with the first three, but struggle with the bottom left. I hope you didn’t struggle with it, as this chapter has already given you the answer! (See Fig. 8.)

Fig. 8: Completed TWP Time and Space Matrix.

• Vision is the articulation of a desired future (the ‘to-be’ state). It does not (yet) exist in the external world and is usually somewhat intangible in nature.

Example: “To become the preferred supplier in the market.”

• Goals/Targets are the milestones that are set in relation to the vision. They are generally more tangible in nature than the vision itself, and must be achieved in the external world if the vision is to be made manifest.

Example: “To achieve a customer satisfaction rating of 4.5 or more/5 in this calendar year.”

• Results exist in the present (the ‘as-is’ state). They are produced and exist in the external world.

Example: “Our customer satisfaction score is currently 4/5.”

• Context is the internal and invisible element that exists in the present (the ‘as is’ state).

Example: “The way that the team members interact with each other.”

Now you can see the difficulty with defining ‘context’. It is not quite as easy to pin down as the other areas.

Another word used to describe ‘context’ here is ‘culture’. Culture is an example of a context. You can’t see it, but it is undeniably there, and it has a major impact on everything else. This is why companies often talk about ‘culture change’ programmes: Change the culture and everything else changes. Easy to write on a flip chart, but not so easy to deliver in practice.

You might be familiar with the famous quotation attributed to management consultant, Peter Drucker:

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast”.

The same could be said for context with regard to visions and goals.

CONTEXT CREATES RESULTS

Culture/context does not, however, eat results for breakfast. Quite the opposite. In fact, culture/context creates results (Fig. 9).

Fig. 9: Context generates results.

Your team’s results are a direct consequence of its operating context.

The results you have in your life are a direct consequence of your operating context.

You can have a beautifully crafted vision.

You can have wonderful SMART goals.

You can spend millions of dollars with consultants to create a fantastic strategy.

You can have a crystal-clear motivation.

None of those things will create your results.

Context eats them all: breakfast, lunch, and dinner with snacks in between.

Your results are created by your context.

This is why the vast majority of change strategies are doomed before they start.

For example, ask yourself: Are you really going to become the preferred supplier, when your team members have such low levels of trust in each other that they do not share information between their departments? Not likely.

CONTENT REVEALS CONTEXT

The fact that context creates content (results) is very useful in one critical respect. If context creates results, then logically, the results you have today must reveal your current context. This is incredibly useful because of the transparency of context.

In fact, looking at results is the only way to reveal context.

Context creates content (results).

Content reveals context.

It operates as a two-way mirror (Fig. 10, overleaf).

Fig. 10: Results illuminate context.

Simple to understand? Yes.

Easy to apply? No.

Why not?

Because human beings are generally highly resistant to looking at their results in a clean mirror and far prefer to fog it up with excuses, blame, stories, and justifications. A fogged up mirror will obscure, rather than reveal, your operating context.

Example:

The team scores 4/5 in their customer satisfaction surveys.

Rather than look at what that tells them about their operating context, and the way they are working together, they instead come up with a great story to explain or justify their results:

“The market conditions are much tougher this year, so a 4 this year, is equivalent to a 4.5 in any other year.”

“The customers are not being honest. They are marking us lower to help their pricing negotiations with us next year.”

Human beings are masterful at creating these kinds of stories. I was told (non-ironically) very early on in my career that:

“If you don’t have a great result, then you better have a great story.”

My late business partner, and co-founder of TWP, Mark Hemstedt, told a wonderful story about his time as a Unilever Finance Director in Malaysia. The ice cream sales were massively down, and he justified it to his superiors in Northern Europe, by attributing this to a cold spell of weather in Malaysia!

Note that he was successful in his strategy because he assessed that the distinctions made by Northern European senior managers would include correlating ice cream sales with temperature and hours of sunshine. This is another example of using the ontological methodology to take effective action.

It was much easier for his Board of Directors to do that, than look in the mirror and see what this decline told them about how the team had become complacent with their dominant position in the ice cream market, allowing for competitors to swoop in (their operating context).

He never did tell me if this was apocryphal or not.

Companies often promote the best storytellers.

A common criticism of this approach is that one result can be interpreted in many different ways, and thus reflective of many different possible contexts. This is certainly the case and why this method requires you to not only be honest as you look at your results, but also to be curious and to look for patterns.

A great question to ask yourself as you attempt to discern your context from your results is this: What is the benefit to me of interpreting it like that? What does interpreting the result in this way allow me to do/not do, to think/not think? How does it allow me to be/not be? And, in particular, what does it allow me to be right about?

In the earlier example, blaming the weather allowed the Board of Directors to play safe, be right about their current way of working, and essentially do nothing different.

This willingness to look for patterns in your results is an important part of the process and is what I refer to as ‘connecting the dots’ in my coaching. As you begin to look at results across your life, you will notice patterns and it is these patterns that illuminate the path to your operating context.

In general, human beings like to fog up the mirror because they want to protect their public or private identity. They fear that looking in a clean mirror will be too exposing. The people around them will not like what is revealed and neither will they.

As you are reading, you might notice that you agree with this assessment. It is certainly a very common belief. Remember, however, that assessments are not true or false.

Fogging up the mirror is not bad or wrong in any way, but it doesn’t change the result and makes it highly likely that it will recur. Obscuring it means you don’t need to deal with it.

As with all assessments, arguing about their veracity is to miss the point. What is more valuable is to look at the consequences of holding that assessment.

There are always consequences:

• Hold it (fog up the mirror) and you get to protect your image, but the result will recur.

• Drop it (look in a clean mirror) and your image might take a hit and you might experience discomfort, but now you can create a different result.

It is for you to choose the road you want to go down.

Fig. 11: Context is identified by content.

Let’s use a metaphor to clearly illustrate the relationship between context and content (results). Let’s say you wake up surrounded by snow and ice, in freezing temperatures, and a polar bear wanders by.

That is the content. Connect the dots of this content and what do you see? The content reveals you are in the Arctic Circle. The Arctic Circle is your context. (See Fig. 11.)

An Arctic Circle context, accordingly, will only allow certain types of content to exist. You are not going to see a sunflower.

If you take a sunflower to the Arctic Circle, then guess what? It dies.

However hard you try to keep it alive, eventually it will die.

Why? Because the context simply does not allow it to exist (Fig. 12, overleaf).

Fig. 12: Context produces and determines the possible content

This is the equivalent of a company declaring a new vision and new targets without addressing their culture. The desired result will not and cannot be sustainably created because the existing culture won’t allow it.

The existing culture is not bad or wrong in any way. It is simply that the whole raison d’être of the existing culture is to maintain the status quo.

The same is true at a personal level and most easily seen with health and wellness goals. For example:

You declare a new vision: To live a healthy lifestyle.

You set smart targets/goals: To reduce your weight to 75 kg by the end of the year.

You establish a great strategy: Join a gym and hire a personal trainer.

End of the year result: Your weight is unchanged (or has even increased!)

This is very common. Why? Because there is something in your operating context that will not allow the new result to appear, or maybe it did appear briefly and then it disappeared.

What could it be? The possibilities are endless, but common examples are:

• Prioritising comfort and familiarity over discomfort and discovery;

• Wanting to fit in when everyone else is eating and drinking stuff that is not in your plan;

• Prioritising looking good in front of the boss and staying late at the office, rather than sticking to your exercise plan;

• Avoiding being ridiculed about being ‘on a diet’ (again!).

How do I know this? Because they all came up for me early on in my own personal health and fitness journey.

Rather than look at these assessments in a clean mirror and see what it reflects about your context, it is easier to fog up the mirror with justifications: “It’s been a very difficult year. The gym was too far away from my office. My personal trainer sucked. I am big-boned. I have a slow metabolism.”

If you continue to fog up the mirror with these stories, then not only will you not shift your weight next year either (even if you change your personal trainer), you will not even attempt to, because you don’t believe you can do it (your slow metabolism). If you are willing to look into a clean mirror, however, then the result will illuminate your operating context. Once you can see the operating context, then you can address it.

Changing the content (adding a sunflower) will not change the context (Arctic Circle) but changing the context will inevitably change the content.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. What major assessments about yourself are you already aware of?

2. What major assessments about other people are you already aware of?

3. Consider 3–5 of the current results in your life that you like, or of which you are proud. Given these results,, what can you begin to infer about your operating context?

How must you be seeing yourself, other people, and the world in order to generate those results?

4. Consider 3–5 of the current results in your life that you dislike, or with which you are disappointed. (It could be a result that you do not have and yet you say you want.) Given these results, or the lack of them,, what can you begin to infer about your operating context? How must you be seeing yourself, other people, and the world in order to generate the results you have, or to not generate the results you say you want?

5. What assessments about yourself, other people, and the world begin to appear as you do this work?

6. Do you notice that your desire to fog up your mirror is stronger as you answer Question 3 or as you answer Question 4? What does this answer reveal about your operating context?

CHAPTER 8

Observer and Identity as Context

So, why all this talk about context and content? What has this got to do with the importance of ‘starting with who’?

Simply put, your observer and your identity are also examples of context. In fact, they are two of the biggest, most important contexts in your life. Like every other example of context, they are creating the results that you have in your life right now and they are, for the most part, completely transparent to you.

OBSERVER

We won’t spend time here to further examine the idea of ‘the observer’ in the ontological approach. Suffice it to say that your observer is an invisible context that both creates and limits the possibilities that you see in terms of emotion, conversation, and action. These, in turn, create and limit the range of results that you are able to produce in your life (Fig. 13, overleaf).

Fig. 13: Your observer determines the range of possibilities you can see and ultimately the range of results that you can create.

As we discussed earlier in this section, the reverse is also true: The results you create illuminate the self-imposed limits to your possible actions and ultimately reveal your observer, if you keep the mirror clean (Fig. 14).

If you are interested in taking this a step further, then consider this: You only ever actually experience elements of the world that are consistent with what your observer has already decided is the case.

Fig. 14: The results you create and the possibilities for action that you see (and don’t see) reveal your observer or context.

Example:

If you decide that your boss lacks empathy, then when they do show empathy, you say to yourself one of two things:

a) You explain it away: “It’s because the company survey happens next week and they want a good score. It won’t last.”

b) You continue to assess them through the same lens: “They are not as unfeeling as usual today.”

Or maybe you do not even see the change.

The way you see the world is not the way the world is.

The way you see the world is simply the way you see the world.

This simple and yet fundamental observation is one to which the majority of my clients are initially blind. This is not to say that the way you see the world is wrong (or bad in any way), but equally, it is not to say it is correct (or right in any way). The way that you, as a human being, experience the world is necessarily subjective.

Now, let’s turn our attention to the context of identity and why it signals the importance of starting with the ‘who’ question over the ‘why’ question.

IDENTITY AS CONTEXT

We are nearing the heart of the book now. The rationale for starting with ‘who’ rather than ‘why’ is bound up in the observation that identity is such a powerful context.

We have already established one source for the power of context: its transparency.

With regard to identity, there is another important source of power, namely that this is an area where people are especially prone to taking their assessments and holding them as assertions. For now, think of this as holding beliefs as though they are facts. This is something that we will amplify throughout the remainder of this book.

As will become evident, it is not only important with regard to the primacy of the ‘who’ question, it is also an extremely useful factor in the creation of sustainable change (the nirvana of coaching, development, and change initiatives in general).

QUESTIONS REGARDING IDENTITY

Before we go any further, take a moment to consider your answers to the following questions:

• What is your definition of identity?

• Who are you?

• How do you know?

There are no right and wrong answers, but it is revealing to start to notice your own answers and to consider the consequences of answering the questions in the way that you do.

The way that you define identity in general and then yourself in particular, begins to impose boundaries and limitations that, in everyday life, are generally transparent to you. We will look at two of the most common ‘problems’ that occur in this area, in the next chapter.

Before we go there, however, notice how you answered the third question: How do you know who you are? This is an area where the ontological distinctions provide a great structure for exploration because in general, people answer this question by using one or more of those distinctions.

You know who you are because of your:

• Observer: Your way of being

e.g. You are a supportive/friendly person.

• Action: What you do

e.g. You exercise regularly. You are a smoker.

• Results: What you have

e.g. You have a job labelled ‘HR Director’.

• Body: Your physical body

e.g. You are 6 feet tall. You are a man. You are a woman.

• Emotion: Your emotional range

e.g. You cry easily. You are not emotional.

• Language: What you say/don’t say

e.g. You rarely make requests. You are a wo/man of your word.

THE BIGGEST BARRIER TO IDENTIFYING YOUR CONTEXT

There are many reasons why human beings resist using their results/content to illuminate their context.

In my experience, however, the area we are looking at here is the most intractable. The vast majority people that I work with have the following unconscious and unspoken declaration: “I am my results.”

In other words, they see themselves as defined by the results that they create in their life. Their sense of self-worth is inextricably wrapped up in what they achieve. For as long as a person holds and validates that declaration, or treats it as a (true) assertion, then it becomes almost impossible for them to use their content to illuminate their context. For some people, this declaration stops them from seeing results they assess as ‘bad’, because this would mean they are a ‘bad person’. Other people are more worried about seeing results they assess as ‘good’ because this would mean that they are ‘good’.

As an example, I have encountered many people who put on weight during the period of the pandemic and immediately jumped to, “Therefore, I am weak, hopeless, not good enough, and lazy” etc. That is what happens when you live from this declaration.

A different declaration is required if you are to avoid this trap, and to use the ‘start with who’ approach effectively. The clients of mine who learn to work with this new declaration experience a turbocharge in their leadership development and in their ability to produce results.

The new declaration has two parts.

“I have results. I am not my results.”

This can be a tough one to accept because the world will constantly tempt you in the other direction. However, if you can learn to allow this declaration to exist for you—not just intellectually as a concept, but also limbically and somatically—then it can be a complete game-changer.

If you can learn to live from this declaration, then putting on weight during the pandemic is simply feedback on the effectiveness of your operating context. It says nothing about your value or self-worth.

Not only will it allow you to see your context more clearly, but it will also transform your attitude towards risk. If you risk and it does not work out, then it does not mean that you are a failure. Conversely, if you risk and it does work out, then it does not mean that you are a superhero.

Stopping to notice how you define yourself is a powerful exercise that I love to do in my coaching and facilitation work. It is a revealing process for individuals, teams, and entire companies.

This has been especially relevant during the global Covid-19 pandemic because many of these things unexpectedly changed. Maybe you lost your job as a Marketing Director, perhaps you cannot now get to the gym and your body begins to look different, maybe you now need to start making requests, maybe you now start to experience and express new emotions, maybe you don’t feel quite so friendly anymore, etc.

A lot of the changes that occurred in this period were very sudden and many of the resulting stress and mental health issues were due to the sudden loss of things that had become tied up in a person’s sense of identity. It became a very destabilising time for a lot of people. It shook their very foundation. That is the power of identity.

IDENTITY, STRESS, AND TRANSITION

One of the most common causes of stress, burn out, and overwhelm is the desire to hold fast to ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that were effective in the past, but which are no longer fit for purpose in a new situation.

People, teams, and organisations very often get stuck in the left-hand columns of Fig. 15.

Fig. 15: Perspective in times of transition.

When you get stuck in the left-hand columns, you begin to make up great stories to explain your stuck-ness.

Top left quadrant stories sound like this: “Oh, this new job/company/situation is terrible, my new team suck, and my new boss just doesn’t get me.” This is usually accompanied by a mood of anger or resentment towards that situation.

In general, these stories are characterised by the person continuing to do what worked in the previous situation, often with an ever-increasing sense of desperation and frustration. You often hear people stuck in this story say, “I don’t have time” because their established ways of doing and being, once successful, are no longer fit for purpose in the new situation. They are now inefficient. The unspoken message in this quadrant is, “I don’t want to change and why should I have to?”

Bottom left quadrant stories sound like this: “Oh, I am never going to win in this new situation, I’m just not suited to it. I’m just not the right person.” This is usually accompanied by a mood of resignation, a deep sigh, and a slump of the shoulders. In general, these stories are characterised by the person giving up and finding more and more reasons to retreat into themselves and hide. The unspoken message in the this quadrant is, “I would change if I could, but I am just not able to.”

These stories play out at all levels: individual, team, and organisational. They are good examples of the ‘foggy mirror’ idea that we examined in the previous chapters: “Needing or waiting for external change to happen before I can be successful”.

Such stories inevitably lead to a felt loss of personal agency: “My life today and my success in the future is out of my hands. My fate is in the hands of someone or something else.”

This experience of a loss of personal agency is one of the biggest causes of stress, burn out, unhappiness, and general ‘un-wellness’ that I see in the workplace (and the world) today.

So, what is different in the right-hand columns? Firstly, it is important to recognise that the left-hand columns are not bad or wrong in any way. It is simply that they are not productive. Remember also that they are not true or false. We are in the land of assessments here.

Also, be aware that most people begin in the left-hand columns, before moving to the right-hand columns. A period of resistance to the new situation is perfectly natural (homeostasis kicks in). Noticing this resistance is actually very useful. It can serve as an alarm clock going off in your brain. It can wake you up.

The right-hand columns keep the mirror clean and shine a light on how to move from left to right. ‘Keeping the mirror clean’ involves using the current situation to illuminate your own personal operating context and identity. This is the start of the ‘start with who’ process.

In the top right-hand quadrant, rather than simply ‘rage against the machine’, you hear the person assume personal agency. This does not involve making yourself wrong, pretending everything is ‘okay’, or adopting a sense of false optimism.

What it does involve is looking into the mirror, acknowledging that the way you are currently showing up is not effective in this new situation, and then using three of the speech acts that we outlined in Chapter 4: requests, offers, and promises.

Making a clear and well-formed promise in response to a request is a clear demonstration of personal agency.

Requesting for a change in the external world and/or making an offer to create a shift in the external world—both of these involve retaining personal agency. They can both have an impact, however, on your sense of private and public identity.

For example, some people fear making a request for change (or support) because they fear it makes them look less than superhuman, dependent, or needy in some way. Others resist making requests because they don’t want to be a burden on others. Some people fear making an offer to generate change because it means they will need to get involved in someone else’s business and it will be extra work (“I’m already so busy!”). Others resist making offers because they fear the person/people receiving it will assess them as being superior or arrogant. They do not want to be seen to be implying that the other person/people cannot cope, or that something is wrong with them or their system.

Being willing to make requests and offers leads to a mood of possibility. Being willing to make and keep promises leads to a mood of confidence and certainty.

In the bottom right quadrant, rather than dwelling on your own perceived inadequacies, you use the mirror of your results to illuminate your operating context: “My results show that I am showing up in a certain way and this way of showing up is not producing the results that I want in this new situation.”

In contrast to the bottom left-hand quadrant, however, you then begin to get curious, use the assertion/assessment distinction to make new declarations, and generate a mood of ambition.

To live in the right-hand columns requires you to see identity in a certain way, however, and there are traps along that path. Before we explore these traps, however, let’s take a detour to explore where the notions of context and identity begin for a human being, and how they subsequently develop.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. Who are you?

2. How do you know?

3. Who were you 10 years ago?

4. How did you know?

5. How do you respond to times of transition?

(Remember that it is very common to begin in the left-hand column, before moving to the right-hand column. So, watch out for an urge to jump to the right-hand column.

6. Which transitions in your life do you assess that you managed (or are managing) effectively?

7. Which transitions in your life do you assess that you managed (or are managing) ineffectively?

8. What do you notice about the differences between your answers to Questions 6 and 7? Were the differences in the type of transition you encountered, or the ways that you responded to them, or both?

CHAPTER 9

Context Development

So, where does our context of identity begin and how does it develop over time?

Over the years, in my conversations with clients, I have come to recognise classic stages of context development that arise for human beings. As I describe them, I urge you to make this process real for yourself. If you do, then it will set you up most powerfully for the remainder of the book.

STAGE 1: PRE-IDENTITY – ONE

In this early stage, you lack the awareness and cognitive function to understand that you are a human being at all. You begin in the womb, at one with your mother, and then emerge kicking and screaming into the world. At this point, you have neither the concept of nor the need for an identity.

Over time, however, you begin to see that you are, in fact, a distinct human being in your own right and begin to define yourself and the boundaries of your context quadrant.

STAGE 2: DEPENDENCE

As a young child, events happen to you, people say things to you, and they do things with and to you. Equally, you do and say things to and with other people. You see people doing things to and with other people.

At this point, one of the key factors of a human being’s ontology starts to go into overdrive. This factor is your inevitable drive to interpret events and assign meaning. This simply comes with the territory of being a human being. Events cannot and do not stay neutral for long: This means that and that means this.

It is in these early days that many of the roots of your identity and the boundaries of your ‘context quadrant’ are unconsciously established. During this time, you are, essentially, a sponge. The assessments you form at this point in your life tend to put down very deep roots and they do not operate at a purely cognitive level. That wonderful supercomputer you have at the front of your brain is not yet fully functional, and these assessments cut deep, at a somatic and a limbic level.

Many of my leadership development and coaching conversations centre around an identification of the meaning that a person has assigned at this stage of their development and the assessments that arose as a result.

There are four very common assessments that a person seems to develop at this stage.

Based on what I am experiencing in the world:

• I am not as smart as other people (“I’m stupid”).

• I am not as capable as other people (“I’m incapable”).

• I am not useful to other people (“I’m weak”).

• I am unremarkable/invisible (“I’m average”)”

While it is perfectly possible that all four of these occur for a person, in general, one or two of these seem to take a particularly firm grip.

Although we are focusing on the linguistic domain at this point, it is also important to acknowledge that assessments such as these also significantly impact the somatic and limbic domains. As an example, the declaration “I’m stupid” makes certain moods and emotions inevitable, while making others almost impossible to experience.

Similarly, a declaration such as “I’m weak” has attendant body postures, breathing patterns, and movements. This is why a coach skilled in the somatic domain is able to ascertain and then intervene in a client’s linguistic and limbic worlds, purely through bodywork. I have been lucky to observe Chris Balsley, Beatriz Garcia, and Sari do exactly this on many occasions in our programme.

This process of interpretation and ‘meaning-making’ is inevitable and is not wrong or bad in any way. Similarly, remember from the last section, that the assessments themselves are neither bad nor wrong.

Breakdowns don’t occur because of the assessments themselves. They occur because those assessments become invisible, and you begin to see them as (true) assertions. You say to yourself: “This is the way things are. I really am like this. It’s a fact,” and so, “I must establish an identity that covers this up and disproves it.”

Perversely, however, driven on by another part of a human being’s ontology, the need to be right, you (unconsciously) begin to look for and create more and more evidence to support the assessments that you are simultaneously trying to disprove.

While all of this is happening, another critical factor emerges. You become aware that you are not only a distinct human being, but that you are also a human being who is currently dependent on other human beings for your very survival and continued existence.

As a result of this, you decide that you need to create your independence and to do that, you will need to prove these assessments wrong. You must prove that:

• You are smarter than everyone else.

• You can do more than everyone else.

• You are more useful than anyone else.

• You are more remarkable/unique than anyone else.

You say to yourself, “If I can prove this, then it will establish my ability to be independent.” Teenagers often make their parents acutely aware of what can be a highly turbulent stage. I know I did.

In essence, your identity and the walls of your context quadrant begin to be forged out of a perceived need to prove yourself wrong about early assessments that you made.

A large part of the identity you hold about yourself today, is a reaction to your interpretation of events that occurred many years ago.

Sure enough, it seems to work. Over time you grow up, go out into the world, and establish your own life, family, and career.

STAGE 3: INDEPENDENCE

The majority of the people that I meet in my coaching and leadership development work are stuck at this stage. They are in a constant battle to remain independent. It is an exhausting and often deeply lonely battle. Proving yourself to be a certain way is also a battle that you can never ultimately win, because you are dealing with assessments and not assertions.

Additionally, assessments such as “I’m stupid” are ones that people generally class as negative, and as we have seen, assessments that are assessed as negative are particularly ‘sticky’.

• However smart you become, there will always be someone smarter.

• However much you do, there will always be someone doing more.

• However helpful you are, someone will always be more helpful.

• However remarkable you are, someone will always be more so.

What’s more, you will always notice these other people, because of your drive to be right about the original assessments. In essence, you win battles along the way, but you never win the war.

It is not an accident that I tend to meet people at this stage, because although this experience can be exciting and can drive progress for a while, in the end, it becomes frustrating, and people are left with the experience of, “Is this it? Surely there must be something more to life than this?”

It is a classic time to reach out for a coach and embark on personal development work. Left to your own devices, it is difficult to develop past this stage. Life will continue to occur as a war to be won, and the adrenaline that comes from the constant battles and from attempting to disprove long-held assessments gets you through.

There is nothing wrong with this perspective, but in the TWP and TCP approach, we offer a point of view that there is something more out there. There is a different game in town, if you want to play it.

STAGE 4: INTERDEPENDENCE

The different game that is out there lies in seeing independence as a myth. As human beings, we necessarily live in an interconnected mesh of relationships and conversations. No one human being is truly independent in that sense.

One factor that makes interdependence so difficult to even acknowledge as a possibility, let alone attain, is the constant bombardment of messages from the outside world that independence is where it’s at. Think of all the superhero movies and all the TV series that centre around the triumph of the individual against the machine.

This bombardment has only intensified in recent history as technology allows us to exist more and more separately from other human beings. The iPhone, the iPad, the laptop … the list goes on. Intimacy dies on the vine as people retreat beneath their headphones, in front of their screens, behind their masks, and soon, into the metaverse.

The other factor that makes interdependence so difficult to acknowledge is that your independence has been very hard won.

The fear of re-experiencing dependence is so great that it stops people from wanting to take the risk of playing a new game called interdependence.

Make no mistake, this new game carries a higher degree of risk, because in order to acknowledge your interdependence, you must open up, trust, and be willing to risk vulnerability.

One of today’s buzziest terms is ‘psychological safety’. In order to create this psychological safety, you must be willing to take this risk. The biggest barrier that I see to psychological safety in the workplace is that everyone wants to wait at Stage 3 and maintain their independence.

Playing safe and waiting behind your protective barrier of dependence is not going to create psychological safety. In fact, that’s exactly what prevents it from flourishing.

In order to create psychological safety, you must take a risk,

and that risk is to trust and be vulnerable:

to acknowledge your interdependence as a human being.

Maybe you can already see the problem that now looms large. The risk involved means exposing the assessment that you have spent a lot of time and energy trying to hide and prove to be false:

• That you are not as smart as other people (“I’m stupid”).

• That you are not as capable as other people (“I’m incapable”).

• That you are not as useful as other people (“I’m weak”).

• That you are not as remarkable as other people (“I’m average”).

For many people, this is a step they are not willing to take, and this is exactly what keeps them stuck in a holding pattern at the level of independence, maintaining the lack of psychological safety that they experience at the office and in life in general.

In corporate terms, this is the leap from being a manager to a leader. In life, it is the leap from relationships that are ‘complicated’ to relationships that are mutually fulfilling and satisfying.

The way through this stage is at the heart of this book.

The key is to remember that you are not exposing

that you are not as smart as everyone else. You are exposing that you

assess yourself to be not as smart as everybody else.

That is a huge difference and a good example of how the ontological distinctions— once understood and practised—can be genuinely transformational. However, this is not the end of the story.

STAGE 5: POST-IDENTITY – ONE

Few people that I have worked with live at this level; and please don’t assume that I am implying that I live at this level myself. Ask my wife, Sari. She will tell you a different story. I do have glimpses of it from time to time and maybe those glimpses have increased as I move through my 50s.

I don’t believe it is necessarily age-related, but based on my experience with clients, I do think it requires a certain degree of life experience. This is not a distinction that can exist at a purely cognitive level. It is not difficult to understand, but as one of my earliest mentors once said to me: “Understanding is the consolation prize in this game.”

The distinction between this stage and the interdependence of Stage 4, lies in the fact that in Stage 4, you still see yourself as a separate, distinct entity that is interacting with other separate, distinct human beings.

Conversely, at Stage 5, you begin to see that you are part of a bigger whole. We are all one in that sense, in just the same way we were one with our mother when we were in her womb. Separation is an illusion.

The wheel has come full circle and your need to establish and maintain a distinct identity in the world disappears as you allow yourself to see yourself as part of something far larger than yourself. It is this sense of ‘one-ness’ that you often see referred to in great poetry, literature, and spiritual works. As Michael Novak says, in The Experience of Nothingness:

“The self has no pure identity, substance, core of its own;

it is constituted by activities in engagement with the world.”

Having taken this look into the stages of context and identity development, let’s now take a deeper dive into the concept of identity itself, and look at some of the traps that can occur when you begin to examine it.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. Which of the four common assessments do you see as most relevant to yourself?

2. What events from your early history do you see contributed to you adopting that assessment?

3. What events from your more recent history do you see yourself using to reinforce the ‘truth’ of this assessment?

4. Consider the different areas of your life. Which stages of development show up in which areas? For example, maybe you see yourself operating at Stage 4 with your spouse, but at Stage 2 or 3 at the office.

5. Where in your life, and with whom, do you experience ‘psychological safety’? Where, and with whom, do you not?

6. Considering your answers to Questions 4 and 5, what could you do differently or how could you be different, in order to create a different experience?

CHAPTER 10

Problems with Identity

FIXED-NESS

The first common problem is that the notion of identity often implies that it is fixed. For example, in Singapore, we have an identity card. It immediately implies a fixed-ness, but this is really more of a classification card. It shows that I am a man, it shows my age, it shows my address, and it has a photo of me. Most people would say that their identity is bigger than this, but it is indicative of how human beings often define it.

The elements contained on a typical identity card are classic assertions. They are verifiable. They are true statements. That’s kind of the point. We are on solid ground here.

Fixed-ness here is not the real problem. The problem lies in the fact that human beings rarely leave it there. They love to add declarations and assessments to their assertions and then treat them all in the same way. They collapse the distinction.

Now there is a problem, because as we saw earlier, assessments are highly generative and predictive of the future.

In my coaching and facilitation work, I refer to this process as building a ‘Language Ladder’ (Fig. 16). A person takes an assertion about themselves and then creates a ladder, by adding rungs of declarations and assessments to it.

Fig. 16: An example of a Language Ladder.

Classic assertions that sit at the bottom of the ladder include:

• my gender;

• my age;

• my race;

• my nationality;

• my position in the family (middle child, eldest child, youngest child).

Then the classic rungs that people love to add include:

Therefore,

• I must/must not …

• I can/cannot …

• I should/should not …

Example:

• Assessment:    I can prioritise work over family.

• Assessment:    I should provide for my parents in their old age.

• Assessment:    I must not cry.

• Assertion:        I am a man.

The top three rungs are not true or false,

because they are assessments.

Because they now sit on the same ladder, however, people love to hold them all in the same way: as assertions.

This is where the fixed-ness becomes a problem. If you see assessments such as these as assertions, then you will continue to create, look for, and find more and more evidence to be right about them and your future is essentially on a set of invisible train tracks.

In this case, what you forget is that assessments are a form of declaration and as such they do not operate in the domain of true/false or right/wrong.

You are choosing your declarations in a way that you do not choose your assertions.

You don’t choose your age or your position in the family,

but you absolutely do choose your attitude towards them and

the declarations that you make about them.

What you declare (publicly or privately) about them is entirely up to you.

The powerful way to use the declarations is not to turn them into assertions, but rather to use them as a mirror, to reveal your context (observer) and how you see yourself, other people, and the world in general.

Although we are focusing on the language (L) domain here, remember that this domain will inevitably influence and be influenced by the body (B) and emotion (E) domains.

A common example that frequently occurs in my coaching:

L: Assertion: I am a man.

L: My assessment: Men must not or should not cry.

B: My body: Tightens up. Stress reaction kicks in, because I must not be seen to cry.

E: My emotion: Anger, because I see anger as more permissible for me than sadness and I need to emote in some way.

CONFUSING COMFORT AND AUTHENTICITY

The second problem regarding identity that I frequently encounter in my coaching is that clients love to confuse comfort and authenticity. Put simply, it shows up like this:

I don’t enjoy ‘X’.

Therefore,

I avoid doing ‘X’.

Therefore,

When I do ‘X’ I say, “I’m not good at ‘X’.”

Therefore,

I don’t enjoy ‘X’.

(Rinse and repeat—see Fig. 17)

Fig. 17: Self-reinforcing comfort and safety loop.

Another example:

You don’t enjoy speaking up in meetings if you and the boss disagree (E). Therefore,

You avoid it wherever possible (B).

Therefore,

When you do it, it does not go particularly well, and you say, “I knew it. I’m no good at this” (L).

Therefore,

You don’t enjoy it (E).

Now you are stuck in a self-reinforcing loop, with all three B-E-L domains involved.

This is very common, and the way people generally justify it, is to use the concepts of identity and authenticity to fog up the mirror. It usually sounds like this: “Oh yeah, I know that I should speak up in meetings, but that’s just not me. I’m not built like that. It would be inauthentic for me. It’s just not who I am.”

And then they start descending their Language Ladder to throw in some assertions to really seal the deal:

• “I’m a junior manager/the youngest in the room, so the boss won’t listen anyway.”

• “I’m a woman and men don’t listen to women, so what’s the point?”

• “I’m Asian, and we don’t do that. You don’t understand, Marcus.”

It all sounds great and maybe they can throw in some research and Jungian theory to help even further, like “I am an introvert.”

What is really going on, however, is that they just want to avoid the discomfort that inevitably occurs when they do something new or different.

Authenticity and identity can be used as great shields from discomfort, growth, and development. A chess player might call it ‘The Genetic Defence’.

Just because you find something uncomfortable,

it doesn’t mean that it is inauthentic for you or in opposition to your identity.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. What is the most common Language Ladder that you create in your life?

Draw it out here or on a separate piece of paper.

2. Which assertions form the rungs at the bottom of the ladder?

3. What are the major assessments that form the rungs higher up the ladder?

4. What are the consequences that arise from continually climbing up this ladder?

5. In which areas of your life do you most frequently find yourself going around this authenticity and comfort cycle?

6. What are the declarations that you use most often to stay stuck in it?

e.g. “That’s just not who I am.”

7. What are the consequences of staying stuck in this cycle for you?

There will be good news and bad news, if you look hard enough.

CHAPTER 11

Opportunities with Identity

Now let’s examine the flip side. Firstly, seeing identity as fluid and evolving.

FLUIDITY

People generally understand this at a conceptual level: The way you are constituted now, in all three domains of body, emotion, and language is different today, to how it was when you were a teenager. Similarly, your actions and results are different, indicating that your observer must therefore be different as well.

There may also be some elements that are the same now as they were then. This is an important point to notice and one we will return to in the final section, when we look at using identity to generate sustainable change.

This is clearly seen at the level of national identity. What it means to be British today, is different even compared to when I was a child. Roll back 100 years or more and the difference is even greater.

The sparks begin to fly when you attempt to stop the process of identity fluidity or even to turn back the clock.

Again, that is not to say that everything can, should, or does change in this process. There will be some elements that remain unchanged and disagreement about what those ‘unchangeable’ elements are, is often what generates those sparks.

The biggest factor that has people reaching for the pause or rewind buttons regarding the evolution of identity is success. Failure can also play the same role (e.g. someone who allows themself to be defined by doing badly in their school exams, many years ago) but in my experience, it is success that is the more common cause of wanting to press pause on one’s concept of identity.

It’s no accident that countries such as the USA and the UK currently have movements aimed at pausing and/or rewinding. It is because, by most standards, they have a history of success and there is a fear of losing what has been gained.

It is exactly the same at the personal level. This is very often a huge factor when I am coaching C-Suite and Directors, who often see themselves as having a lot to lose. Ironically, this fear of loss, trying to pause the inevitable process of identity evolution, is far more likely to cause loss than to prevent it. Paradoxically, by trying to avoid loss and discomfort, they experience more of it.

Indeed, very often this is the exact reason I have been asked to coach the individual in the first place: They have become fixed and closed to new possibilities and changing requirements. This fixed-ness and closed approach makes it far more likely that they will be fired and lose all they have gained. When we look underneath that apparent fear of loss, we generally uncover a fear of experiencing discomfort again.

The amount of discomfort a person experiences during a change

is determined by the attitude they choose towards the change,

and not the change itself.

The best example I know of embracing the power of identity evolution and fluidity is the career of Bob Dylan.

1962: He writes ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and is lauded as a great folk singer/songwriter.

1963: He writes ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ and is lauded as a great protest singer/songwriter.

1964: He writes ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ and is lauded as a great philosophical poet.

He’s now crazy popular. Most people would be tempted to stay put and just continue to repeat the same formula for the rest of their careers (I’m looking at you, Mick). Instead, in 1965, he plugs in his acoustic guitar, leaves ‘pure’ folk/protest music behind, switches to electric music and writes his magnum opus, ‘Like A Rolling Stone’.

His fluid concept of identity reaches its zenith in 1966 when, mid-concert, someone in the audience yells out, “Judas”. Folk fans saw his rapidly evolving identity as a betrayal of his (and their) prior stance in the world. Who they understood (and needed) him to be was no longer the same as who he understood himself to be. He had continued to evolve while his original fan base had not.

In my own coaching conversations, what I have come to notice is that when a person resists change in this domain, it increases their own level of discomfort, while decreasing the level of discomfort experienced by the people around them. Conversely, when a person embraces the fluidity of their identity, it actually reduces the discomfort they experience, while increasing the discomfort experienced by the people around them.

This factor is not to be underestimated: The fear of losing other people’s approval is often a major factor in someone deciding to put the brakes on the evolution of their identity. It is a factor I frequently see in my leadership development and coaching work. It can happen at the individual, team, and organisational level. You will see how this plays out in more than one of the case studies in Part IV of this book.

This is Bob Dylan, however, and so, undaunted, in 1967, he then shifted again and wrote the world’s first biblical rock album, John Wesley Harding. This development did not just signify a notable development of his own identity, it confounded the identity of the music scene as a whole. It was an incredibly sparse recording at a time when music was going psychedelic.

Not content with this, he then rounded out the 1960s by totally altering his voice and writing a great country music album, Nashville Skyline, that included one of his most enduring songs, ‘Lay, Lady, Lay’.

Bob Dylan has never been afraid to continually evolve and reshape his public identity. At the time of writing, six decades later, he is playing a series of critically acclaimed concerts that heavily features songs from the album he released in 2020, and only very few of the songs that made him famous all those years ago. The evolution of his identity continues to this day.

When people tell me that they don’t like Bob Dylan, I always ask: “Which one?”

Now you might catch yourself with an assessment that sounds like this: “Well, it’s easier for Bob Dylan, because he is rich, successful, famous, and a once-in-a-lifetime genius, so this is not relevant to me.”

If you do have that assessment, then first of all, be clear that it is an assessment (not true or false) and then ask yourself how holding that assessment serves you. What does it allow you to do, or not do? How does it allow you to be, or not be? Now and in the future? Are the consequences of holding that assessment going to support you to create the results that you want in your life?

The assessments we hold are very revealing about ourselves. We always hold them for a purpose. Because we necessarily hold so many of them, however, we generally do not stop to question why we hold the ones we do, and, as a result, they gradually begin to exist for us as assertions: “That’s just the way it is.”

In my coaching work, I refer to this process as ‘slowing the tape down’ and it is something that we will return to in Chapter 18, when we look at feedback and then again in Chapter 26, when we look at knowledge, truth, and facts. It is a very important part of the ‘start with who’ approach. In this case, you could easily ground an assessment that it is actually harder for rich, famous, and successful people to continue to evolve their identity, because they have more to lose.

This assessment is no more right or wrong than the first one, because it is still an assessment. Holding this second one opens up different possibilities for you, however, as you move forward in your life. It will serve a different purpose. It is for you to decide which one will better serve you.

PARADOX

Another empowering possibility that exists with regards to identity is to take advantage of your belief system’s ability to engage with paradoxical or contradictory beliefs. The rational, logical element of the human brain is very uncomfortable with paradox. It far prefers things to be true or false. Recognising the assertion/ assessment distinction, however, allows you to use the power of declarations in your favour.

This time, I’ll share with you a real example from my own life that illustrates the point perfectly. Between the ages of 35 to 40, I had some well-worn Language Ladders operating. One of the most entrenched was that as a British man in my mid 30s, I was not good with emotions (stiff upper lip and all that). It was easy to find evidence to justify that assessment, from my own life, the lives of others, and even the movies. Then something happened: I met this beautiful woman called Sari and I wanted to get married.

I could clearly see that if I held on to my assessment, then the relationship wasn’t going to go very well. I could also see that I was unlikely to throw away the assessment after 25 years of holding it and looking for evidence to strengthen it. It was unlikely that I would be able to simply rub it out.

I saw that what I could do instead, however, was to declare a new assessment, one that was diametrically opposite to the old one.

My assertions remained the same: British. Male. 40 years old.

My original declaration remained the same: I am not good with emotions.

Then I added another declaration. One that was completely inconsistent with the old one. It was not logical to hold both. It did not make sense.

My new declaration: I am good with emotions.

To believe both declarations was paradoxical.

To understand how this can work, you need to remember what we outlined in the previous section about how declarations work. They are valid or invalid (not true or false) and what determines their validity is where they are made, when they are made, and crucially in this case, who makes them.

In this case, I am making the declaration about myself, so it has validity, if I choose to give it validity. It’s not true, but it’s not false either—just like the original declaration. I can give myself the authority to believe both of the declarations if I choose. It does not matter that they are antithetical.

Armed with this new declaration in place, I can go on and begin to create new evidence and this creates a new cycle/loop (Fig. 18, overleaf).

I am good with emotions.

Therefore,

I enjoy being emotional.

Therefore,

I embrace the opportunity to be emotional.

Therefore,

I become better with emotions.

Fig. 18: Growth and development loop.

Now, if you talk to my wife, 14 years later, she will tell you that I am still not exactly the most skilled player in the world of emotions, but it doesn’t matter. I have declared it. I am acting on it and we can both see evidence of change. She is not slow to give feedback when I am on/off track either. Having an honest support network really helps, as we shall see.

Notice that the old assessment is still there, however, and it always will be. That’s not a bad thing either, something to which we will return in the final section.

Before we leave this area, let’s dig in a little more about declarations. This approach works because I validate my declaration: I give myself the authority to make it and then believe it.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. Where do you see yourself continuing to define yourself according to past successes/failures?

What are the consequences of this?

2. Where do you see that you have been successful in moving past previous successes/failures and continuing to see your identity in a fluid manner?

What are the consequences of this?

3. Where do you currently already hold contradictory and paradoxical assessments about yourself?

e.g. “I’m not a good public speaker” and “I do well when I speak in public.”

4. What is one area of your life where you could make an empowering declaration today, that is paradoxical to one that you already hold?

What stops you doing it?

What are you afraid will happen if you do it, right now?

CHAPTER 12

Declarations, Authority, and Authenticity

This leads to a very important area in the TWP leadership development work: authenticity. The root of the word ‘authentic’ is two-fold. The Latin word authos means ‘self’ and the Greek word authentes means ‘one acting on one’s own authority.’ Thus, I am the author of my-self. Authenticity is an act of creation, based on my own authority.

You are living authentically when you are living in accordance with your declarations and declared intentions.

Example:

• You declare a vision to make an impact in the world.

You are in a meeting with senior managers, and you speak up.

In this case, you are acting authentically, because you are acting in line with your declaration.

You are authoring the self that you declared.

• You declare a vision to make an impact in the world.

You are in a meeting with senior managers, and you don’t speak up.

In this case, you are not acting authentically because, rather than acting in line with your current declaration in the present, you are acting in accordance with a previous assessment from your Language Ladder in the past (e.g. “I’m the youngest in the room, so people won’t listen.”)

Remember, that’s not wrong, bad, or a false statement. It is just not consistent with your declared vision and hence, inauthentic (but you do have a great justification for your behaviour).

So, ultimately, authenticity is a creative force.

It is up to you to create your identity, not discover it.

It’s in your hands, no one else’s.

You are the one making your declarations and assessments and you are the only one who can choose to validate or invalidate those declarations and assessments.

The world is a big place, and you will find evidence to justify just about any assessment you can think of, if you look hard enough.

As we begin to wind up this chapter, it is time to nail down exactly why starting with ‘who’ provides the most powerful basis for growth, change, and development.

How does working with context, identity, and authenticity in the first instance make the critical difference?

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. Using the definition of authenticity from this chapter, in which domains do you most consistently live authentically?

2. Using the definition of authenticity from this chapter, in which domains do you most rarely live authentically?

3. Looking at your answers to Question 2, which assessments on your Language Ladders do you notice most frequently interrupt your stated desire to be authentic?

CHAPTER 13

The Power of ‘Who’

As we begin to draw this section together, let’s revisit the ontological model.

The temptation (and received wisdom, to a large degree) is to declare a vision, clarify why it matters to you, set goals, and create results. Then learn from those results and set new actions. Rinse and repeat until you either achieve the vision or give up.

This is similar to the single loop learning (Fig. 19), however, that we discussed earlier …

Fig. 19: Boosted single loop approach.

… albeit with a turbo boost from the ‘why’ question to understand the motivation and importance of achieving the vision.

Even with the turboboost applied, there is still a factor missing, however, and that is the person to whom it is important—the ‘observer’ in the ontological model (Fig. 20).

Fig. 20: Double loop approach.

Now let’s add in the TWP Time and Space Matrix (Fig. 21).

Fig. 21: TWP Time and Space Matrix.

It is true that the ‘why’ question exists in the ‘context’ quadrant, but it is only one part of it. The other key pieces can be uncovered by asking these two critical questions:

• Who am I being in the present?

• Who do I believe that I can become in the future?

Until we surface and make visible the answers to these questions, it is as though there is an invisible veil draped over all four quadrants, limiting all possibilities.

Your context does not just create and limit your results, it does the same for the

vision and the goals that you are able to see and are therefore able to declare.

If you hold enabling assessments about who you are in the present and who you can become in the future, then your context grows, and the other three quadrants grow accordingly. If you hold limiting assessments about who you are in the present and who you can be in the future, then the other three quadrants shrink accordingly (Fig. 22). This impact is magnified further by the propensity to see these limiting assessments as true assertions, and hence, unchangeable.

Fig. 22: Assessments create and limit your present results and your future possibilities.

Let’s return to my example regarding being good with emotions and getting married.

The vision is to be happily married.

The goal is to be emotionally connected with my wife.

Now we ask “why?”

I’ll have lots of answers there—no doubt they will all be important—and they will all serve as rocket fuel to propel me forward, but—and it’s a big but—for as long as my contextual declarations and self-assessments remain unexamined, there will always be limiting assessments—e.g. “50-year-old British men just don’t do that kind of thing”—lurking that will limit my ability to declare and achieve this vision/goal, however much I want it.

This is very powerful to recognise and it is one of the main reasons why people do not sustainably achieve the goals and visions about which they are passionate and for which they have clear motivation. This is the cause of a lot of the frustration that I encounter in my coaching conversations.

These declarations and assessments are extremely powerful barriers to your success, not because they are wrong or bad, but because they are transparent and because you treat them as though they are assertions, as though they are facts, as though they are true and unchangeable.

Instead of recognising this and starting with the ‘who’ question, people tend to stick to the ‘what’ and ‘why’ questions and when there is no sustainable change, they come up with a reason or justification to explain the problem. This is the ‘fogging up’ of the mirror that we saw earlier.

To continue with my example:

Vision: Successful marriage

Goal: Emotional connection with my wife

Why: Companionship, family, experiencing unconditional love, etc.

Result: Failed marriage

Huh?

Strange, but it happens all the time.

How come?

Justification: I chose the wrong woman, she wasn’t what I expected, I suck at relationships, my boss worked me too hard so I didn’t have time.

There are endless possibilities, all of which fog up the mirror.

What about if I had kept the mirror clean and asked these two ‘who’ questions before diving into the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ questions?

• Who am I being now?

• Who do I currently believe that I can become?

In order to answer these questions honestly, I must keep the mirror clean and look into the results quadrant without judgement. What do my current results reveal about my operating context? How am I currently living?

Remember the polar bears and the Arctic Circle?

• The Arctic Circle allows for polar bears, but not sunflowers (however strong my desire for sunflowers may be).

• The presence of polar bears reveals that I’m in the Artic Circle. The temptation, of course, is to say that a brown bear fell into a vat of white paint. You’d be surprised how many times I hear stories like that in my coaching conversations.

Context creates content. Content reveals context.

So, if I look into the content of my life (the results) and I see that I am not married and I have a string of broken relationships, instead of providing justifications to explain these factors, I look at the kind of declarations and assessments that must be in place in order for this content to exist.

That inquiry leads me to uncover my operating context and that will ultimately lead me to my Language Ladder and the declarations and assessments that I have added to my assertions (Fig. 23).

Notice how the assertions now also begin to act as a justification for my results. I can say to myself: “If I wasn’t a 50-year-old British man, then of course I would be great with emotions.” How convenient! But also how limiting! For as long as I see it like this, it is game over.

Fig. 23: Using assertions to justify declarations and assessments.

Assessments/Declarations

• I am not good with emotions.

• I must have a stiff upper lip.

Assertions

• I am 50 years old.

• I am a man.

• I am British.

By making the declaration/assessment visible and then correctly using the assessment/assertion distinction, I rob the declarations of their power.

Failing to do this essentially sets up a heavyweight competition between wanting to be right about your (unseen) assessment and your motivation and willpower.

In my personal and professional experience, wanting to be right usually

triumphs over even a strongly held motivation.

Now I can see the assessments, I can examine them, however, using one of my favourite coaching questions:

“Now that you see this, if you continue to believe it/act on it,

are you more or less likely to achieve your vision?”

If your honest answer is “less likely”, then the follow up question is:

“What new declaration/assessment in this domain could you adopt that

would make you more likely to achieve your vision?”

Remember, the declarations and assessments you make are completely in your hands and it does not mean that the old contradictory ones will disappear. That is the beautiful paradox of being human.

You can comfortably hold contradictory assessments in your head because you can give yourself authority to validate them both, without regard to facts and logic.

That’s how declarations and assessments work, but when you confuse them with assertions, you lose sight of that and now you are living in an invisible prison. A prison that might not even let you articulate your vision and goals, let alone achieve them.

“I am not going to declare that as a vision for me because I know I can’t achieve it.”

This is very common self-talk that even the most powerful answer to a ‘why do you want it’ question cannot overcome.

Indeed, it is very common for people to miss that a particular vision is even possible for them. They do not even consider it, so strong is the hold of the unseen declarations/assessments.

Incidentally, it is worth noting that although I am largely focusing here on assessments about self, the same holds true for assessments you make about other people and the world in general.

• She’s a woman, therefore she can, should, must, will, will not …

• He’s a man, therefore he should not, cannot, must not, will, will not …

• My government should/should not …

• A multinational company must/must not …

• My team leader/boss should/should not …

Language Ladders such as these also make up your operating context and consequently also play a huge part in creating your results.

PART II

Postscript

This concludes our exploration of the importance of the invisible factors called context and identity. Who you have decided you are and who you have decided you can become in the future are critical factors in your ability to sustainably produce the results that you desire.

Finally, let’s deal with a very common objection I hear to this approach:“This all sounds very theoretical and psychological. Can’t we just skip to what we want, why we want it, and then get going?”

I guarantee that at least some of you are thinking that right now. This is very tempting, but it is also the reason why so many visions and goals remain unattained. Here’s an analogy I use to show why it is so important to ‘start with who’.

The analogy is a journey. You want to travel to a new destination called ‘My Vision’. You are clear why you want it. Now what?

Of course, you want a budgeted plan of how to get there. You call a consultant, and they sell you a lovely, detailed map

Here’s the rub. The expensive map (Fig. 24) is absolutely useless to you at this point. You cannot use it to achieve your vision, however clear you are about why that vision is so compelling to you.

Fig. 24: Useless map.

Why not?

Because you are lacking one key element.

A map is useless until you know where you are now (Fig. 25).

Fig. 25: Useful map.

You need to recognise and understand your current context or operating system before a map or a strategy is of any use to you. This context is the one created by the invisible declarations and assessments we have been discussing.

Missing this point is one of—if not the biggest—reasons that people fail to achieve their visions and goals on a daily basis.

You can work extremely hard on a beautifully crafted strategy,

but if you are not clear about your starting point, then it’s all for naught,

because the journey from Singapore to London

is very different to the journey from Los Angeles to London.

At one level, the start point seems self-evident, but as we have seen in this section, human beings love to fog up the mirror that would give them an accurate read on their starting point.

There are essentially two ways to uncover this starting point. The first way is to use the content in your results quadrant to illuminate it. If you keep the mirror clean, then it will accurately reflect answers to our ‘who’ questions:

• “Who am I currently being?”

• “Who do I believe that I can become in the future?”

This is the work we have discussed so far. There is a second way, however, and it is to that second way that we now turn. The second way is to request and be open to receiving feedback from other people.

PART II

Key Learning Points

1. Context creates content.

2. Content reveals context.

3. Words, events, actions, etc. are examples of content. Without context, they are ‘meaning-less’ (not ‘meaningless’).

4. Culture and identity are examples of context.

5. You have results. You are not your results.

6. Human beings love to add assessments to their assertions and then treat them both as though they are right/true/correct. Over time, this process becomes automatic and invisible.

7. Uncovering your purpose for holding an assessment as an assertion is a powerful way to reveal your context.

8. The assessments you create and add to your assertions are completely in your hands. Although they may be comfortingly familiar, they may no longer be productive.

9. Just because a particular action, way of being, emotion, or posture is uncomfortable, does not mean that it is ‘inauthentic’.

10. Identity is a fluid, iterative process that evolves over time. Attempting to stop that process leads to frustration and is ultimately a fruitless enterprise.

11. It is perfectly possible for a human being to simultaneously hold two (or more) conflicting points of view or assessments.

12. You alone have the authority to author and validate your own concept of self. It is never true, but it is always valid.

13. Authoring your ‘self ’ and being authentic is more of a creative process than it is a process of uncovering, discovering, or revealing anything.

14. What you (consciously or unconsciously) have decided to be true (about yourself and others) will inevitably determine both your results in the present and what you believe to be possible for you to achieve in the future.

CHAPTER 14

What is Feedback?

In this chapter, we will explore the important role that feedback can play in the ‘start with who’ approach.

On the surface, it might seem that feedback is unnecessary. If your results, viewed from a clean mirror, are enough to reveal your context, then why do you need feedback? What role does feedback play in answering our two lead questions?

• Who are you currently being?

• Who do you believe you can become in the future?

Isn’t feedback just going to fog up the mirror again, by getting other people involved? Surely you can keep your own mirror clean? Unfortunately not, as you will see when we unravel things further in this chapter.

Before we dive into the vital role that feedback plays in this process, we need to agree on a definition of feedback, because in all my years of working in coaching and training, this is the most misunderstood tool in the toolkit.

Pause here for a moment and consider your own definition of feedback. While you are here, also pay attention to your assessments about it as well as any somatic or limbic associations that you many have. ‘Feedback’ is often a very charged word for people, because they have previously been burnt by it.

Incidentally, this is another good example of the power of context. If I asked a musician onstage at a concert for a definition of ‘feedback’, they would likely give a very different definition to the one you are considering. It is always the context that gives meaning to the content and here, the context is personal development, leadership, and coaching.

Let’s start with what feedback is not.

It is not advice and it is not judgement.

Bottom line: Feedback is information. Simple as that.

Let’s use the distinctions of the ontological methodology again.

Fig. 26: B giving feedback to A.

When person B gives feedback to person A, they are giving them information as to how they are experiencing them (Fig. 26). Note that this experience can show up in any of the three domains that we have discussed: Body, Emotion, and Language.

Examples:

• I notice that you arrived for the meeting at 9:15 a.m. after we promised to start at 8:30 a.m. (Language: Assertion—can be verified)

The impact this had on me was that I experienced anger and frustration (Emotion) and I felt the physical sensation of a tightening in my shoulders and a quickening of my breathing (Body).

• I notice you arrived at 8:25 a.m. after we promised to start at 8:30 a.m. (Language: Assertion—can be verified)

The impact this had on me was that I experienced you as reliable (Language: Assessment—cannot be verified, is not true or false, but is a reflection of the standards I hold in the domain of punctuality. (Note: My standards may be different to other people’s standards, of course.)

It is still feedback, even if there is no assertion.

• I experience you as un/reliable. (Language: Assessment)

• I experienced joy in the meeting with you today. (Emotion)

• I noticed my body shrank and I lowered my eyes when you started your presentation. (Body)

All of these are examples of feedback. I am giving you information.

Feedback is information regarding

what I observed and/or the impact it had on me.

• I noticed that you did not speak up in the meeting. (Feedback)

• I experienced sadness when you did not speak up in the meeting. (Feedback)

Notice that I am not telling you that you need to or should change your behaviour or way of being in any way. That would be advice. Similarly, I am not telling you that your behaviour or way of being is too much, or too little, etc. That would be judgement.

• You should speak up in meetings. (Advice)

• You did not speak up enough in that meeting. (Judgement)

The distinction between feedback and advice or judgement is collapsed more often than any other I encounter in the world of coaching and development.

If you can hold to the definition of feedback as information, then the mirror remains clean. As we will see, however, there are many traps along the way.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. How have you been defining feedback, up to this point?

2. What consequences arise from your definition?

3. Using the ‘feedback is information’ definition, when was the last time you gave feedback?

4. Using the ‘feedback is information’ definition, when was the last time you received feedback?

When I ask these questions in my coaching work, it can often be a real eye-opener for people. They thought they had been giving feedback but, in reality, had been giving and receiving a lot of advice and judgement. As we shall see, this is not simply a linguistic matter; it has important real-world consequences, especially in the domain of relationships.

CHAPTER 15

Misconceptions of Feedback

Looking at the misconceptions surrounding feedback could almost be a book in itself.

FEEDBACK VERSUS ADVICE AND JUDGEMENT

Let’s start by reinforcing the distinction between feedback and judgement or advice. Remember when we explored the ontological model and discovered that making distinctions is a key first step in enabling effective action? It’s not that advice and judgement are inherently bad, but they are different and, as we have discussed before, knowing and practising distinctions is a primary key to being effective.

• Feedback: My observer shares what I am noticing and/or experiencing about your observer; how my observer is being impacted by your observer.

e.g.“I notice that you are presenting with your shirt untucked and I experience that as unprofessional.”

• Advice: My observer tells your observer what to do, based on my assessments and my standards in this particular domain.

e.g. “You should tuck your shirt in when you are presenting.”

• Judgement: My observer tells your observer what is right and wrong, based on my assessments and my standards in this particular domain.

e.g. “It is bad/wrong to present with your shirt untucked.”

Imagine someone communicating these three statements to you. Notice how the feedback lands very differently.

One of the biggest causes of friction in relationships (personal, as well as professional) is that they exist on a diet of judgement and advice. Over time, unchecked, this diet will lead to defensiveness and an accumulation of resentment which, in turn, is likely to lead to unexpected outbursts of anger or sadness.

Notice also how feedback leaves the power of interpretation and response in the hands of the receiver. For example, the receiver may say one of the following:

• “Thank you. I had not realised that it was untucked,” and immediately tuck in their shirt.

• “Thank you. I know. I was going for an informal look today,” and carry on with the presentation.

To reiterate: advice and judgement are not bad per se. They both give the receiver clear insight into the way that the giver views the world and a skilled receiver can use that insight very powerfully, moving forward in the relationship.

Additionally, they both also alert the receiver to the likelihood that there might be consequences to not heeding the advice/judgement being given (especially if the giver is in a position of power in this situation—another example of how declarations work).

It is extremely common for people to give advice and judgement when they are asked for feedback. If you are struggling with this, then consider it this way. If you want to give someone advice to do something different, then by definition, you don’t see them doing it now. Therefore, your feedback is what you see as currently missing.

Example:

• Advice: You should be open.

Feedback: I experience you as closed.

• Judgement: You did not speak up enough in that meeting.

Feedback: I heard you speak up one time in that meeting, and as a result, I assessed* that you were holding back and I experienced* frustration.

(* You do not have to use these rather formal words, of course. I am using them here to illustrate the point.)

POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE FEEDBACK

Now let’s continue down this path and use the ontological distinctions to further illuminate the consequences of seeing feedback as information. In so doing, we can further simplify this topic and explode some myths along the way.

Information is neutral.

Information is content.

Remembering our earlier work with context, content, and polar bears, this means that you can only really understand feedback when you know the context. Therefore:

Positive and negative feedback does not exist.

You might need to read that statement again, because the idea of positive and negative feedback is so well established that it is taken as self-evidently true by almost everyone I coach.

Example:

• I noticed you spoke up three times in this morning’s meeting and I experienced excitement.

That’s feedback.

Is it positive or negative? It is neither, until the listener adds their own context to it.

If the listener is a junior manager, with a goal of raising their profile, then they will likely label the feedback as ‘positive’. If the listener is a senior manager, with a goal of giving more space to their team, then they will likely label the feedback as ‘negative’.

Notice that I experienced the emotion of excitement, because there was something in my context that generated that. Maybe I knew that you had earlier declared a goal of speaking up in meetings or maybe it was one of my goals to have you raise your profile.

Now, you might be thinking, “Yeah, but it’s not always that easy”, so let’s take a seemingly more difficult example:

• I experienced you as extremely disruptive in the meeting.

Surely that is negative feedback? No.

To understand why, we must return to the ontological distinctions and, in particular, declarations.

Declarations are valid or invalid depending on who says them, where they make them, and when they make them. They only have power if the receiver grants authority to the speaker.

The feedback in this example is a particular form of declaration—our old friend the assessment. An assessment is reflective of the standards of the person making it. It reveals more about the person making it, than it does about the person to whom it is being addressed.

Therefore, if the receiver grants authority to the speaker, then they are likely to interpret it as negative feedback. If the receiver does not grant authority to the speaker, however, then they are likely to interpret it as neutral or essentially meaningless.

More than that, if the receiver consciously holds very different standards to the giver in this domain, then they might even see the feedback as positive because they have a very different interpretation of the events under discussion. Maybe the receiver sees themselves as acting authentically, or as livening up the meeting, or speaking openly and honestly about their different opinion.

People often tie themselves in knots with the idea of positive and negative feedback, coming up with all sorts of arbitrary rules: “You should give two pieces of positive feedback for every bit of negative feedback. Think of it like a sandwich.” No.

This definition of feedback as information, supported by our language distinctions, cuts through all of that.

TRUE OR FALSE/RIGHT OR WRONG FEEDBACK

This is another very common belief about feedback that does not stand up under the scrutiny of the distinctions that we have been using.

It is true to say that pure assertion-based feedback can be true or false.

Example:

• I noticed that you arrived for the meeting at 9:15 a.m. when we had an agreement to start at 8:30 a.m.

There are two assertions that can be verified here. Did the person arrive at 9:15 a.m. and was there an agreement regarding 8:30 a.m.?

Breakdowns in teams can certainly occur because of disagreements about assertions.

• “No, I arrived at 9:00 a.m. Your watch was wrong.”

• “No, I did not agree to an 8:30 a.m. start.”

Most of the time, this is not what people are referring to, however, when they say feedback can be right or wrong or true or false. Usually, they are referring to statements like this:

• I experience you as arrogant.

• In my experience, you are unreliable.

Hopefully, by now you recognise that these kinds of statements are not either true or false. They are assessments, based on the person’s standards in those domains.

If you hear that feedback, does it really make sense to say to the person giving you the feedback: “No, you are wrong. You do not experience me as arrogant or unreliable”? If that’s their experience, then that’s their experience.

You might want to say that they are wrong and their feedback is mistaken, but that’s just because you hold different standards in this domain. Your different standards result in you having a different assessment, but that does not invalidate the other person’s assessment in any way. You are simply interpreting the same event/s in a different way. Your assessments are no more right/wrong or true/false than theirs are—however much you might want to believe otherwise.

Feedback can be honest or it can be a lie, but it cannot be labelled as true/false or right/wrong (except in the rare cases of pure assertion-based feedback).

OBJECTIVE AND SUBJECTIVE FEEDBACK

Another very common belief about feedback is that it is either objective or subjective, but if you go back to the beginning of this chapter, you quickly realise that this makes no sense at all.

Feedback given by one observer to another, can never be ‘objective’. By definition, you are subjective. The feedback you give to another human being is always subjective. You might think that pure assertion-based feedback is objective.

Example:

• I noticed you arrived at 9:15 a.m.

On the surface, it appears to be objective, but if you look deeper, then you see that is not. Look around you right now. Consider how many assertions surround you. Thousands. Maybe more.

Assertion-based feedback remains subjective because you noticed it and you deemed it worthy of highlighting. Someone else might have been in the same meeting and not even noticed what time the person arrived. Someone else might have noticed, but not deemed it worthy of mentioning. Even assertion-based feedback is subjective in this sense.

Other forms of feedback (assessment-based) are much more clearly subjective. Just because feedback is subjective, however, doesn’t make it any less valuable. In fact, as you will see as we move forward, it is precisely the subjectivity of feedback that makes it valuable!

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. What feedback have you received that you are holding as ‘negative’?

What is generating that assessment?

What does that tell you about your observer?

2. What feedback have you received that you are holding as ‘positive’?

What is generating that assessment?

What does that tell you about your observer?

3. If you were to hold those pieces of feedback identified as ‘negative’ or ‘positive’ in answer to Questions 1 and 2, as neutral, then what new possibilities open up for you?

4. Which is harder for you to hear: feedback you label as ‘positive’ or feedback you label as ‘negative’? Why?

5. Which is harder for you to give: feedback you believe will be interpreted as ‘positive’ or feedback you perceive will be interpreted as ‘negative’? Why?

6. What feedback have you received recently that you labelled as wrong/false?

What have been the consequences of doing that?

7. What feedback have you received recently that you labelled as right/true?

What have been the consequences of doing that?

8. What new possibilities open up for you, if you were to see this feedback identified in Questions 1 and 2, as neither ‘positive’ nor ‘negative’, but simply as information?

CHAPTER 16

Why is Feedback Useful?

Now we have defined feedback as information and cleared up the most common misconceptions about it, the next question to ask is why it is useful in this context of growth, development, and change. Why do you need feedback to help you answer our ‘who’ questions?

Feedback is extremely useful in this context because the manner in

which other people experience you is a key result in your life.

Remember that the bottom right quadrant in the TWP Time and Space Matrix is ‘As Is’ and ‘External’. This quadrant refers to the results you are currently creating in your life (Fig. 27, overleaf). These results can be objective, such as the amount of money you have in the bank, or they can be subjective, such as the way other people experience you. Both objective and subjective are equally revealing and equally worthy of your attention.

Fig. 27: Objective and subjective results.

If you want to use your content (results) to reveal your context (identity) then you need to take into account both types of results. In a very real sense, both forms of result are feedback.

OBJECTIVE RESULTS AS FEEDBACK

Usually, we use the term ‘feedback’ to refer to something given by one person to another person, but the objective results you have in your life also serve as feedback.

• If you are single, that’s feedback.

• If you have $1 million in the bank, that’s feedback.

• If you are married with three kids, that’s feedback.

• If you are declared bankrupt, that’s feedback.

Whether you like the result or not, it is still feedback.

Some people like to fog up the mirror and downplay their ‘good results’ with false modesty. Some people like to fog up the mirror and justify their ‘bad results’ with blame and excuses.

If you are willing to keep the mirror clean and use all your results to help illuminate your context, however, then it can be a very revealing exercise.

Objective results are the closest to objective feedback that you can get.

• They have no agenda.

• They don’t lie to you.

• They don’t want your approval, time, or attention.

• They have nothing to prove to you.

It is just too easy, however, to fog up that part of the mirror with reasons, stories, and excuses. For example, you say, “I am bankrupt.” It is so easy and tempting to blame the economic climate, the exchange rate, etc. There will never be a shortage of ways to fog up the mirror.

Keep the mirror clean, however, and it provides very useful feedback that ultimately allows you to learn from the past, choose different actions and ways of being in the future, and ultimately create new results.

The drive to fog up the mirror often comes from a faulty understanding, namely that the results are giving you feedback on your worth as a human being. They are not doing that.

Objective results are not giving feedback on you as a human being, they are simply giving you feedback on the effectiveness (or otherwise) of your actions, ways of being, and the operating context that generated them in this situation.

If you are declared bankrupt, then it does not mean that you are a failure, bad, or stupid; but it does reveal that your actions, ways of being, and operating context were not effective in this situation, based on results.

Incidentally, the converse is also true. If your business is a massive success, it does not mean you are a genius. It does, however, give you feedback on your actions, ways of being, and operating context. In this case, they were effective, based on results.

This is similar to the critical declaration we discovered in the previous section: “I have results, I am not my results.”

Neither objective nor subjective results define you or your identity. Seeing both these forms of results as neutral pieces of information, rather than indicators of your self-worth or value as a human being, is a critical step in the ‘start with who’ process.

It’s a critical step because the actions you took, or did not take, are a product of your operating context. In this way, further light is spread on how you see yourself, other people, and the world.

SUBJECTIVE RESULTS AS FEEDBACK

The subjective results we are concerned with here are other people’s experience of you. Your own subjective experience (moods, emotions) is part of your internal world and, together with your assessments, go towards making up your context.

This internal, subjective experience is a very valuable tool because it, too, can help to illuminate your (invisible) assessments. For example, you notice you are feeling sadness, frustration, and disappointment. What does that show you about you and how you see the world? What assessments must you be holding in order to be experiencing these emotions or moods?

Remember the spider? The emotion of fear arose as a result of your assessment of the spider; it was not caused by the spider. If it was, then everyone would have the same assessment about spiders.

A note of caution here. If you catch yourself saying: “I feel that spiders are scary”, then you are back in the realm of assessments, rather than the realm of emotions. It would be more accurate to say: “Because I assess that spiders are scary, I experience fear, anxiety, etc. when I see one.”

As soon as you put ‘that’ after the word ‘feel’, you leave the domain of moods and emotions and are back in the domain of language.

This is a common fault in everyday language:

• ‘I feel that …’ will lead you to an assessment, rather than an emotion.

e.g. “I feel that it is wrong to argue with my parents.”

• ‘I feel …’ will lead you to an emotion or a mood, not an assessment.

e.g. “I feel sad when I argue with my parents.”

If you want to uncover the emotion or the mood you are experiencing,

then drop the word ‘that’ after the word ‘feel’.

The subjective results that we will focus on in this exploration are the ones that arise in other people. As with the spider, you are not the cause of the subjective experiences that arise in other people. If you want to be successful in relationships with other human beings, however, then becoming aware of their experience around you is extremely valuable.

While the impact you have on another human being is a subjective result, it is these subjective results that often go on to create the objective results that you have in your life.

Example:

• Your boss experiences you as trustworthy and having integrity.

• Your boss experiences you as untrustworthy and dishonest.

Imagine how different your objective results are likely to be in these two scenarios. If you want to answer our ‘who’ questions with the most accuracy, then you need to look at the whole of the results quadrant: the subjective element as well as the objective element.

Yes, different people can and will give you different feedback.

Yes, the same person can and will give you different feedback at different times.

Feedback is not a science. Human beings are not logic machines. It is on you to interpret the feedback as best as you can, to keep the mirror as clean as possible.

How do you know the way people are experiencing you, or the impact you are having on them? You can certainly make assessments based on how they treat you and how they act in your presence, but the more direct way is to ask for feedback.

Simple? Yes.

Easy? No.

As we will see, there are significant barriers to asking for and receiving feedback. There are also similarly significant barriers to giving feedback, once you have been requested to give it. We will explore these barriers in more detail in Chapter 18.

If you are committed to keeping the mirror clean and using it to illuminate your context, then you will need to overcome them.

USING THE OBJECTIVE/SUBJECTIVE RESULTS DISTINCTION TO ILLUMINATE CONTEXT

Armed with the distinction between objective and subjective results, you can use another one of my favourite models to help illuminate context.

As you work with this one, it is especially powerful to notice which quadrant of the mirror the client (or you) has the most resistance to keeping clean—the one you are most tempted to fog up.

Fig. 28: Segmenting results to illuminate context.

All eight segments will reveal assessments that together make up your context. With some of those results, you will have no problem letting them do their ‘context-illumination’ job, and with others, you will be sorely tempted to explain away.

A tip: Allow this to flow and go with your first instinct. There are lots of results you could choose to put in each box. The ones that show up first, often do so for a reason.

Examples (Fig. 28):

• Subjective Results

You have received feedback that:

> you are supportive.

> you are passive.

You have not received feedback that:

> you are stupid.

> you are creative.

(Clearly there numerous things that you could put in here, so the best way to frame this is to ask: “What is the feedback that you are most relieved/disappointed not to have heard?”)

• Objective Results

That you do have in your life:

> You are married.

> You are overweight.

That you do not have in your life:

> You are not a Director.

> You are not unemployed.

(Again, there are numerous things that you could put in here, so the best way to frame this is to ask: “What are the results that you are most relieved/disappointed not to have in your life?”)

My coaching conversations that arise out of using this simple model have often proven very effective at deepening a client’s self-awareness.

Remember, however, that this process of using results is not a science. There is rarely a result that can be categorically linked to evidence of one specific assessment in your context. Similarly, remember that you need to be constantly on the lookout for new results. Your existing assessments will attempt to have you focus solely on results that reinforce their veracity.

What you are looking for are patterns that allow you to ‘connect the dots’ and make inferences about the underlying context that must therefore exist.

This is something that we will dive into in more detail in the next chapter.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. What are the objective results that you have in your life that you find most difficult to see as feedback?

What is it about these results that makes this process difficult?

e.g. “I have not been promoted at work for five years and I don’t like to see that as feedback, because I assess that it means I am a failure.”

2. What are the subjective results that you have in your life that you find most difficult to see as feedback?

What is it about these results that makes this process difficult?

e.g. “My colleague gave me feedback that she experiences me as boring and I don’t like to see that as feedback, because I assess that it means I am not a good teammate.”

3. Were the results identified in Questions 1 and 2, more often results you like or results that you don’t like?

Why is that?

What assessments crop up when you look at these results?

4. What are your favourite ways to fog up your mirror?

e.g. “I like to blame circumstances or other people, such as my boss or my spouse.”

5. What are the consequences for fogging up your mirror in this way?

There will be some good news and some bad news, if you look hard enough.

6. What emotions do other people consistently experience around you? How do you know?

7. What are the consequences of people experiencing those emotions around you?

There will be some good news and some bad news, if you look hard enough.

8. What are you beginning to see about your context?

(It helps to work with a coach at this point, or at least, a trusted external party, to keep yourself honest.)

CHAPTER 17

Master Assessments

Despite the absence of straight-line provable causation, it does become possible to ‘connect the dots’ as the process progresses, and as you do so, themes will begin to emerge. These themes begin to highlight what ontological coaches will often refer to as ‘master assessments’. These are the ones that permeate your whole life.

Go back to look at Fig. 28 in the previous chapter. This is a real example from one of my previous coaching conversations. How would you ‘connect the dots’?

My client joined up the dots to arrive at master assessments along the lines of:

• “I do not deserve success.”

• “I am lucky to be where I am today.”

• “I am lazy.”

• “I am a helper, not an achiever.”

Note that in this process, the assessments are not all necessarily about you. The process will always throw up assessments about other people, the world, etc.

Ones that showed up in this case:

• “Life is unfair.”

• “People only like you when you help them.”

• “Men are more self-centred than women.”

• “A youthful appearance makes it harder to be taken seriously.”

Remember, we are in the land of assessments. None of these statements are true or false. What matters is not their veracity or otherwise, but rather an honest appraisal of the consequences of holding them. So:

• What are the advantages and disadvantages of holding them?

• What do you get to be right about if you continue to hold these assessments?

• What lies at the end of the road if you continue to hold these assessments as assertions?

• Are you more or less likely to achieve the dreams you have for your life if you continue to hold them?

Master assessments form the boundaries of your context quadrant. The whole point of the ‘start with who’ approach is to illuminate and make visible this kind of boundary.

For as long as a master assessment lurks invisibly in the shadows, posing as an

assertion, your ability to achieve your dreams will always be compromised.

As soon as you begin the journey to your motivating destination,

the master assessment silently sticks out a leg and trips you up,

before quietly retreating back into the shadows.

In Chapter 8 of Fit To Lead, there is a similar model that you can use to illuminate the ‘good news’ and the ‘bad news’ that hide in the background as you consider your goals and your results. You will find a reminder of that model and some further work with it in the Appendix. These two models can be used in tandem for a synergistic effect.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. Based on the four quadrant model that you filled out in the previous chapter, what are the dots in your own life that you can begin to connect?

2. What are the master assessments you hold about yourself, other people, and the world that begin to become clear as you connect the dots in this way?

3. What are the consequences that arise from holding these assessments as assertions? There will be some good news and some bad news, if you look hard enough.

CHAPTER 18

Barriers Surrounding Feedback

ASKING FOR FEEDBACK

The biggest barrier to asking for feedback is that it requires you to expose yourself and be vulnerable; to acknowledge that you are in the growth and development game: That you are not perfect.

For many people (especially people in senior positions at the office or at home), this is simply not a risk they are willing to take. They would rather not know the impact they are having on people.

In my coaching, I notice that people in senior positions often see themselves as ‘above it all’ in some way. It’s almost as though they say to themselves: “I have done my growing. Now it’s someone else’s turn to experience the discomfort and pain of growth and development.”

As you read that last statement, you might be tempted to say to yourself, “Well, that’s not true for me”, but again, use your content to reveal your context. What do your results tell you? When was the last time you sincerely asked someone for feedback (and acted on it!)?

There are always lots of justifications for this stance: “other people are too busy”, “other people won’t be honest”, “I already know the answer”, “other people don’t know me”, etc. The list goes on and on. What such justifications overlook is not just the importance of the feedback itself, but also the process of asking for it.

The very act of requesting feedback impacts the relationship and

your public identity with that person or group of people.

I have seen this be extremely powerful in a team context, when the leader is willing to do it with the members of their team.

There is also the additional problem for some people that if they ask for feedback, then they will be expected to act on it, and that will be very uncomfortable and inconvenient. Asking for feedback, receiving it, and then not acting on it also impacts the relationship and your public identity with that person or group of people.

RECEIVING FEEDBACK

The most fundamental barrier to receiving feedback lies in the work that we have already discussed about declarations and assessments. Some people have more resistance to hearing feedback that they assess as ‘negative’, while others have more resistance to hearing feedback that they assess as ‘positive’.

It is also possible that one person can experience a combination of both of these, because they see things differently in different domains. For example, you are more resistant to hearing feedback you perceive as negative at the office, but more resistant to hearing feedback you perceive as positive at home. In either case, the resistance stems from the same place: an unwillingness to re-assess your assessments.

As we saw earlier, once you have your assessments in place, you want to gather evidence to reinforce them, because that gives you more certainty about the future and it allows you to feel more right, and who doesn’t enjoy being right, after all?

If you have an assessment that you are inadequate in a domain (maybe you see yourself as bad at being assertive), then receiving feedback that you actually did well in that domain can be very inconvenient.

Similarly, if you have an assessment that you are very good in a domain (maybe you see yourself as very open to new ideas), then receiving feedback that you did not do well in that domain can be very inconvenient.

So, you tell yourself stories that often sound like this:

• For as long as I see my assessment that I am inadequate in a domain as true, then I have a wonderful justification to play safe, or not participate in that domain.

• For as long as I see my assessment that I am very good in a domain as true, then I have a wonderful justification to be in control and do whatever I want.

Stop for a moment and consider how this shows up in your own life right now.

In my experience with clients, there are essentially three levels of defence that they put up with regard to receiving feedback:

• Denial: I don’t do that. You are wrong.

• Justification: I do do it, but only because of my situation. (job, boss, team, etc.)

• Genetics: I do do it, but I was just born that way. It’s just who I am.

The genetic defence is generally the last resort before acceptance and you may notice the similarity with the cycle of faux-authenticity from the previous chapter.

It is important to notice that I used the word ‘acceptance’ and not the word ‘agreement’. These are two totally different concepts. Misunderstanding or overlooking this distinction can be a barrier to receiving feedback in itself.

You are unlikely to be open to receiving feedback if you interpret this to mean that you must agree with every piece of feedback that you hear.

Acceptance does not imply agreement. It is perfectly possible to be open to feedback and accept it as valid from the speaker’s point of view without agreeing with it. This is another area where the ontological linguistic distinctions can help you to take effective action.

The feedback is a declaration by the other person and as a declaration, it is valid for them. That validity, however, does not mean it is true, right or correct in any sense. You can accept it as a valid declaration without turning it into an assertion.

Remember that the power of declarations and their validity ultimately comes from the person saying it and where and when they are saying it. When you see it through that lens, there is no need to get sucked into agreeing or disagreeing with it. Agreeing or disagreeing with an assertion makes sense because it can be verified and is either true or false. Arguing about whether an assessment is true or false is to miss the point entirely.

This is another example of using a distinction to enable you to take effective action. Feedback is always valuable because it gives you information regarding how another human being experiences you. Oftentimes, that valuable information is lost, however, in a misguided, ill-judged, and ultimately unnecessary determination to disagree with and disprove the feedback.

Acceptance allows space for the feedback to be examined—a necessary step if you are to keep the mirror clean. Understanding this distinction between acceptance and agreement is a critical step in your ability to work effectively with the feedback that you hear.

Feedback often asks you to accept a different point of view about something that you have seen as true/right about yourself for many years. The reality is that it was never true (and it was never false either). So much time is wasted by people trying to prove feedback wrong.

This is a good place to pick up something mentioned earlier. Assessments are never true or false, right or wrong, but they can be grounded or ungrounded.

In simple terms, the process of grounding assessments requires you to search for assertions that not only match your assessments (everyone loves to do that bit) but also to search for ones that do not match your assessments. That second step is a bit trickier to do on your own and is often best done with a coach or someone else in your life who is willing to be honest with you.

Of course, you can also ground assessments that you have about other people (doing it with a client about people they don’t like is a favourite coaching exercise of mine), as well as the ones that you have about yourself.

Remember, though, that however grounded the assessment,

it will never become an assertion. That’s the trap.

Other important elements in the grounding of assessments are to be clear about why you are making the assessment in the first place (for what purpose?) and in what domain you are making it. These steps help to illuminate the context surrounding this assessment and, as we have seen, understanding the context is a vital element of any interpretation.

GIVING FEEDBACK

Again, there are many barriers that show up here: “I don’t have time”, “They shouldn’t need it, it’s obvious”, “I might make a mistake”, “I don’t know them well enough”, “I know them too well”, “They won’t listen anyway, so what’s the point?”, “I have nothing to say”, and “I am not good at giving it”.

The list goes on and on and you will notice that all of these have essentially been shown to be spurious, using the work that we have already discussed.

The one that underlies a lot of these, and the one that is the most common, however, is the one that sounds like this: “If I give honest feedback, then I will hurt their feelings and the relationship will be damaged.”

Hopefully by now, you can see that that statement is an assessment, and as such, cannot be either true or false. This is another one of those assessments that people have often lived with for so long, that it has morphed into an assertion or self-evident truth for them. When you do ‘slow the tape down’ and examine it, however, it soon falls apart. For example, consider your own experience in life.

Very often, the honest feedback you received from someone, although tough to hear at the time, was actually the spur you needed to make a big change or even transform your life. Not only that, but when this person risked your disapproval by giving you that honest feedback, it did not harm the relationship at all. In fact, it actually brought you closer together. This is a phenomenon I have seen time and time again in my leadership development workshops.

So, rather than try to prove this assessment as true or false, which is nonsensical, let’s look at the benefit of holding it. It is so commonly held (and clung to) that the benefit must be very valuable.

To examine it, we need to pull it apart piece by piece, and ‘slow the tape down’ again: “If I give honest feedback, then I will hurt their feelings and the relationship will be damaged.”

Presumably you say that because you care about that person, otherwise it would make no sense. So, you care about the person by withholding your experience about them? If we cut to the chase: You demonstrate your care by lying to them?

That simply does not add up.

So, let’s look at what does make sense. If you are honest, then they might not like it (it’s also true that they might like it, of course) and they will form an assessment about you, that you won’t like, e.g. “You are nasty”, “You are arrogant”, “You are a bitch”, “You are a know-it-all”, etc.

So, in order to avoid that, you don’t give the honest feedback. You hold back.

So, what does make sense here is this:

By not giving honest feedback, you are protecting your own feelings,

not the feelings of the other person.

That’s rather inconvenient to admit. It certainly does not sound so virtuous. It does, however, make sense.

Am I therefore saying you should go around giving honest feedback to everyone, all the time? No. That would be crazy and likely to leave you in hospital.

We will explore this further in the next chapter.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. When was the last time you requested feedback? Who did you request it from?

2. Who do you most resist asking for feedback? Why?

What would be the benefit of asking them?

3. In what domains are you most resistant to asking for feedback? Why?

What would be the benefit of asking for feedback in those domains?

4. Your favourite ways to deflect feedback are …

5. In what domains are you most prone to deflect feedback? Why?

6. From whom are you most prone to deflect feedback? Why?

7. Are you more prone to deflect feedback that you assess as ‘positive’ or feedback that you assess as ‘negative’? Why?

8. What are the consequences of your answer to Question 7?

9. Your favourite justifications for not giving honest feedback are …

10. Which domains in your life would benefit the most from you taking the risk to offer honest feedback?

11. Which people in your life would benefit the most from you taking the risk to offer honest feedback?

12. You are willing to take this risk with this person and/or in this domain because …

13. You are unwilling to take this risk with this person and/or in this domain because …

14. What do the assessments that show up in your answers to Questions 12 and 13 reveal about your operating context?

CHAPTER 19

Effective Feedback

We are not in the realm of science here. What lands effectively for one person, in one situation, might not land effectively with another person in another situation, or even the same situation. There are some general principles that can support you, however, if you are committed to giving honest feedback.

Given everything we discussed in the previous chapter, you will not be surprised to hear me say that context is the critical factor. If feedback is information, then it is content. The success or otherwise of the feedback will be determined by the context that produces it. There are various elements to the context that surrounds feedback.

INTENTION

Be clear about your purpose. Is your feedback given with the purpose of contributing to the growth and development of the other person? Only you know.

Feedback given with the intention of making yourself look smart or to score points does not tend to land well. People generally have a good radar for that distinction.

IN WHICH DOMAINS ARE THEY INTERESTED TO RECEIVE FEEDBACK?

This is one of the ways to check your intention. Do you know what they are working on? Feedback in an area on which someone is interested to work, is far more likely to be effective than feedback given in other areas.

A common flaw in company competency development models is that it often channels feedback into areas of little interest to the manager, resulting in little ownership and minimal behavioural change. In my experience, most companies would be better served by working with managers to identify leadership behaviours that they are passionate to develop. The consequent level of ownership will drive far more change than trying to force a behaviour change linked to a generic (and expensive) company competency model.

This not to say that feedback can’t be valuable in areas where the receiver is not interested in growing. If you are going to give feedback in such an area, however, then the next principle becomes even more important.

CREATE PERMISSION

Just launching into a feedback conversation, unannounced, is unlikely to be effective, especially if it is in a blind spot area, as mentioned above. Asking for permission to give feedback can make a huge difference but is often totally overlooked, especially by senior managers giving feedback to junior managers: “Why do I need to ask for permission, when I’m the boss?”

You don’t need to ask for permission, but stop to consider whether asking for permission is likely to have the feedback land more or less effectively? If you are concerned to have the feedback land effectively, then asking for permission sends a signal and helps to set the context.

If you notice that you have resistance to asking for permission, then it is likely that you are more concerned with being right about your point of view and showing how much you know, than you are with giving useful feedback in an effective manner.

There are other benefits as well. For people who are nervous or reticent about giving feedback, asking for permission can reduce their nervousness. For people who find it easy to jump in and give feedback, asking for permission, can serve to slow them down and create a more conducive environment or context before they rush in with their content.

TIME AND LOCATION

Walking into a lift and launching into a feedback conversation in front of other people is unlikely to be effective. Creating a ‘safe space’ for the feedback is likely to have it land more effectively.

There is no one rule for this. Finding out where and when the receiver is going to be comfortable works in a similar way to asking for permission. It helps to set a conducive context.

MOOD AND BODY

A big part of the context are the moods and body dispositions of the people involved in the conversation. Delivering feedback from a mood of anger or frustration is very common and it sets up a feeling of defensiveness that results in the feedback essentially ‘bouncing off’ the recipient, because they have strapped on all their protective armour.

Similarly, delivering the feedback from a body disposition of flexibility, with scattered energy can result in the recipient either not understanding you, or not taking you or your message seriously.

It is very common for the language domain to be ‘outshouted’ by the domains of moods and body in this way.

REMEMBER THE DEFINITION OF FEEDBACK

Part of your preparation is to remember what we discussed earlier.

You are sharing information about what you have noticed and

how it has impacted you. You are not giving advice, passing judgement,

or dispensing great truths from your self-righteous pulpit.

You are passing information from your observer to their observer. It is necessarily a subjective exercise that, while potentially extremely valuable for them, ultimately reveals more about you than it does about them. A different observer is likely to give different feedback, even in the same situation.

With this in mind, effective feedback is clearly owned by the giver:

• What I noticed is/was … and the way this impacted me was …

• In my experience you are/were …

• When you said this, my physical sensation was …

• When I saw you do that, I experienced the emotion of …

Statements owned by the giver tend to land more effectively than statements such as the following:

• You are/are not … (sounds as though you are dispensing a truth)

• You should/should not have… (that’s advice, not feedback)

• You are too much of that or too little of this (sounds like a statement of fact, but is simply an assessment, based on your own standards)

RELATIONSHIP

In summary, a feedback conversation never exists in isolation. You will be giving or receiving the feedback in the context of your relationship with that person (Fig. 29).

Fig. 29: Feedback conversations occur inside a relationship context.

You could attend to all the above points and if there is a long history of bad blood between you, then the feedback is still unlikely to land effectively. Conversely, if there is a long history of trust and respect between you, then you might find that you don’t need to pay as much attention to some of these principles. This is another example of the overarching power of context.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. Given the information in this chapter, which areas do you notice have previously hampered your attempts to give and/or receive feedback?

What specific preparation could you make to ensure that your feedback lands more effectively and/or other people’s feedback is received more effectively in future?

2. Which relationships do you currently have in your life where you assess that feedback can be freely given and received? What does this show about the operating context in those relationships?

3. Which relationships do you currently have in your life where you assess that feedback cannot be freely given and received? What does this show about the operating context in those relationships?

4. With regard to the relationships identified in Question 3, what can you now do differently or how can you now be different, in order to facilitate the exchange of feedback?

CHAPTER 20

Adding Speech Acts to Feedback

It is possible to add power to feedback by linking it to the speech acts that we discussed in the first section.

• When giving feedback

> You can contextualise it by starting with an offer (seeking permission) or a request (for openness).

> You can end with a request (for changed behaviour) or an offer (to support behaviour change in the future).

• When receiving feedback

> You can start by making a request regarding the domain in which you are interested in hearing the feedback and/or making a request for honesty, combined with a declaration that there will be no adverse consequences for this honesty.

> You can end with a request (for more feedback) or a promise (of changed behaviour in the future).

Examples:

• Adding an assessment

“I noticed you arrived at 9:20 a.m. (assertion) after you agreed (made a promise) to arrive at 9:00 a.m. and, as a result, I thought (formed an assessment) that you didn’t care.”

• Adding a request

“I noticed that you did not speak up in the meeting today (assertion) and I ask that you speak up at least once in the meeting tomorrow. Will you do that?” (request)

• Adding an offer

“I noticed that you interrupted one of our team members three times in the last meeting (assertion). This is not consistent with what you stated previously as your desired leadership style (assertion). I would like to point it out to you the next time you do it. Is that ok?” (offer)

If the request or offer receives a “yes” then a promise is in place.

• Adding a declaration (remember that you need the appropriate authority in this place and at this time if the declaration is to be valid)

“I noticed you have missed your sales target for the third month in a row and, as a result, I will now start having a weekly meeting with you, or stop allowing you to set your own targets” or even “You’re fired!” (declaration)

Whether you are sending or receiving feedback, ending with the twin declarations of “thank you” and “you’re welcome” are effective ways to acknowledge that conditions of satisfactions have been met.

Only say “thank you”, however, if you are truly satisfied. Saying “thank you” when you are not really satisfied screws up the whole system.

Over the years, I have found that using the language distinctions in this way is an extremely effective way to keep the feedback on track.

USING ONTOLOGICAL DISTINCTIONS TO SEGMENT FEEDBACK

Feedback shows up across the whole ontological model.

You can offer feedback based on your experience of someone’s results (R), their actions (A), their way of being (O), their physical presence (B), their emotional presence (E), and their language (L). All of these are valid.

Examples:

• When you failed to achieve your year-end targets, I experienced frustration. (R)

• When you spoke up in the meeting today, I was excited. (A)

• I experienced you as supportive and nurturing yesterday. (O)

• When you established eye contact with me in the meeting today, I experienced authenticity. (B)

• When you cried in the meeting, I experienced you as courageous. (E)

• When you asked for support today, I experienced (assessed) myself as valuable. (L)

The same is true when you are requesting feedback. You can request it in any of these domains.

In my coaching, I like to use this template to ensure that my feedback covers as broad a spectrum as possible. Using the model in this way helps me to avoid falling into a habit of focusing on one particular area.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. Bring to mind one piece of feedback that you are committed to give in the next week.

The language distinction/s you could incorporate in order to add power to its impact is/are …

How would that sound?

2. Bring to mind one particular person from whom you are committed to requesting feedback in the next week.

The language distinction/s you could incorporate in order to add power to its impact is/are …

3. Considering all the primary distinctions of the ontological model, the ones that you most resist giving feedback in are …

Why?

4. Considering all the primary distinctions of the ontological model, the ones that you most resist receiving feedback in are …

Why?

5. The piece of feedback you have received that has impacted you the most in your life is …

This feedback was especially impactful because …

Consider how this feedback lives in all three domains of human being-ness:

Language: The assessments you formed as a result were…

Moods: The prevailing mood/s that you live in as a result is …

Body: The way you have shaped your body and move in the world as a result is …

6. How has this piece of feedback and the consequent impact it has had on your language, mood, and body impacted your actions and results?

7. The piece of feedback that you have offered to someone else that has made the most impact on them has been …

8. You know this feedback was impactful for them because you saw changes in their:

Language:

Emotion/Mood:

Body:

Results:

Actions:

Observer/Ways of Being:

PART III

Postscript

This concludes our exploration of the importance of coming to terms with giving and receiving feedback, as well as being able to distinguish it from other elements, such as advice and judgement.

This whole section on feedback was made necessary because of its importance in helping to answer the ‘who’ questions that were outlined as critical in Part II:

• “Who am I currently being?”

• “Who do I believe I can become in the future?”

In Part II, we sought to establish the following:

• It is important to surface the answers to these questions before going on to ask the more usual ‘what (do I want?)’ and ‘why (do I want it?)’ questions.

• Your results (content) are created by the way that you observe and experience the world (context).

• Using your results (content) is the most effective way to illuminate your identity (context).

• This method is often impeded by a strong desire to fog up the mirror with stories, reasons, excuses, and blame.

• This method necessarily only takes into account objective results that you can see.

As a result of all this, feedback becomes an extremely valuable part of the process, not because it is true or right, but because it helps to keep the mirror clean and also extends the mirror to include a wider set of results.

Feedback gives you information about how other people experience you—the external subjective results in your life. When you stop to consider how much of your life is determined by other people’s experience of you, then the need to be able to work effectively with feedback becomes apparent.

Examples:

• You may assess yourself as a great spouse, but if your spouse has a different assessment, then are you a great spouse in reality, or just in your head?

• You may assess yourself as a great leader, but if people are not choosing to follow you, then are you a great leader in reality, or just in your head?

• You may assess yourself as a great manager, but if your boss has a different assessment, then are you getting promoted?

Where do you want your results to show up? In your head, or in the external world?

Ultimately, feedback is important if you want to be effective in the world,

as opposed to in your own head.

It is very difficult to accurately assess the impact you are having on someone else unless they tell you.

Many of the people that I encounter in workshops and in coaching relationships begin as ‘legends in their own minds’. Consciously or not, they prioritise their own assessment of themselves and their situation over the assessments of other people. What has become apparent in our exploration is that both are important.

And so, to the next section, where we will bring this all together and take a look at how you can have this powerful force of being right about your assessments work for you, rather than against you, in the quest for your dreams.

PART III

Key Learning Points

1. Feedback is information. It is distinct from advice and judgement.

2. Feedback is neutral. It only becomes ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ when assessed as such by the receiver.

3. Feedback can be an assertion or an assessment, or a combination of both.

4. Feedback can be objective or subjective.

5. The results that you have in your life are objective feedback on the effectiveness of your actions, way of being, and operating context, not on your worth as a human being.

6. Feedback between two human beings is necessarily sent and received subjectively.

7. You give feedback based on the world that your observer is able to experience.

8. You receive feedback based on the assessments your observer made a long time ago.

9. Assessment-based feedback is never true or false, but it can be grounded or ungrounded.

10. ‘Connecting the dots’ using different data points from all the feedback that you receive can lead you to discover the master assessments that form the invisible boundaries of your context.

11. Feedback is just as useful for the sender as it is for the receiver, because it reveals information about the standards that they hold in that particular domain.

12. When you sugar-coat or withhold feedback, you are protecting your own self-image, not the other person’s feelings.

13. Feedback is content and therefore exists inside context.

14. One particularly important element of context that surrounds feedback is the quality of the relationship that exists between the sender and the receiver.

15. Another powerful element of context that surrounds feedback is the intention with which it is given.

16. Feedback given with the intention to contribute to the other person’s growth and development is more likely to land effectively.

CHAPTER 21

Barriers to Starting With ‘Who’

Before we explore how to bring it all together, let’s take a look at the most common barriers that seem to occur with regard to applying this approach. Over the years, I have noticed that there are two typical concerns that crop up.

FEAR OF CHANGE

Some people are highly resistant to looking at their assessments because they fear they will be asked to excise them somehow and, in so doing, they will become a different person.

Relax.

This isn’t going to happen. You will always be you, a growing, evolving human being. The goal of this approach is not to change you or your identity. The goal of this approach is, rather, to help you see the identity (context) you have (consciously or unconsciously) created: the possibilities it offers and the limitations it imposes.

Once you see it, the power is in your hands, in the present moment, as opposed to being in the hands of the assessments that you created a long time ago.

The process is not aimed at making you an ‘improved’ human being in some way. You are fine the way you are. This approach is designed to give you tools to help you in your journey of growth and development. Whether you want to go on that journey or not will always be up to you. Whether you continue the journey or turn back at some point, is also your choice.

FEAR OF LACK OF CHANGE

Conversely, other people are happy to jump into this process; maybe they even find it exciting. They subsequently become despondent, however, and even feel cheated when their old assessments do not disappear. This can lead to cynicism about the whole area of personal development, coaching, and leadership development.

They say, “I have been doing all these courses and reading all these books, and I still have all my old assessments.” My response to this is: “Good! I am glad that you do.”

To hope for the disappearance of these old declarations and assessments is to fundamentally misunderstand the process of personal development. These old assessments may be ‘limiting’, but you might have noticed that I have never labelled them as ‘negative’. To call them negative would imply that you would be better off without them. This isn’t the case. They are there for a reason. They protect you and keep you safe.

For example, you have an assessment about yourself that you are not good enough, often labelled as having ‘imposter syndrome’. There is nothing wrong with that. You don’t want or need to get rid of it. Whatever you might have read elsewhere, you don’t need to unlearn it. This is another commonly held belief in personal development that does not hold up under scrutiny.

The dangerous thing about an assessment like ‘imposter syndrome’ is not the assessment itself. It is the fact that it operates as an assertion, and it does so invisibly. You don’t need to unlearn or remove your limiting assessments. You need to make them visible, and see them for what they are: assessments.

Once you can see them, you have a fix on your starting point. From there, you can plan your ‘what’ and your ‘why’ and see where you need to create new assessments that will support you in pursuit of your motivating vision.

What makes the assessment limiting is that it operates automatically, in every situation. You originally created the assessment for a good reason. It served you at the time, and there are still times when that assessment will serve you well today. Attempting to remove it or ‘unlearn it’ would be crazy. There are also many times, however, when it will limit you and the possibilities that you see as available to you.

It is not about removing the old assessment, it is about noticing it, and then identifying it as an assessment (not an assertion). Once you have done that, then it is about adding a new assessment that will more effectively support you, as you pursue this particular goal.

This process of adding new assessments can be frightening. The old invisible assessments might have been limiting, but they did keep you safe, and made your life largely predictable. These new assessments will open up new possibilities, but they will also make you vulnerable and your life will become more unpredictable.

For example, you say (out loud or to yourself): “I am unattractive.” This is a limiting assessment if you want to be in a relationship. If you let it sit there, invisibly operating as an assertion, then you are unlikely to create and sustain the powerful relationship you yearn for. It does keep you safe from potential rejection and heartbreak, however, because you never reach out.

Whether or not you need to add a new assessment, will depend on your objective. If you want to create a powerful, intimate relationship, then it makes sense to develop a new assessment. If you now add a new assessment that facilitates this new possibility, such as: “I am attractive,” then while you do give yourself the opportunity of reaching out to form a relationship, you also open yourself up to the possibility of the pain of rejection and potential heartbreak.

In my experience, most people find it far more frightening to adopt new enabling assessments than they do to maintain their old limiting assessments.

An illustration of this is when someone becomes attached to an assessment or story that is clearly no longer productive for them. Even though the story is limiting their ability to produce a result they desire, they cling to it because of its familiarity. It has become part of who they believe themselves to be, and they cannot imagine living without it.

An example would be someone who wants to become a CEO, but who holds onto an assessment that they are bad at public speaking as tightly as though it were an assertion.

For many people who I coach, the assessment that “I’m okay” is a far more frightening one to hold onto, than “I’m not okay”. When we explore this phenomenon in conversation, it comes down to the stories that they attach to the two assessments. For some people, “I’m not okay” (in whatever domain we are discussing) reduces the (internal and external) expectation of success, while “I’m okay” brings with it an expectation of success and/or perfection in that domain. Holding onto “I’m not okay” can be comforting in that situation.

Other people use the “I’m not okay” declaration to constantly whip themselves towards higher performance levels and are scared of declaring “I’m okay” because they fear they will become complacent and lazy.

Statements such as “I’m okay” and “I’m not okay” are assessments. They are not right or wrong and both can be used in productive ways. Paradoxically, both can even be held at the same time.

The assessment itself is not the issue, it is the other rungs on your Language Ladder that you create as a result that makes the difference. How are you going to use that assessment and what story will you build as a result? Will that story be productive for you?

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. What are three goals that you have in your life right now?

2. For each goal listed for Question 1, what is one assessment that you can now see is limiting your capability to produce that goal?

(Assessments might be about you, other people, or the world in general.)

3. For each of the assessments identified in answer to Question 2, what is the benefit to you of holding it?

4. For each of the assessments identified in answer to Question 2, what is at least one piece of evidence that contradicts it?

5. For each of the goals listed for Question 1, what is at least one assessment that you could adopt that would support your capability to produce that goal?

(Assessments might be about you, other people, or the world in general.)

6. For each of the assessments identified in answer to Question 5, what stops you from adopting it? In particular, pay attention to how it contradicts any master assessments you have about yourself and your identity.

7. For each of the assessments identified in answer to Question 5, what is at least one piece of evidence that supports it?

8. Finally, consider the consequences of holding these various interpretations and assessments. The consequences will inevitably flow from the assessments to which you give authority. Which consequences do you most want to have in your life?

CHAPTER 22

Sustaining the Change

Having started with the ‘who’ questions and followed them up with the ‘what’ and ‘why’ questions, you can then come back and harness the power of assessments and context to help you drive sustainable change and bring that motivating vision to reality.

1. Start with who

Who am I being in the present?

Who do I believe I can become in the future?

2. Move to what and why

What do I want? What’s my vison?

Why do I want it? What’s my purpose?

3. Return to the who

Who do I need to be in order to sustain this vision?

What new assessments do I therefore need to declare into reality?

4. Move into action

What do I need to do in order to reinforce my new assessments and take me closer to my vision?

Fig. 30 is a model that I use with clients in order to support this part of the process. It helps to segment the assessments and make the process more manageable. In my experience, there are different layers of assessments in the realm of the identity context, and they are held with different levels of tenacity.

Fig. 30: Assessment levels and identity.

Of course, it is the declarations and assessments that live at the centre that prove the most resistant to change and development. These are the ones most commonly being held as assertions. “I cannot speak in public” is a common one.

Working with a client to explore which declarations they put in which circle can be very powerful and revealing. In addition to seeing that they are the architect of their own circles, they also see that these circles change over time.

Exploring this over the arc of a life (e.g. as a teenager, in their 30s, single, as a parent, etc.) can really open a client up to the idea that the context of identity is not a fixed concept. Rather, it is something that is constantly alive and fluid.

If it was fluid in the past, then why wouldn’t it be fluid in the present and the future? This realisation can help to build the client’s confidence—a critical element in the overall process.

Indeed, as we have seen, it is when you attempt to stop this natural evolutionary process and attempt to cling onto an identity from your past, that you begin to ossify, decay, and lose connection with the present moment and all that it means to really be alive.

Now, to see that something can be changed does not imply that it should be changed. Being willing to consider identity in this way, however, does open up the possibility of development in areas that are otherwise seen as off limits or impossible.

Once the client sees that the context of identity is malleable in this way, we can use the mind’s propensity to confuse assessments and assertions to create and sustain powerful new assessments that can exist at the level of the inner circle in the diagram.

In order to drive these new assessments down through the other circles and into the core, however, you not only need to be rigorous in creating evidence that the assessment really is ‘true’ about you, but you also need to be very clear as to the benefit of holding this new assessment. The power of the ‘why’ question!

Returning to my previous example:

• “I am a 50-year-old British man, therefore I am not comfortable expressing emotion.”

This Language Ladder existed for me for many years. As we saw earlier, it is entirely possible for me to create a new declaration/assessment that will support me to create the marriage I desire (Fig. 31). This new assessment is inconsistent with the old one, but it does not matter:

• “I am a 50-year-old British man, who is comfortable expressing emotion.”

This statement is no more true or false than its predecessor (they are both assessments).

Fig. 31: Co-existence of paradoxical assessments.

If I am willing to suffer the inevitable initial discomfort of ‘expressing emotion’ and consciously notice that I am doing/being it, however, then I can begin to produce evidence to support this new assessment. (Note that it’s tempting to ignore early evidence of success because the old assessment is screaming out to be true!)

This process really benefits from the presence of a coach, or at the very least, a committed network of support. Ideally both.

In addition to a support network, the three elements that support this process are:

1. Confidence that you can do it (something that only comes from repeatedly doing it).

2. An assessment that you are more likely to achieve the vision that you have for your life if you hold this new assessment. (e.g. Do I believe that it will help me to produce the marriage I desire?)

3. A clear view of your vision and why it is important to you.

Once you drive this new assessment down to the level of the inner circle, then it becomes as ‘sticky’ as the old assessment.

That’s the beauty of assessments.

When you know how to recognise and work with them rather than against them,

they can become your best ally in personal development and growth.

So, returning again to my previous example. When I come to believe that I can express emotion, it becomes a part of my inner circle (my context of identity) and I hold it just as fervently as the old assessment that I could not. In fact, in my own experience I actually hold it even tighter than I hold the old one because it is an assessment that I can see is helping me to sustain a vision to which I am passionately committed.

The old assessment kept me safe and protected me from the pain of rejection.

The new assessment supports me to sustain the marriage of my dreams.

Both assessments are important and have a role to play in my life and I can easily hold both at the same time if I choose to.

• I am a person who is comfortable expressing emotion AND I am a person who is uncomfortable expressing emotion.

Human beings will always be prone to holding their assessments as assertions, so you might as well use that propensity to your advantage, rather than try to fight it.

Assessments at the centre of the circle are not kept there by willpower.

They are kept there by an even more powerful force of human nature:

the desire to be right about your assessments.

Let’s look at another example. I have a reputation for having great willpower and discipline regarding exercise and nutrition, but that’s really not what keeps me on the path. What really drives me is a need to be right about assessments I have made with regards to my identity:

• “I am fit and I eat healthily.” (Private identity)

and, maybe even more importantly,

• “I am known for being fit and eating healthily.” (Public identity)

Over time, this drive to be right becomes unconscious and it just becomes ‘the way I am’.

In this sense, your assessments about both your private and public identity are at stake.

Being right about them is an incredibly powerful force to have on your side.

Think about this. Fourteen years ago, I gave up beer, fries, and ice cream for a month. Fourteen years later, I still have not gone back to them.

I promise you, it’s really nothing to do with willpower. Maybe it was, right at the very beginning, but by employing this process and especially the steps in the following chapter, it very quickly became about being right with regard to my new declaration/assessment.

Beer, fries, and ice cream are not options anymore, even when left on a table in front of me. It’s as though they are invisible, which is handy as I live next door to Singapore’s most popular ice cream shop and a great bar.

One of my favourite client stories involves a senior executive who had never exercised a day in her life before she met Sari. Three years later, she exercises every day and cannot imagine going a day without some form of physical movement. It has become a part of who she is, a part of how she defines herself, and a part of how other people define her. It has reached the inner core of her concentric ring diagram. “I exercise or consciously move my body every day” is a declaration/assessment that has become a part of her public and private identity. You know who you are!

Similarly, when people ask me, “Where do you find the motivation to exercise every day?”, I reply: “Exercising is my hobby. Do you need motivation to do your hobby?”

Once you drive an assessment through to the core of this circle, then it becomes very difficult to act in a contrary manner. This is why it is so important to make it a conscious process, rather than just let assessments drift in there unnoticed, over time.

Discipline and willpower are not the secrets to success.

The secret to success lies in eliminating the need for them.

Your whole life is a process of creating assessments and then finding evidence to be right about them. It is one of the strongest forces in human nature. By being right about our assessments, we are able to make sense of the future, make it predictable, and give ourselves a sense of control over what is necessarily unknown and unknowable.

In this sense, you are constantly telling a story and enrolling yourself and others into that story. The secret is not to look for a way to fight this tendency (with a strong purpose, desire, motivation, and SMART goals) but rather to find a way to work with it.

The approach discussed in this book is designed to do exactly that: to harness and work with these powerful forces. Although starting with ‘why?’ and ‘what?’ can certainly produce great results, it is a process that invariably leads to putting your willpower and determination to the test in opposition to these forces. It requires you to battle against human nature, rather than work with it. If you can learn to work with assessments in this way, then a whole new level of possibility opens up.

One of my favourite discoveries on this path is that:

The pleasure of discovering you are right about an assessment is nothing compared to the joy you experience when you find out you are wrong about it.

While the former may give you an initial rush of self-righteous confirmation, the latter offers you an exhilarating taste of freedom and possibility. This is the genuine ‘breakthrough’ and ‘transformation’ moment that training and coaching companies routinely promise in their presentations, without ever coming close to producing it.

Example:

You discover that you have an assessment about yourself and your ability to speak in public: You can’t do it. Your English sucks. You are too young. It’s just not who you are. Classic assessments.

• Scenario 1

You do it and it goes badly.

At one level you are disappointed, but at another level, it is actually rather comforting to know you were right all along, and at least they won’t ask you to do it again. You go home, sit on the sofa, and eat ice cream.

• Scenario 2

You do it again and this time it goes pretty well.

This time, you go home and run around the apartment screaming at the top of your voice, like a madwo/man, flush with the pure excitement and joy of being wrong about your old assessment, free from its suffocating limitations. (Or am I the only one who has done that?)

Working with the ontological model in this way allows you to clearly see the power of language and sharply distinguish assertions from assessments. Using your results to illuminate your context reveals who you are being in the present. The same assessments that you uncover in this process are also creating and limiting your assessments of who you can become in the future. Ultimately, this limits the scope of the visions and goals that you are able to see and the results you are able to achieve.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. Your ‘Ultimate Language Ladder’ has your name on the bottom rung. Your name is your bottom-line assertion. What are the assessments that make up the other rungs?

Drawing up your own personal ‘Ultimate Language Ladder’ in this way is an exercise that you can use to uncover the narratives that have been unconsciously running your life. Typically, clients with whom I work are either unconscious of these assessments or they are conscious of them but have been treating them as assertions.

2. What is the new assessment that you would be most excited to drive down into the core of your personal version of the concentric circle model?

3. What assessments do you have that are stopping you from doing just that?

4. What is the benefit to you of not letting this new assessment reach your core?

5. How would your life be different if you did drive this new assessment to your core?

CHAPTER 23

Building Belief

If you have got to this point of the book and the process, you have hopefully come to realise that you alone have the ultimate authority to create and then believe the new assessments that will facilitate your ability to produce the new results you desire.

That sounds great in theory, but what tactics are there for building supporting evidence to help you believe these new declarations and assessments? In reality, it becomes difficult to maintain belief in an assessment for which you have no evidence.

We touched on three of these in the previous chapter.

1. Keep producing evidence, by acting in line with the new assessment.

Even if the examples are small. Keep doing it.

2. Make sure the assessment really is one that will support you to achieve the new goal.

If there is any doubt in your mind about that, then it will undermine your belief in both the assessment at hand and the overall process.

3. Create a clear statement of the goal and why it is important to you.

The ‘what’ and the ‘why’ questions are still important in this process. They are just not the start point. If your goal is woolly and/or your motivation is shaky, then it becomes too easy to lose interest in acting in accordance with the new assessment.

In addition to these ideas, here are some other tactics that my coaching clients have found useful over the years.

4. Journal the new results that you create by acting in line with your new assessment.

Initially, it will be easier to find evidence for the old, limiting assessment because you have been living in accordance with it for so long. Carrying a small notebook or using a Notes app to jot down examples of you acting in the new way can be a very addictive habit. What clients have noticed is that other people often start to get intrigued by what you are doing and that in itself, builds excitement and support.

5. Be prepared to look into your past to find evidence.

In my experience, almost everyone can find supporting evidence for the new assessment in their past. It has always been there, but you just developed a habit of overlooking or discounting it. This process, best done with a coach, can be incredibly liberating for a client. It creates a sense of: “Wow! I can actually act in that way after all … because I already did.”

6. Be prepared for counterevidence to appear.

This is a big one.

Clients often come to a session disappointed that they ‘failed’ after the last session and that they acted in the old way again. They become discouraged. It is important to remember that:

• The path of change is never straight or linear.

• Counter evidence is just that. If you create evidence to support the old assessment, while attempting to create evidence to support the new assessment, then that is interesting and worth investigating. It shows you areas of your life where the old assessment has been protecting you particularly strongly. However, it doesn’t disprove the new assessment in any way.

• There is nothing wrong or bad with the old assessment kicking in. It’s a perfectly natural part of the process. The old assessment has not gone away or been removed. As we have already seen, that was never the intention or a necessary part of the process.

7. Speak the new assessment out loud.

Something does seem to happen physically and emotionally when you hear yourself say the new assessment out loud. Based on my experience, saying it out loud at the time when the old assessment wants to kick in, is especially powerful.

I had a client who used to do this while queueing up in a coffee shop. They had a fat loss goal and their old assessments would often lead them to order a piece of cake while waiting in front of the pastries. So, they experimented with repeating their new assessment out loud (under their breath!) while waiting. It worked extremely well for them.

The old assessment was screaming at them internally: “You deserve that piece of cake!” So, rather than listening to that internal voice, they spoke out their new declaration: “I am eating healthy food today.”

In addition to giving themselves something to be right about, they reported that saying it out loud seemed to engage their physical and emotional domains. Their breathing became slower and deeper and they experienced a sense of calm, leading to an empowering sense of being in charge of their life.

8. Tell other people what you are up to.

Building a network of support can really help. No one said that your journey of growth and development had to be a solo enterprise. Being willing to let people know what your goal is and asking them to join you in looking for evidence to support your new assessment makes a big difference.

Most people find that they are their own harshest critic, and that other people often see evidence of this new behaviour a lot quicker than they do themselves. Use the power of feedback!

In my coaching conversations, I generally ask clients if they are willing to tell at least three people in their life what they are working on, and if they are willing to ask them for support. If they are not, then I recommend that we go back and look again at the objectives, because something is in the way.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. Which powerful new assessments do you assess that you will have the most difficulty beginning to believe in/finding evidence for?

2. For each assessment you identify in Question 1, what is at least one action that you could successfully do, in order to provide supporting evidence?

3. For each assessment you identify in Question 1, what evidence do you already have from your past that supports it?

4. What is the benefit you gain by not believing in the assessments identified in Question 1?

5. Who could you enlist to join your support team?

6. What barrier exists that prevents you from asking them?

CHAPTER 24

Case Studies

These case studies illustrate how different aspects of the ‘start with who’ approach can be utilised to support people to make significant progress in their personal and professional lives. They are all based on real coaching encounters experienced by TWP/TCP coaches.

* * * * *

BEING RIGHT

How an addiction to being right can become entangled with your identity and subsequently inhibit your ability to produce the results you desire Terrie Lupberger, MCC

I was approached to coach a regional Vice President in a global financial services firm whose boss had asked him to get coaching. A reorganisation of the company had him now leading a team in a different global region, and the new team found him very “difficult” to work with. The boss told me that ‘Jim’ was technically brilliant and that his direct, blunt, and assertive style of relating had worked adequately well with his prior team. His leadership style was basically that of a helping bully—someone who always knows, and is quick to tell others what to do. This style wasn’t working in the new role and region; he needed a more collaborative and less directive way of working with others.

In our initial conversations, ‘Jim’ was frustrated and resistant. He had a proven formula for success and was now being challenged to change a long-standing way of being and habits that had worked well for him in the past. He felt his very identity was under threat. In one of our coaching sessions, when he was being particularly righteous about how wrong his boss and team were, I asked him, “Would you rather be right or get great results?”

Once he had the awareness—a key first step in any change process—we then co-created small steps and practices for him to try out.

One of the most impactful for him was practising a ‘coaching approach’ with his team. Instead of taking up most of the air time in team meetings sharing his opinions and telling the team what he thought they should do, he learnt how to ask insightful, thoughtful, and well-timed questions. The shift from telling to questioning empowered the team members to make better decisions and to take more effective actions.

Out-take

One simple question created space for a powerful exploration and led him to the awareness that his resistance was fear-driven:

• Would he stop being the man he thought he was (and who he thought others expected him to be)?

• Would he be able to develop these new skills at this stage in his career?

• Could he really change?

• Would his team lose respect for him as he tried (and likely failed, initially) at embedding new behaviours?

Most of the time, our addiction to being right comes from fear, similar to the ones that ‘Jim’ expressed. His identity (who he thought he was) had become bound up with his ability to always know the answer. This link between ‘knowing’ and his identity was being challenged and that was at the source of his resistance to moving forward.

FEEDBACK AND IDENTITY

Working with feedback and its impact on perceived identity

Sari Marsden, PCC

A leader in a multinational company came to me looking to improve his business relationships. While he was comfortable with facts and data, he assessed himself to be an introvert. He showed up absolutely certain of this. It was living for him as an assertion, not an assessment. It was true for him.

Inconveniently for him, however, his new position required him to work on his ability to develop more productive working relationships. What made this even harder for him was that the new role involved working in a new country, with a younger, more diverse team and very stretching targets.

His expressed desire was to work on his confidence level when interacting with other people, but he had a very clear unexpressed desire to be right about his self-assessment: “I am an introvert and introverts don’t work well with people.”

The journey we went on began with him asking for feedback from his wife! The hardest thing he heard was: “I don’t experience you listening to me.” Essentially, his righteousness about being an introvert was getting in the way. Being right about his assessment had become more important than the relationship with his wife.

That revelation hit him hard. He was not being the man he wanted to be, but the mirror showed that it was the man he was actually being.

Based on that feedback, and supported by his wife, he started practising a different way of showing up. He redefined what ‘listening’ meant to him and he learnt and practised new distinctions in the domains of emotion and body.

He felt awkward initially, but little by little, he began to laugh at his fumbles and developed a mood of lightness around his journey.

Then he took what worked for him at home into the way he worked with his team at the office. Instead of waiting for feedback to come to him with dread, he took the initiative to reach out and ask for it. He told his team what he was working on and asked for their support—specifically to let him know when he was on and off track. Every week, through our partnership, we created a fun challenge. We connected the dots between home and the office. He practised cooking at home and instigating sports challenges at the office.

The outcomes went far beyond his expectations. He created a much closer and more engaging relationship within his team and with other groups with whom he worked. His ability to drive cross-function initiatives improved exponentially—a result he had never even believed to be possible!

Out-take

The whole process began with him looking at who he believed himself to be and who he believed he could become in the future. After we discussed this and introduced the distinction between assertions and assessments, his whole world changed. He experienced a sense of liberation and possibility.

His assessment of himself as an ‘introvert’ has not gone away and it still pops up from time to time, especially in moments of extreme stress, but now he also has the assessment that, “I can be effective with people and enjoy myself in the process.” He now sees evidence on both sides of the equation and has more possibility (and a happy wife) as a result.

CONTEXT AND IDENTITY

How holding onto a prior understanding of who you are can damage not only results, but also physical health itself

Dr Katrina Gisbert-Tay, PCC, NBC-HWC

I was approached by the head of Human Resources (HR) of a large corporation to coach a C-suite executive who was having some leadership issues with her team. She was apparently not getting along well with her team and there were concerns about her leadership capability.

At our first coaching session, she shared what was going on for her: she was recently promoted, had a baby a few months earlier, just got back from maternity leave, and had been diagnosed with early stage cancer a year before. She discussed the issues going on with her team and was at a loss with what she should do. I asked her to describe to me what a normal day was like for her and she shared that she was extremely exhausted and well on the way to burn out. She was sleeping three to four hours a night and was drinking a lot of coffee just to stay awake.

For the first few weeks, we worked on her sleep and got her to at least five to six hours of sleep a night. By the fourth week, her HR officer called me and asked what I had done because she was showing up very differently at work. To which I replied that we had worked on her sleep … and everything else had fallen into place because she was then able to regulate her emotions and regain her cognitive capabilities.

Out-take

If the conversation had stayed focused purely on the content—on what was happening in the office, on one part of her life—it would have taken us a long time to get to the bottom of the situation.

Because we used the content (becoming a director and a mother, while also receiving a cancer diagnosis) to reveal the context of her changing identity, however, we were able to zoom out and discuss how she saw herself today, in contrast to how she had seen herself two years previously.

This process was extremely liberating and allowed her to identify long-held assessments about herself that were no longer serving her. In turn, this allowed for new assessments to emerge, culminating in the development of new actions and practices, most notably around her sleep.

MASTER ASSESSMENTS AND IDENTITY

How identifying a master assessment can allow for new declarations and an expanded sense of identity to appear

Clemence Blondel, PCC

I was approached to coach a medical doctor and research director. She had become overwhelmed with her work and was experiencing an increasing level of stress. Even though she had a team of 10 researchers in her lab, she could not see a way to achieve what she wanted and, as a result, was beginning to work on an increasing number of weekends, something that her husband and children were not enjoying.

In our first conversations, she mentioned that she was struggling to say “no” at work, to all the solicitations that were coming at her. She was worried that people would think she was disrespecting them. Her desire to please them had become all-pervasive and the sense of overwhelm and anxiety was suffocating. She felt trapped.

She had begun to notice that she was rarely ‘present’ with people and in situations.When she was at work, she was worried about the family and when she was at home, she was worried about work. She had made so many promises that she simply could not keep up.

The first step in working with this situation was to gently support her to see that while at one level she was concerned with other people’s feelings and judgements, there was a deeper level in operation. This level involved her own sense of identity.

As we began to look in the mirror of results in her life, and ‘connected the dots’, she began to notice something very powerful. She became aware that many of her results were driven from a place of needing to prove to herself and to others that she was good enough and was deserving of praise and recognition. She traced this phenomenon all the way back to her childhood.

She had developed a master assessment of ‘I am unworthy’. This master assessment had become a huge part of her operating context and private identity: An invisible and insatiable snake, constantly demanding more achievements and slowly squeezing the joy out of her life.

Her initial response was, of course, to see herself as unworthy (and dumb) for holding the master assessment, ‘I am unworthy!’

Once she saw this, she was able to laugh at herself and to see how automatically this master assessment kicked in and the purpose it served. It provided a sense of drive to create a new result.

It was not bad or false. However, it was not good or true either.

This was the place I introduced the distinction between assessments and assertions, and with a clean mirror, she began to realise that she could, in fact, now make new declarations and it did not matter if the new assessment was contradictory to the old one: “I am worthy, and I care about other people.”

From this place, she set about producing evidence to support the new declaration. She started small and enrolled her family to support her. Having breakfast with her kids, away from her phone and spending a few days on holidays without checking her email became a big win, celebrated and remembered. She began to believe that she could be totally present in one situation, without the other situations disintegrating.

She began this practice at home, but it quickly spread to her office. She began to set limits and boundaries, especially with regard to her weekends. As a result, she began to say “no” and/or renegotiate before saying “yes”.

This was still an area that she found difficult and so she developed a fun practice to help her. She bought a ‘NO’ red button/toy and placed it on her desk. Whenever she wanted to communicate a “no” or signal a renegotiation, she would pick it up. She noticed that this physical practice shifted the mood (hers and other people’s) and made it easier for her to make the declaration.

Encouraged by her results, both at work and at home, the sense of relief and lightness was palpable. Suddenly, she didn’t need to be ‘Superwoman’ and the impact on the people around her was also noticeable. There was space around her for others to contribute and grow in the process.

Out-take

Encountering a fear of saying “no” is not at all uncommon in coaching conversations. That is the content. What is powerful is to use that content to illuminate the context that creates it.

The driving force is not the same for every person. In this case, there was a deep-rooted or master assessment that if she said “no” then other people would not like her, and see her as weak or stupid in some way. They would assess her as unable to cope or ‘difficult’ in some way. In essence, they would see what she saw about herself—“I am unworthy”—and she needed to hide that at all costs, because if they saw that, then everything was going to fall apart.

Of course, it is easy to conceptually understand that the statement “I am unworthy” is an assessment. It is very easy for these assessments to begin to live as (true) assertions, however, when you constantly repeat them to yourself and continually search out and find evidence to support them.

In the end, as in this case, the assessment becomes so entrenched that it generates a completely fixed way of showing up: a static public and private identity that becomes harder and harder to maintain.

Using a clean mirror to illuminate this context and practising the distinction between assertions and assessments allows for a sense of freedom. Another powerful consequence of this approach is that this sense of freedom is not only experienced by the person you are coaching, but also, as in this case, by the people around them, often the people they love the most.

WORKING WITH SUCCESS

Using assessments, assertions, identity, and feedback to transform identity and results

Chris Balsley, PCC

My client was a highly successful businessman and a pillar in his community, with a remarkable work ethic and a strong sense of adventure. He had tremendous results in his life and on first meeting, I wondered why he even felt the need for a coach.

After our first conversation, the need became clear. His zest for life had led him to set up such big goals for his teams that they were exhausted. He wore his work ethic and long work hours like a badge of honour and if you worked like him and fulfilled his expectations, you were well taken care of. In the start-up phase of his company, his vision, passion, and accomplishments created rapid growth and financial success, keeping everyone focused and excited. Once the heady fumes of the initial start-up phase started to wear off, people came to realise that the promised land just beyond the next bend was always out of their reach. There was no rest period, the workload kept increasing, and excitement soon turned into anxiety and burn out.

One of the first coaching interventions was a three-hour session designed to help him and his team create distinctions between assessments and assertions. He frequently spoke his assessments and opinions as though they were the truth (assertions): “If we don’t do this, the company will fail,” or “This is the product that’s going to make us $10 million.”

Like many leaders I have met, he would use his ‘voice of authority’ to give weight to his opinions. In the safe space of our team coaching session, however, his senior leaders pointed out that he was often guilty of promoting his opinions (assessments) as though they were facts (assertions). He began to give his leadership team permission to ask, “Is that your opinion or a fact?” This experiment in vulnerability immediately began to energise his team.

Of course, it was not all plain sailing. He often caught himself saying with exasperation: “But I have seen and done this a hundred times. I know what will happen. I am right.” As one of his team members accurately pointed out: a well-grounded assessment is still not an assertion!

During our coaching, he identified that the moments he found most difficult to deal with in this respect were when production deadlines were looming, and he needed things to go his way. This realisation weighed heavily on his shoulders.

Once he had allowed the realisation to settle, however, he began to apply his work ethic into confronting his idea of who he thought he needed to be and what he thought he needed to achieve in order to be that person.

He asked for feedback from colleagues, vendors, and customers alike. Bravest of all, he sat down with his wife, and the answers were consistent in all parts of his life. Faced with feedback regarding the man he was being, he made a clear declaration to become the man he wanted to be, rather than the man he thought he needed to be, or that he thought other people wanted him to be.

As he moved away from automatically and unconsciously using his ‘voice of authority’, many of his roadblocks and pain points morphed into opportunities for him to role model a new way of being—away from being an expert, trying to control every outcome, towards being a collaborator who inspired the people around him to step up and develop. The results were not just evident in the bottom line, but also in the whole mood of the company. People physically looked and moved differently.

Out-take

Working from a place of clarity allowed my client to see beyond his undeniably powerful results. His whole identity had become tied up not simply with producing great results, but also in producing those results in a certain way: His way.

It took great courage for him to ask for feedback and move away from what had been successful in the past. As is often the case, the message in the feedback was clear: He was not being the man he deeply wanted to be. Armed with this feedback, the challenge became clear: How to produce the great results and be the man he wanted to be.

The coaching work allowed him to see that both were indeed possible, if he was willing to risk. The result has been a man who is now becoming the leader, the husband, and the man that he always wanted to be.

SAYING “YES” AND THE POWER OF CONTEXT

Identifying, challenging, and extending team identity

Carol Courcy, PCC

My client was a five-year-old software development company, two years into a period of exponential growth that included a growing backlog of pending projects. After three ‘impossibly lean’ years, the CEO and Executive Team (ET) were thrilled with the surge in business but reported they were now having ‘growing pains’ and tempers were flaring.

The CEO’s request was to coach the ET, to get them back on track (meeting contract deliverable deadlines and staying closer to budget, especially with regard to profit margins).

My First ET Meeting

[CEO entered room seemingly very upset.] “What’s going on? This project is a mess.” [Heads nodding around the table.] “You guys need to do something.” [Heads nodding again. CEO exited still upset.]

• ET Perspective

“We agree the project is a mess and something should be done.” Underneath that agreement, however, was a deep sense of resentment that the CEO typically left the room just as they wanted to dive into what WAS going on and resolve issues.

> “Every week there are change orders from the CEO to please the client. She doesn’t seem to realise what add-ons do to the project requirements, schedule and costing.”

> “Something has got to give. I can’t take it much longer. I’m working a hundred hours a week and I have young kids and a wife I never see.”

• CEO Perspective

> “You see what I have to deal with? I told them the problem and they agreed, but then they don’t do anything about it. You saw them nodding their heads, right?”

> “I hired the best of the best, I pay them top dollar, and this is what I get … missed deadlines, cost overruns, eroding profits, and whining about workloads? You need to FIX them!”

After some somatic work with her breathing and posture, to shift her emotional space, I read her my notes of what she’d said at the meeting. From this new place of calm and acceptance, there was an opening to listen and reassess the situation.

She immediately reinterpreted their nodding heads to be an indication of their agreement regarding the status of the project, rather than an indication of their agreement and/or ability to take action.

At this point, we began to unpick the results of the last three years and illuminate a picture of the company identity that had built up as a result. During the three lean years, the CEO and the ET had basically said “YES” to every idea, brief, and request that came their way … And they delivered! The company had developed a ‘Yes + We Always Deliver’ identity.

Once examined, the consequences were stark: Not only were clients now routinely asking for extra features at the last minute (requiring regular weekend work by the team) but the CEO didn’t negotiate on price or deadline extensions, because the team was delivering, and she didn’t want to upset the client.

Saying “YES” had become systemic: “That’s just what we do around here. It’s who we are.” The team was now at their wit’s end, however, the CEO was frustrated, and profits were falling. They were caught in a web of their own making.

How to escape? It began with a genuine willingness to look into the mirror and own the results, individually and collectively. It was not the ‘fault’ of the CEO or the Leadership Team. No blame—it was simply the result of them thinking, feeling, and acting in a certain way. There were reasons for it and the results were not all bad. It was who they were being, but it was not who they wanted to be or who they wanted to become.

The CEO acknowledged that her strong ‘pleasing muscle’ and her fear of the business collapsing was driving her automatic “YES”-ing behaviour. As a result, she began to respond to clients with a firm promise to get back to them with any changes to the agreement only after discussing with accountable team members regarding additional costs and deadline implications. She then gave clients the option to revise their contract or remain with the original agreement.

The ET members also stopped their automatic “YES”-ing to the CEO and her client requests. No more silent nodding!

They adopted a response similar to hers: “Let us speak to our teams and get back to you by an agreed time.” Then they got back with clear, time-based promises. Initially, there was push back as things took longer. The ultimate payoff was shorter and fewer meetings, however, because progress was easier to track and fulfilment was sharper and on point.

Together, the CEO and ET took another big decision: To not accept any new clients until their current backlog was 80% handled. This felt like a huge risk to them, but it gave them the necessary breathing space to regroup and re-energise.

As soon as they reached the 80% point, they began to search out new business with a renewed sense of purpose and vigour, in contrast to the feelings of fear and dread that had previously permeated their efforts.

Within 30 days, profits started an upward trend and the weekly work hours plummeted. The company went on to hire a HR manager with ‘employee well-ness’ and resource management experience, in order to build these new changes into the system.

Out-take

The company had been moving at such a fast pace in the early days and work was so scarce that they had developed a context and an identity (at a personal and team level) without even noticing. The identity began to produce real success and so it became even harder to discern it, and then intervene in it.

The CEO and the team, however, both displayed the courage to do just that. They looked squarely into the mirror of their results and allowed it to illuminate a context that, once seen, was identified as corrosive to the ongoing health of themselves and their company.

It was not who they wanted to be, but it was who they were being. Armed with this realisation, they looked into who they were in danger of becoming, if nothing changed.

Having the guts to begin by acknowledging who they were being and becoming, opened up the space to go on and ask what they really wanted and why they wanted it.

CONTEXT AND ASSESSMENTS

How allowing the distinction between assertions and assessments can fundamentally impact a sense of self-worth and reshape identity

Tini Fadzillah, PCC, NBC-HWC

My client was a mother of children with special needs who was also a senior executive. When I first met her, she showed up to me as a very tight individual who was extremely tough on herself. There was a right way and a wrong way and whenever the results were not quite as anticipated, she was quick to either blame other people for not listening to her, or quick to chastise herself for not being perfect and correctly figuring everything out ahead of time.

After a few conversations, what eventually surfaced was how she saw her children as ‘less than perfect’ and as a result, how she had failed as a woman and as a mother. As a result of this internal narrative, she drove herself to the edge of insanity in an attempt to constantly fulfil the unrealistic expectations she had of herself, her children, and the people around her.

This narrative not only led to her own frustration and burn out but was also having a major impact on the well-being of the people around her.

As a mother of a child with special needs myself, I found my client’s narrative quite fascinating and I could see how easy it would be to interpret the results in her life that way. I could also see that other interpretations were very possible, however, if she were to look at other results in her life and to connect the dots in different ways.

As a result, we began to explore questions that had her examine the operating context around other significant areas of her life: “How did she define perfection?” and “What if her children (and she, herself) were perfect exactly as they were?”

These questions were the beginning of an exploration of my client’s own deep-seated narratives and master assessments. All of this led to a beautiful unfolding of the most amazing relationship between her and her children.

Out-take

In this example, the client came to realise that her identity had become totally wrapped up in the assessments of the results she was creating, and her biggest results were her special needs children. She had become completely stuck in her interpretation of those results: “I am a flawed woman” and “I am a bad mother” were living for her as though they were (true) assertions.

At the start of the coaching relationship, she allowed no space whatsoever for these to be seen as the assessments that they clearly are. Although she understood the intellectual concept of assertions and assessments, she resisted any attempt to apply the distinction to her own life, labelling it as “trying to take pity on me” or “trying to make me feel better.”

As the coaching continued, she began to be willing to take a take a step back and look at a wider range of results in her life, her depth of care for the people around her, at home and at the office. As she did this, she began to connect her dots in a very different way and she began to form a whole new set of assessments and declarations about herself, including: “I am a woman who cares deeply for the people around me.”

To begin with, she continued to be resistant to the process of creating and allowing in evidence that supported the new assessments, for fear of losing not only her sense of identity but also her drive to “prove she was good enough.”

I experience this phenomenon a lot. The client fears losing their ‘drive to achieve’ if they adopt a different assessment, such as “I am (good) enough”. As explained earlier, this is a baseless fear, firstly because the old assessment will never actually disappear and secondly, because as the new assessment settles in, the client will see that it is just as possible to generate powerful results from this new assessment, as it was from the old one. The new assessment also has the benefit of being accompanied by more pleasant self-talk and moods, not to mention a generally more peaceful experience of life.

Over time, as the client began to trust the process, she also developed a regular practice of conscious ‘belly breathing’. In turn, this physical practice impacted her emotional state and mood, opening up a space for her to consciously choose her assessments, rather than slip into automatic pilot, with its assessment of “I’m a flawed woman,” and its all-too-familiar accompanying experiences of tightness and moods of frustration and resignation.

She described the results in this way: “It is as though a long-closed door has been flung open and now I can see a whole realm of new experiences waiting for me in the room beyond.”

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. For each case study, what is at least one element that you recognise as relevant to you, in your situation?

2. For each case study, how would you have approached the situation, if you were the coach?

PART IV

Postscript

This concludes our exploration into how to bring this all together.

One of the key elements in this area is to realise that your current assessments are not bad or wrong in any way. In fact, the more that you fight and resist them, the more they will dig their heels in and insist on being heard.

On the contrary, the ‘start with who’ approach seeks to legitimise these assessments, while at the same time acknowledging your ability to begin to create and believe in new ones.

When you devise strategies to do this, you will be able to drive these assessments to your ‘inner circle’ or ‘core’ from where they will be very difficult to shift, because they become a part of your (private and public) identity. In this way, the process seeks to work with the power of assessments and a human being’s desire to be right about them.

However, there is no magic strategy. One of the fun elements of this process is working out what works best for you, personally.

In Part V, the conclusion, I will throw some light on some important themes that have been floating around underneath the surface of the ‘start with who’ approach. This will not only provide a deeper understanding of the approach, but it will also begin to illuminate another, longer path that you can follow to create a structure for your whole approach to life. Let’s do it.

PART IV

Key Learning Points

1. Your long-held assessments are not bad or negative. They continue to serve a purpose. The problem was that they had become invisible, automatically applied and held as assertions.

2. This process will not remove old assessments.

3. You do not need to ‘unlearn’ anything.

4. This process will enable you to start working with the power of assessments, rather than fighting against them.

5. Taking action in line with your newly declared assessments and being rigorous about noticing when you do, is a critical part of the process as it will give you evidence that you can believe them.

6. Lasting change comes from driving assessments to the ‘inner circle’ or ‘core’ where you hold them as part of your identity: “That’s just who I am/I’m not”.

7. Willpower is not the secret to effective growth, development, and change. The real secret lies in eliminating the need for willpower.

8. As a human being, you are constantly forming assessments and then creating and searching for evidence to convince yourself and others that they are true.

9. Assessments and assertions are distinct. One is not better or worse than the other.

10. Assessments are necessary in order to help human beings navigate and make sense of what is, by definition, an unknown future.

CHAPTER 25

Storytelling

One of the key underpinning elements of this whole approach is that human beings are great storytellers. Not only are we great storytellers, but we are masterful at creating evidence to convince ourselves and others that our stories are true.

In fact, if we do not believe that we can convince a person that our story is true, then we do not even bother to tell it to them, usually writing them off as unintelligent, or ‘lesser than’ us, in some way. The benefit of convincing others is that it bolsters our argument that our story is factual. While this can lead to comforting feelings of superiority, the real benefit is that it protects us from needing to face up to the realisation that our stories are exactly that: stories.

As we have already seen in this book, this process is not bad. It is the way that we navigate through life, making sense not only of the present, but also of the future. For example, once you have decided that you know how your boss will react to a situation, you can go into that meeting (consciously or not) prepared for their response. This is the process that allows you to complete the sentence of somebody you know well, before they have finished speaking (sometimes out loud, sometimes in your head).

When you let this process go unnoticed, however, your life begins to run on invisible railway tracks. Once you have a story that you believe to be true, you stop examining it and instead, start looking (consciously or not) for more and more evidence to support it.

The context that you bring into a situation will determine the

interpretation with which you leave.

A simple example is when I watch a football match with my dad who is a Manchester United fan. We have watched Liverpool versus Man United games together for more than 40 years. Each time, we watch the same match, and walk away with completely different interpretations, assessments, and declarations. They are not determined by what happened in the game. They are determined by the contexts that we brought into the game.

If Liverpool win, then I say it’s because we played far better, and my dad says it’s because the referee needed glasses. I watch the game though my Liverpool fan lens and he watches the game through his Man United fan lens. After the game, I leave with my story and hold it to be true and my dad does the same with his. But it was the same game!

This is a simple and (relatively) trivial example that demonstrates that our stories are determined by what we have already decided to be the case.

This process in other situations, however, can have far more damaging consequences. The consequences arise because human beings do not just create stories and hold them in a neutral or detached fashion. Instead, they have a strong desire to be right about their stories and to hold them as true. It is one of the strongest desires known to wo/man.

This need to be right is understandable because it gives a sense of certainty in what is necessarily an uncertain world. However, it is this need to be right and to convince more and more people of the fact that you are right, while simultaneously making others wrong in the process, that has led to genocide, world war, and oppression for hundreds of years. Much of 20th century history can be explained by this phenomenon.

There are few things in life more dangerous than holding an

assessment as an assertion, be it at an individual or a national level.

The advantage of the ‘start with who’ approach is that it seeks to work with, rather than against this process. Instead of letting this process run unconsciously in the background, this approach offers you the opportunity to surface your existing stories, recognise them as such, and then consciously choose and create new stories that will support you to achieve your goals. It provides a solid and intentional foundation on which to build, while retaining the understanding that it remains a story.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. What is one of your favourite stories that you know you love to treat as ‘true’? Good places to look include politics, money, gender, age, and nationality.

2. For the story identified in answer to Question 1, what are the consequences of holding it as true/factual/right? In particular, look for what it allows you to be right about and what it allows you to do and not to do.

3. How are you able to link your findings from Question 2 to the concentric circle diagram in Chapter 22? This process will allow you to begin to see how your belief in certain stories is so strong that it has become part of your very identity, existing in the innermost circle.

4. Once you have completed the process in Questions 1–3, take a step back (maybe literally as well as metaphorically). Is holding these stories so tightly as true enabling you to produce the results you desire, or is it holding you back?

Remember, you are holding the stories as true because they give you a benefit, not because they are true.

CHAPTER 26

Knowledge, Truth, and Facts

This drive to be right fuels the strong human impulse to find truth, knowledge, and facts in a situation. As we saw in the first section, the power of declarations and assessments is such, however, that they can always trump knowledge, assertions, and facts. If you score a goal from an offside position in football, then it is still a goal if the referee assesses that it’s a goal. You can commit the crime and walk away an innocent man if the presiding judge declares it so. However, there is even another level to this.

Let’s assume that you have incontrovertibly ‘proven’ your fact and you have a verifiably ‘true’ assertion.

Now what? It all depends on what you do with it, and once again, the danger is that what you do with it will be determined by what you have already unconsciously assessed to be the case.

Let’s illustrate this with an example. If you know me, or if you have read Fit To Lead, you will know that I am a fan of High Impact Interval Training (HIIT) because of the physical, mental, and emotional benefits that it has offered me over the years. My favourite way to do HIIT is to do sprints: Run hard for a short period of time. Stop. Recover. Go again.

I generally do this in roughly 30-minute sessions, without looking at the clock until I have been going for a while. Let’s say that I look at the clock at 28 minutes. Now, I suddenly have an assertion: A fact. Knowledge. Truth: I have been running for 28 minutes.

Now what? It all depends on how I interpret or assess that fact and what that interpretation or assessment leads me to do next. I can say to myself:

• “28 minutes? Oh wow. No wonder I feel so tired.”

Or

• “28 minutes? Oh wow. One final push and I am done.”

Or even

• “28 minutes? Oh wow. It’s okay to stop now.”

I have done all of them before and the second one invariably gives me a better result than the first or the third.

These kinds of competing interpretations and assessments come up all the time, in all walks of life. In the general hurly-burly and ‘busyness’ of life, however, the process of choosing which interpretation to use happens so lightning fast and is so automatic that people generally do not even see it.

A big element of our coaching and development work at TWP and TCP is to intervene in this process, so that people begin to ‘slow the tape down’, separate the fact/assertion from the assessment, and as a result, begin to make conscious choices about their interpretation of the fact/assertion. This is where the somatic/ physical practices outlined in Fit To Lead, such as conscious breathing, can make a huge difference.

To support this intervention, I like to use the analogy of having a touchscreen in your mind. As potential interpretations flash up on your touchscreen, you keep swiping left, until you come to one that you assess will best support you to achieve your goal in the current situation. Once you find that interpretation, you swipe right.

You might think that assessments cannot swipe back, but they can, and they do. In fact, expect your old assessments to swipe back hard. They want to protect you from marrying this new assessment. That’s their job.

Without this approach, the impulse to choose the most familiar one, or the one that reaffirms something you have already decided to be ‘right’, will likely be overpowering and it will happen so fast that you will not even notice it.

Knowledge of facts is not what determines your performance. What determines

your performance is what you make up about the facts that you know.

A business example might be looking at the clock and realising that you have been working on your presentation for three hours. What assessments will you choose as a result? Which ones will best support you to produce the best presentation?

Now, let’s go back to the first possible interpretation and declaration: “28 minutes? Oh wow. No wonder I feel so tired.”

This is an example of a story that is especially dangerous if you want to achieve your goals: entitlement.

• Because I have been sprinting for 28 minutes, I am entitled to feel tired/stop, etc.

• Because I have been working on the presentation for three hours, I am entitled to feel annoyed/stop, etc.

Sari and I wrote about entitlement in some depth in Fit To Lead and I will not repeat it all here. Suffice it to say, that “I am entitled to … /I deserve to …” declarations need careful attention because they always sound so plausible and are highly detrimental to you producing the results you desire.

For example, you have a goal to lose fat. Then you catch yourself saying or thinking: “I can have pizza and beer tonight because it’s my birthday”, or “… because it’s the weekend”.

The fact that it is your birthday or Friday is irrelevant (unless and until you make it relevant) and does not entitle you to do or not do anything.

If you want pizza and beer, then choose it, go for it, and enjoy it.

Own that it’s your choice, rather than giving that power to the circumstance—

in this case, the assertion that it’s your birthday or a Friday.

Another similar and common example. You say, “I am not going to do the coffee run because I am the boss.” Do it or don’t do it, based on your choice. The assertion/fact that you are the boss has no relevance or power in itself. On its own, it means nothing.

What really has the power in this situation are your assessments (story) and declarations about being the boss: What being the boss means to you and what you have decided about it. You can take the assertion that you are the boss and do the coffee run, or you can take the same assertion and not do the coffee run.

Your actions and results are not determined by the assertions in your life;

they are determined by your assessments about those assertions.

The other element to bear in mind with regards to facts and assertions is that even when you find one, you need to remember that there are lots of other ones out there. We first encountered this phenomenon with regards to feedback and the idea of objective feedback. Even apparently objective, assertion-based feedback is, in reality, actually subjective because it was you and your observer who chose to prioritise that assertion over thousands of others that you could have chosen.

Our desire to be right doesn’t only drive us to interpret assertions in a way that fits with our pre-existing assessments, it also determines the assertions that we notice in the first place.

Assertions, facts, and events that do not fit our assessments are conveniently overlooked and ignored.

I often hear clients say: “If I hadn’t seen it, then I wouldn’t have believed it.” In my experience, the opposite is generally the case: “If I hadn’t believed it, then I wouldn’t have seen it.”

One of the ways that this plays out in today’s world is via social media. If you only follow/friend people and subscribe to channels that share your point of view, then you just become saturated, not only with assessments that match your own, but also with more and more assertions that have been cherry-picked to reinforce their ‘truth’ and provide more evidence that you are ‘right’.

One of my favourite coaching challenges is to ask clients to follow/friend people and subscribe to channels that will focus on different assertions and interpret assertions in different ways. This simple exercise can often lead to profound realisations and conversations.

Wherever ‘entitlement’ occurs, the ‘expectation’ conversation is never far behind. This is another highly popular and insidiously invisible conversation that serves to mask your own operating context. For example, not only are you entitled not to do the coffee run (because you are the boss) but you expect someone else to do it instead.

Expectations are essentially unspoken requests and are a very common cause of breakdowns in the fields of relationships and results. You justify not making the request by saying to yourself that the other person should realise that it’s their job to do the coffee run. The ‘coffee run’ is the corporate example, but make no mistake, this ‘expectation phenomenon’ is equally popular at home. At home, the justification generally sounds like this: “If s/he really loved/knew me, then they’d do it. I should not need to ask for it.” This becomes convenient for you, but rather inconvenient for the other person, because they are not a mind reader.

When you then look at the result in your bottom right-hand quadrant, however, you do not have the result that you desired (in this case, coffee) and instead of keeping your mirror clean by looking at what it is in your own context that stops you from making a request (“Who am I being?”), you blame the other person for not doing it for you.

While this does protect you from what might be an uncomfortable inquiry, the downside is that not only are you are now stuck with the result you don’t like (no coffee), you have also generated evidence for a limiting assessment about the other person’s competence (“they do not understand the way things work around here”) and have done nothing to improve the prospect of a different result in the future.

A close companion of the ‘entitlement’ and ‘expectation’ conversations is the ‘envy’ conversation. In this case, you spend your time focusing on another person’s results, rather than looking at what it is in your own context that stops you from creating that result. Your energy is spent on making up assessments about the other person and how they come to have the result you want, rather than creating productive assessments of your own and taking action on them.

Unchecked, envy can become intensely corrosive, not only to the relationships involved, but also to your ability to produce the result you desire in your own life.

It does, however, bring a ‘benefit’—it allows you to avoid taking a good hard look in your own clean mirror and what the lack of that result in your own life means about your own operating context.

These three conversations of entitlement, expectation, and envy are all underpinned by a context of ‘comparison’ (Fig. 32).

Fig. 32: The comparison context.

While some people love to keep their mirror fogged up with excuses, blame, and justifications, other people prefer to ignore their own mirror altogether and just focus on other people.

Of course, it is not always a comparison to another person that shows up. Sometimes my clients like to compare themselves to the impossibly high standards of perfection that they hold for themselves. Because they are inevitably doomed to never match up to those standards, moods of frustration, disappointment, guilt, shame, resignation, and anxiety (and the resulting body shapes) become all too familiar.

The other very popular comparison that I encounter is with “the way things should be” or “the way things used to be”. This conversation has become increasingly popular during the Covid-19 pandemic and has been the cause of a lot of the mental and emotional distress that I have encountered over this period. It is an easy trap to fall into and one in which it is also very easy to enrol other people.

Remember though, however reasonable your conversations of entitlement, expectation, and envy seem to you, and however popular they might be, they are still the product of your assessments and, as such, are not true, correct, or right. Equally, they are not false, incorrect, or wrong.

This phenomenon was something I personally had to deal with when the company shifted to primarily online training delivery because of the pandemic. In the early days of the new situation, I would frequently catch myself in an internal conversation that sounded like this: “Oh, this intervention would be so much better if I was in the same room as the participants.”

I noticed that as soon as I allowed this conversation to exist, I immediately began to find evidence to support it, and the quality of my work suffered. As I learnt to stay focused in the present moment, however, the interventions remained extremely powerful. This was one of the most impactful experiential pieces of discovery that occurred for me during the tumultuous years of the pandemic.

Comparison in and of itself, is not bad. Indeed, when purposefully chosen and productively utilised, it can be a very effective tool (e.g. benchmarking your results against another person, team, or company and then using the results you see to illuminate your own operating context). An unseen and unchecked context of comparison, that focuses on the need for other people or the world to change, however, is one of the most disempowering and toxic habits that I encounter in my conversations with clients.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. Bring to mind a recent event that you found stressful, or where you were disappointed with your response.

2. Imagine you have that touchscreen in your mind. Now, flash up the assessment/s that you selected and made true in the situation.

3. Consider the actions and feelings that arose as a result of the assessment that you chose.

4. Now consider other potential assessments that you could have chosen. Flash those up on your touchscreen, until you find a more productive one that you could have chosen to swipe right.

5. Consider the actions and feelings that were likely to arise (you never know) as a result of swiping right on this new assessment.

6. Pay attention to your fear and/or reticence to swiping right on this new assessment. What do you notice?

7. List out at least three areas where you assess that you are entitled to something.

8. What impact is this assessment having on your results in that domain and the people around you in that domain?

9. Where are you currently holding expectations about what a person should or should not do, without articulating requests for them to do it?

10. What are the consequences of holding these expectations?

11. Where are you currently stuck in a mood of envy?

12. What are the consequences of living in a mood of envy? Consider your own results and the state of the relationships involved.

CHAPTER 27

It’s All Made Up

As we begin to near the end of our journey together, it is only fitting that we arrive back at our starting point, with ontology. A major part of the ontology of a human being is the inevitability of creating meaning in life. This is at the very heart of what it means to be human. It is part of our very essence and being. As human beings, we are responsible for creating our own meaning. Whether you believe that your chosen meaning is ultimately meaningful or meaningless is up to you, but there is no way out of the meaning-creation itself.

If you now combine the strands of the last two chapters on storytelling, being right, facts and knowledge, you come to a place that you will likely either find very uncomfortable or very reassuring. The place you arrive at is the very heart of this approach:

Your life is all made up.

Events happen, facts exist, and assertions are out there. No argument about that.

What determines the course of your life and the results you create, however, is how you choose to interpret these events, facts, and assertions.

It is your interpretations and consequent declarations and assessments that shape and define your operating context, and as we have seen, it is your context, and in particular, what you have decided about your identity, that will determine both the results that you have today and the results you believe yourself capable of achieving in the future.

“It’s all made up” is a confrontational way to state the case and you might notice that you have a strong reaction to it. People who have a strong reaction to it often understand me to be saying that life is trivial or unimportant. I am not saying that, and neither am I saying that it is all random or a game of chance.

Other people have a strong reaction to it because they would prefer to believe that their experience of life and the results that they are able to create are determined by the circumstances and events that they encounter in their life. They see me as cutting across that.

They would be right about that. What I am saying is that your life is absolutely in your hands and that the events and circumstances you encounter along the way are essentially neutral and without any inherent meaning or built-in set of consequences.

Events and circumstances do not contain any inherent meaning

that compels your life to go in a certain direction.

One of my favourite examples in this area is with regard to relationships. Before Covid-19, when people could travel freely, senior executives used to tell me: “The relationship with my spouse/children/parents is not working/close because I spend so much time travelling.”

• Assertion: I travel for business.

• Assessment/Story: As a result, I am not close to my family.

Twelve months into Covid-19 and with international travel shut down, guess what I began to hear? “The relationship with my spouse/children/parents is not working/ close because I am spending so much time together with them.”

• Assertion: I am not travelling.

• Assessment/Story: As a result, I am not close to my family.

The closeness and intimacy that you have with your family members has nothing to do with how much time you travel. It has everything to do with the operating context that you bring to your relationships. Assertions—such as location, circumstances, and time spent—do not determine the level of closeness in your relationships.

That is why it is perfectly possible to spend very little time with someone and create a close and intimate relationship, and also possible to spend all your time with someone and create a cold and distant relationship. It is also why you can feel lonely in a room full of people and connected in a room where only you are present.

It can be very convenient to give your power away to the circumstances and events in your life, but you need to ask yourself if that is what you truly desire and whether that approach will truly serve you, to create the life that you want.

Every day, you are surrounded by thousands of events, circumstances, and assertions. More than that, you are the only one who can choose which assertions to pay attention to, and which to ignore.

You are the only one who can choose which assertions to focus on,

and what meaning to assign to them. You alone choose which declarations

and assessments to make, give authority to,

and validate as a result of that meaning.

Your experience of life, your actions, and ultimately, your results will be the direct consequence of those choices.

Whether you see this point of view as naïve, frightening, empowering, or liberating is up to you. In any case, it is not right, and it is not wrong, because it is a declaration. The real question is not whether it is true or false (it’s neither) but rather whether your life would be more productive if you chose to believe it or not to believe it.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. Choose at least three events from your past that you continue to hold onto as ‘important’ or ‘defining’ for you. Pay particular attention to events that you know you use as evidence to reinforce limiting assessments about yourself.

2. Separate out the assertions and the assessments. Preferably, write them down.

3. Examine each assessment and ask yourself the benefit of holding onto it as though it were an assertion.

Note that this does not mean you should change them all. The point of the process is not to have you change your mind.

The point of the process is to remind you that you have the power to choose your assessments/declarations and that there is no need for events, past or present, to determine the outcome of your life.

4. Look back into your past and identify at least three events that you could begin to use as evidence for new empowering assessments that would support you in your journey towards the results you desire.

5. Pay attention to any resistance you have to adopting these new assessments. How does this resistance serve you?

6. What strategies can you now employ in order to provide more supporting evidence for these new assessments?

CHAPTER 28

In Closing

The most appropriate place to begin the closing is to rewind to the point of origin. The idea for this book took hold when I compared the received wisdom of goal-setting and achievement, with my own professional and personal experience.

In general, the received wisdom is that you ‘start with why’ and move on to specify your vision, set your SMART goals, milestones, celebrate small successes, and you are on your way. There is no doubt that this approach can be and has been successful for many individuals, teams, and companies over the years. It is certainly an approach that I have successfully used in my own coaching and leadership development work.

It is, however, an approach that I have seen fail too often for me to ignore; by people who are so clear on their motivation that they can taste it, and by those whose vision and goals are crystal clear, and yet who fail to even get close to a successful conclusion. More than that and even closer to home, this approach had not been responsible for the biggest successes that I had in my own personal and professional life. There had to be something else going on.

The work that we have focused on at TWP and TCP for many years now had a different starting point and it was one that instinctively made sense to me. The received wisdom was underplaying the importance of the human being at the heart of it all: the person who owns the motivation and the vision. The person who owns the answer to the ‘what’ and the ‘why’, if you will.

The key ‘who’ question is not: “Who do you want to be in the future?” Asking that question is essentially just another way to have the person articulate their vision and it falls into the same trap. The answer will (consciously or unconsciously) be limited by what the person sees as possible for them—who it is possible for them to become.

Instead, the two key questions at the heart of the matter and that provide the optimal place to start are:

• “Who are you currently being in the present?”

• “Who do you currently believe you can become in the future?”

The big difference with these questions is that they are rooted in the present, not the future. It is very tempting to start in the future and then look for the requisite energy source to get you there.

As was established when we looked at the map analogy, however, that process has a fundamental flaw. It overlooks that, in order to make the journey, you need to know where you start from.

In this case, you need to uncover your current operating system (context) and the only way to do this is to look into a clean mirror of your results (the content). The results in your life can be divided into two groups: objective and subjective. Both of these are easily obscured by a fogging up of the mirror.

The mirror of objective results, characterised by your career, relationship status, money in the bank, quality of life, etc., is easily fogged up by excuses, blame, and justifications. Any time you have a result you don’t like, it is so easy to simply produce a story to explain it away.

Subjective results come to you through feedback, which is why we took a deep dive into that subject in a previous section. It is even easier to fog up that part of the mirror, with all its misunderstandings and misconceptions.

There will always be a temptation to fog up your mirror and ultimately, only you can defog it. There is a famous question in this line of work: “What are you pretending not to know?”

In my experience working with clients, people generally know when they are being honest with themselves and when they are not. It might be intellectual (they know it), emotional (they sense it), or physical (they feel it in their gut), but at some level, they just know.

When you are willing to be honest with yourself and keep the mirror clean, then your results will illuminate your context. The only reason that you have that content (results) in your life today is that your context created it and now allows it to exist. If you see polar bears wandering around, then it means you are in the Arctic Circle. Brown bears did not fall into a vat of white paint. You know that, even if you might not want to admit it. Once you make your context visible, you can also see the limits you currently put on yourself with regard to your future possibilities.

The desire to reinforce your existing assessments and be right is

an extremely potent force and one on which many strong motivations and

clear visions have foundered. It is a far more powerful approach

to work with this force of nature than it is to fight against it.

To do this requires a little ninja-like mental aikido:

• Make the context visible by using the clean mirror of results;

• Understand and practise the ontological distinction between assertions and declarations/assessments.

When you see your context and understand that it is made up of your assessments, then you have the power back in your hands.

You will never remove the old ‘limiting’ assessments, and it is better that you don’t, because they serve a purpose. More importantly, you don’t need to remove or unlearn them. Your brain is perfectly able to concurrently hold paradoxical assessments.

With this in place, you are freed up to attack the ‘what’ and ‘why’ questions from a massively enlarged and empowered place, because you are no longer hemmed in by your invisible, limiting assessments.

One of the first aphorisms I ever heard in the field of personal development was something the industrialist Henry Ford said: “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right.”

Twenty-five years later, it seems I have come full circle. What I didn’t realise then, that I do now, is that the most powerful of these thoughts operate invisibly, bolstered by a largely unconscious and extremely powerful desire to gather more and more supporting evidence.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER AND A FIRST STEP TOWARD YOUR DESIRED NEW RESULT

1. What is one assessment that you could choose to adopt right now, that would support you to achieve a goal in your life? Write it down.

2. What evidence do you already have that will support this assessment? (Be prepared to search hard.)

3. What is one small action that you assess to be achievable/easy that you can take in the next 24 hours that will provide further support for it?

4. Do it.

5. Write down your success and your experience of it, so that you begin to create physical evidence that supports this new assessment.

6. Tell other people about your success so that it begins to exist in conversation, out there in the world, where it matters.

PART V

Postscript

It is my sincere hope that you will find something in this book that will enable you to become the person that you dream of being, with the results that you dream of having. As a coach and trainer, the experience of being a small part of someone else’s success is one of the biggest thrills there is.

If everything that has gone before still hasn’t convinced you, then maybe this final metaphor will get you over the line. Think of your life as a house. As with any house, your house is built on foundations. The foundations of this house are the assessments that you created a long time ago. They were the first part of the house that was created, and now they are hidden from view. The foundations are the context of your life.

The structure and size of this house are the results that you have in your life: your career, your savings, your relationships, your health, etc. Results such as these are the content of your life.

As we have seen throughout this book, your results are the content, and are sustained by your context. In this case, the house that stands above the ground is only able to do so because of the foundations that exist beneath it.

Now consider two scenarios.

In the first scenario, you decide you want to build an extension to your house. You want new results or content in your life. Accordingly, you hire a builder and receive fantastic information and advice (at a price). As a result, you then make a detailed plan and spend a lot of time clarifying the purpose of your extension—why it’s important to you, what you want to achieve by building it, etc.

Then you start to build, and the result is so frustrating: Every time you add the extension, it stays up for a little while and then it falls down. Why? Because the foundation simply does not support it. The existing context does not support the new content.

In the second scenario, before you do anything else, you decide to discover the extent of your foundations. You realise that the best way to do this is to look at the current structure, because the foundations are such that they are able to support it. Additionally, you realise that because you are living in the house, you can only see the inside of it and so you decide to ask people outside of the house for their feedback on how the house looks from their perspective.

Now you have the most complete view of your current structure, and you can most accurately ascertain the depth and shape of the foundations that must exist in order to keep the existing structure upright.

You also have a very good idea about the limits of these foundations, based on all the results you have tried, but not managed to sustain. All of your failed previous extension attempts did not last because of the existing foundations. They simply did not support the new extension, however much you wanted it and however important it was to you.

Armed with all this information, you realise that these foundations were not only limiting your current structure, they were also limiting your assessments of what you believed to be possible for your structure in the future. There were so many previous failed extension attempts that you had been unconsciously limiting your vision about what was now possible for you to build and what your structure could become. Why bother to articulate a vision that you have failed to achieve so many times before?

This time, as you begin to consider the vision for your extension, you realise that your possibilities are now far, far greater than you had realised. You do not need to remove the existing foundations, but you will certainly need to extend them. You now know how to do that, because when you examined them, you saw that they were made up of declarations and assessments and these, unlike assertions, are totally in your hands to create, believe, and act on.

Now, finally, it is time to ask the ‘what’ and ‘why’ questions. What kind of extension do you want to build? Why do you want to build it? These are now great questions to ask and they will certainly provide the motivation to keep building through the stormy weather that will inevitably ensue.

It is when you ‘start with who’, however, that you give yourself the blueprint to success.

PART V

Key Learning Points

1. Human beings are master storytellers, and we only tell our stories to people who we assess will believe them.

2. The desire to be ‘right’ is very strong in the psyche of a human being. This process can operate consciously or unconsciously.

3. Unconsciously confusing grounded assessments with true assertions is a dangerous enterprise, for you and others.

4. The ‘start with who’ process is founded on surfacing and harnessing the power of storytelling and a human being’s desire to be right about their stories.

5. Successfully creating the results you desire does not depend solely on possessing knowledge and facts. The key factors are rather how you interpret the facts that you possess and the declarations and assessments that you form as a result.

6. In order to see how you interpret facts, you must ‘slow the tape down’ and decouple the assessment from the assertion.

7. Entitlement, expectation, and envy are three of the most pervasive and limiting assessments, moods, and stories out there. They all stem from a context of comparison.

8. The actions and results you have in your life are the result of your current context and the assessments that shape it.

9. The desire to attribute your results to assertions, circumstances, and/or other people is extremely tempting, but is ultimately a dead end if you wish to live a productive life.

10. Human beings see what they already believe to be the case. If you do not believe something to be possible, then you will simply not see it, or explain it away as an exception.

11. The ‘start with who’ approach essentially makes conscious a process that typically remains unconscious.

12. Your declarations and assessments are in your hands and your hands alone. Therefore, it is you who determines the outcome of your life, not the events, circumstances, and people you encounter along the way.

13. Starting with ‘who’ is a way to remind yourself that you are being who you are choosing to be in the present and that who you can become in the future will be constrained by the declarations and assessments that you are making today.

14. When you ‘start with who’, you remind yourself that the life you are living, the results you are producing now, and the results you will produce in the future are a direct result of the context that you have developed over the course of your life.

A1

The Sarius Squares

This model was first introduced in Chapter 8 of Fit To Lead and it remains a framework that can spark great conversations in the domain of ‘context illumination’, something at the heart of the ‘start with who’ approach.

It follows a similar idea to the four-box quadrant introduced in Part III. By way of contrast, however, it focuses on highlighting the hidden future consequences associated with meeting and not meeting declared targets and goals. Once the perceived consequences become visible then they become another way to highlight context.

This works in the same way as the main process articulated in the book, except that this time, the exploration is in the future. What you say to yourself will be the consequences of achieving (or not) the goals you are considering.

Everyone likes to focus on the ‘A’ squares, but the real power lies in surfacing the ‘news’ in all four quadrants. All four quadrants contain ‘news’ that will shed light on the operating context of your client and serve as great springboards for further exploratory conversations.

In Fit To Lead, we used the example of being promoted at the office:

• A1: More money and a company car

• A2: Stuck with the same boss for another year.

• B1: I can carry on coasting.

• B2: More hours in the office and more performance reviews to write.

In general, people are happy to keep the ‘A’ mirror clean but often like to ‘fog up’ the ‘B’ mirror!

By now, I hope you can begin to see how statements like these can help to illuminate a client’s context.

Let’s now apply this model to show how it supports the ‘start with who’ approach and compare it with the more traditional ‘what’ and ‘why’ approach.

A2

Start With ‘What’ and ‘Why’

The goal we will use as an example is one that many people asked me about, after I told them that I had finished writing a second book: “I want to write a book, but how …?”

• Goal: Write a book and have it published.

The traditional way of working with a goal like this would be to focus on clarifying the bigger ‘what’ picture inside which this goal sits (your vision) and the motivation (the ‘why’).

• Vision: To raise the profile of your company.

• Motivation: To boost your income, to help you attract more clients, to allow you to raise your fees, to achieve a long-held goal, to fulfil the potential you know you have, to pass on your new ideas, to feel satisfied with your life’s work. There are all sorts of possibilities.

Then you would move into chunking the goal down into manageable, bite-sized pieces, and taking action. Any time you ran into difficulties, you would circle back to your motivation for an energy top-up, do an internet search for tips, and ask for advice from other people who have written books. Any time you hit a milestone, you would celebrate, until eventually the book was published.

This traditional approach can work. I have also seen it fail too often, however, for me to ignore. It is an approach that essentially sets up your willpower and motivation in a battle against your desire to be right about your old limiting assessments.

It fails so frequently because the mirror is not clean. There are invisible assessments floating around, being treated as assertions. The desire to be right about these assessments is often simply too great for the motivation to overcome.

Attempting to move forward with ‘what’ and ‘why’ questions, while your mirror is still fogged up in this way, inevitably leads to disappointment and frustration.

Now, let’s compare that approach with the ‘start with who’ approach.

A3

Start With ‘Who’

By way of contrast, let’s start with our ‘who’ questions:

• Who are you being in the present?

• Who do you believe you can become in the future?

In this case, because your goal is something that somebody you know has already achieved, there is another very common way to fog up your mirror to which you must be alert: comparison. Instead of allowing your current results (no book) to illuminate your context, you fog up not only your own mirror, but the other person’s mirror as well!

Example:

He has written another book because …

• “…he doesn’t have children.”

• “…he’s a man and his wife probably does all the chores.”

• “…he was in quarantine for 14 days.”

• “…he is the Managing Partner and his team does all the work.” There are endless possibilities.

Fogging up their mirror allows you to keep your mirror fogged up as well: I would have written a book if …

• “…I didn’t have children …”

• “…I was a man/single …”

• “…I had been in quarantine …”

• “…I was the Managing Partner …”

Setting this trap aside, let’s use the process illustrated in the book and add in the Sarius Squares model from Fit To Lead:

• A1: Good news if you publish the book: You raise your profile and cross an item off your bucket list.

• A2: Bad news if you don’t finish the book: You’ll feel disappointed and frustrated.

• B1: Good news if you don’t publish the book: You can carry on perfecting it.

• B2: Bad news if you do publish the book: It’s out there to be criticised (and so are you!).

Notice how the B squares in particular begin to throw light on your context. There’s a need to be perfect and avoid criticism in there. That’s a context of safety … ask yourself why it is important for you to hold back and play safe.

There are highly likely to be some master assessments in there about other people and your assessment of your own competence:

• “People are so quick to judge and criticise.”

• “I am not as smart as people think I am.”

• “People will see that I am not perfect.”

Leading to:

• “People are critical.”

• “I need to be perfect.”

For as long as you unconsciously hold master assessments such as these and let them exist as assertions, it is unlikely that the book will get published, however strong your motivation may be.

As we saw in the main body of the book, you will have evidence to support these assessments, but however much evidence you have, the statements remain assessments. Indeed, there will always be evidence to support your master assessments. There will always be someone who criticises you. There will always be someone smarter than you.

If you examine your life more thoroughly, however, and ground your assessments, you will also find assertions that contradict them. There will always be someone willing to be on your team and champion you. There will always be someone who knows less than you about a subject.

The desire to be right about assessments that play a protective role, however, is very strong. In the majority of cases, it is certainly strong enough to fight off tips from an internet search or advice from a mentor. That’s why surfacing them and then making new declarations (grounded assessments) to stand against them, before moving to the visioning and ‘why’ question is so powerful.

If you are willing to do this, then you might just find yourself liberated to the extent of declaring an even bigger vision than the one you were previously considering!

Maybe now it’s not just about raising the profile of your company. Maybe now it is about becoming a thought leader in your industry or leaving a legacy.

If you are willing to ask the ‘who’ questions, keep your mirror clean, connect the dots to illuminate your current context, make grounded, new declarations and act on them, then you open up a whole new world of possibility.

About the Author

Marcus Marsden is the Managing Partner of The Coach Partnership and The Works Partnership. His work is informed by more than 30 years of business and management experience, developed in senior management roles in Europe and Asia.

Marcus graduated from Oxford University and began a career with Unilever in marketing, before falling in love with the world of personal and professional development. He specialises in experiential leadership development as well as coaching individuals and teams in interpersonal excellence.

Marcus lives in Singapore with his wife Sari, who is a Nike+ Training Club trainer and championship-winning fitness model, as well as an ICF-certified (PCC) coach. In 2017, they co-authored Fit To Lead, a groundbreaking book that serves as a companion to Start With Who.

The Works Partnership

TWP is a leading provider of high-impact experiential interventions to businesses and institutions worldwide. Our personal approach to development and growth has served to evoke new levels of excitement, commitment, and possibility in our clients for more than 20 years.

TWP has worked in partnership with organisations big and small across Asia, Europe, and the USA to further personal and organisational growth via the development of self-awareness, commitment, responsibility, leadership, and team development.

Based out of Singapore, with partner offices in Hong Kong, Taipei, Kuala Lumpur, Mumbai, and Jakarta, and coaches and trainers located throughout the world; TWP offers services in the areas of Leadership Development, Change Leadership, Line Manager Coach Training, ‘Coaching Culture’ work, Executive/Team Coaching, Influencing & Engagement, and Health and Wellness initiatives on a global basis.

TWP interventions use the ‘start with who’ process as a basis from which to trigger new levels of effectiveness for individuals and teams and thereby enable sustainable transformational change within their organisation.

Using an experiential process that begins with self-awareness and honesty before moving to trust, openness, commitment and responsibility, authenticity and contribution, TWP interventions challenge unproductive patterns of behaviour and build genuine commitment to an organisation’s vision and goals.

We challenge leaders to engage with their career, their team, their organisation, and ultimately their life, at a whole different level; to take responsibility for their results, to communicate authentically, to work in a cooperative spirit of partnership, and to have the courage to do, and be different.

We are dedicated to the excellence of individuals, companies, and communities and believe that it is only possible for a business to grow if its employees are also growing.

TWP also owns one of the world’s most respected coach training companies: The Coach Partnership.

The Coach Partnership (TCP)

The Coach Partnership is one of the world’s leading transformational learning organisations. Founded in 2010, under the name Newfield Asia, the company was rebranded in 2019 as The Coach Partnership.

The company uses the Newfield ontological coaching methodology to create world-class coaches via a nine-month ICF ACTP certified programme, which is recognised as being the gold standard in coach training.

People attending these programmes come from all walks of life. Some are in the process of becoming Executive Coaches, but the majority of attendees are experienced leaders, managers, and professionals looking to become more adept in the domain of working with other human beings. Due to the nature of the work, wherever people come from, they invariably notice growth in their personal, as well their professional lives.

More recently, in view of developing market trends, we have added certification programmes in Health Coaching and Team Coaching.

All of our programmes are designed to support individuals in a journey of discovery that initially challenges them to enlarge their own worldview, take action aligned with what they care most about, and ultimately generate results consistent with their own deepest values.

Only when they have embarked on their own personal journey, do we begin to support them to be able to do the same with other people. In this way, for our graduates, coaching lives as an embodied way of relating to other human beings, rather than simply a methodology, task, or process. For our graduates, therefore, coaching is an embodied way of relating to other human beings, rather than simply a methodology, process, or task to be done.

Selected TCP/TWP Coaches and Trainers

Terrie Lupberger, MCC

Director of Training and lead trainer with TCP

In addition to her talent development work, Terrie teaches executive coaching at the University of Miami as well as internationally. She is contributing author to several books on coaching including: A Coach’s Guide to Emotional Intelligence and The Handbook of Knowledge-Based Coaching, and will soon publish her own body of work on conscious leadership.

Terrie is considered a pioneer in the profession of coaching, having been instrumental in the creation of the core coaching competencies still used as the standards of professionalism today, and a former Board Member of the International Coaching Federation.

Prior to coaching, Terrie’s professional career was spent in various management and leadership positions, in both the private and public sectors. She was CEO of an international leadership and coaching consultancy, a former federal manager overseeing large scale initiatives, and a director of a thousand-person outplacement programme. She knows first-hand what it takes to build teams, lead large-scale change, and navigate complexity. Her passion for people and commitment to make a significant contribution to the performance of companies and individuals eventually led her to become an executive coach.

An executive coach and talent developer to leaders, managers, and teams worldwide, Terrie’s international experience, executive coaching skills, and more than 20 years of experience as a CEO and senior executive give her a unique vantage point when working with her clients. She helps her clients improve performance, build relationships, and get results without sacrificing well-being. She helps them navigate the mine fields and blind spots inherent in playing a bigger and bolder game.

Tini Fadzillah, PCC, NBC-HWC

TWP Founding Partner and Director of Coaching

Tini is an executive coach and trainer based in Singapore, with clients throughout Asia. She specialises in coaching C-suite and senior executives in performance, leadership, and change; with a reputation of surfacing and creating sustainable shifts to the underlying conversations needed to unlock a leader’s full potential and drive results.

She co-founded TWP in Southeast Asia in 1996 and has worked with thousands of people from diverse cultures on both personal and professional goals. Her passion is working with people to design a compelling future and to translate their goals into reality.

Tini is a passionate advocate for the role of the body in creating a powerful leadership presence. She is certified to use Tension Releasing Exercises™ and Wendy Palmer’s Leadership Embodiment curriculum. She also co-designed and delivers the TWP ‘Women & Leadership Presence’ programme and was an active member of the team that designed the Character Building component of the National Service in Malaysia. Tini is also a certified health coach and embeds wellness within her coaching encounters.

In addition to her own coaching and training, Tini runs the coach development programme for TWP and TCP, and serves on the leadership team, responsible for running the business.

Carol Courcy, MCC (Retired)

Author of Save Your Inner Tortoise and lead trainer with TCP

Carol earned her first coaching certification in 1990, after three years of intensive study in ontological coaching. In the decades and coach certifications that followed, she honed her coaching skills by helping hundreds of clients achieve success as they pursued personal and professional learning initiatives. After more than 6,000 hours of coaching, she sustains the passion, rigor, and ‘lightness of being’ to encourage her clients to have courage as they make important life changes.

From 2000–2008, Carol was Vice President for The Newfield Network in the USA, Director of Coach Training for North America, and Senior Course Leader. Since 2009, she has operated her own coaching business.

In 2012, Carol became a guest faculty member and programme coach for TCP, before becoming a regular member of the team in 2020.

From 2000–2009, Carol was an ICF Master Certified Coach (MCC) and member of the global ICF Coaching Credentialing team to certify coaches.

Carol is grateful for her experiences with her clients. Their honesty and commitment to significant changes helped her write a book—Save Your Inner Tortoise: Learn How to Cross the Finish Line Joyful and Satisfied—on simple yet powerful emotional agility learning strategies. She calls the book her gift in support of her favourite audience—the ever-striving, exhausted, self-sacrificing overachievers.

Carol is a featured speaker on emotional agility in the United States, Asia, and Europe.

Chris Balsley, PCC

Author of Stop Controlling, Start Leading and lead somatic trainer with TCP

Chris maintains a thriving and diverse professional coaching practice with 30 years of outstanding experience in supporting his clients. Focusing on inspiring professionals to be the best leaders they can be, especially in the face of adversity, Chris dedicates a large portion of his career to helping individuals and teams increase their performance and shift their moods intentionally. He accomplishes this by teaching them how to mitigate the effects of workplace stress, by training them how to listen and speak more powerfully, and by demonstrating to them the connection between leadership and the human body.

He has worked with Newfield internationally where he presents and teaches coaching in both English and Spanish to international and multicultural audiences. He has been a lead somatic trainer for TCP since 2010.

When he is not teaching others how to coach, Chris coaches leaders at all levels of organisations from C-suite to mid-level managers in multinational corporations, Fortune 100 companies, and in the military. He holds certifications in the Leadership Circle 360° Profile, The Enneagram assessment tool, and in Agile programme management.

Additionally, Chris is a former senior presenter and executive coach providing training for Magis Group LLC from 2009– 2011. These training services include military units deploying to and returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, in which over 10,000 soldiers were trained. He is also a veteran of the US Air Force.

Beatriz Garcia, PCC

Lead somatic trainer with TCP

Beatriz is a passionate people-driven professional with the ability to develop strong professional worldwide relationships. She specialises in Somatic, Personal, Teams, Executive, and Conscious Business Coaching by leveraging on people’s talents and abilities to produce meaningful work and a balanced life while inspiring them to turn their visions into reality.

Beatriz started her coaching practice in 2009. She has more than 30 years of diverse experience spanning from strategic business planning to sales management, organisational development, leadership development, change management, multicultural team effectiveness, as well as executive, personal, and somatic coaching for individuals, national, and international companies in Mexico, South America, Europe, and Asia. She works with her clients to identify strategies to promote leadership and organisational efficiency and to design actions and practices to achieve their goals.

She holds a degree in Business Administration from the Autonomous University of Baja California, Mexico. She has a Certificate in Business and Management Administration from Harvard University, and an MBA in Business Administration with a major in Leadership from DUXX in Monterrey, Mexico.

Sari Marsden, PCC, NASM-CPT, FNS, CES, PES

Co-author of Fit To Lead and somatic trainer with TCP and TWP

Sari has dedicated herself to coaching for more than 10 years and specialises in working through the medium of the body to facilitate personal growth and development. She has worked with people from a wide range of backgrounds and cultures throughout Asia, in both corporate and personal contexts.

Sari is also a certified health coach, an NASM-certified personal trainer, and a corrective exercise and fitness nutrition specialist. Her passion for fitness led her to become an elite trainer for the Nike Training Club in Southeast Asia and she has won Gold Medals for Team Singapore in Southeast Asian fitness physique competitions. She received the CMO Asia Indonesian Women Leaders Award in 2018 and has also been recognised for her role as a champion of women who lead with purpose by Women In Asia, TEDxSingapore, and the National Library Board of Singapore.

Sari’s vision is “to facilitate empowerment and excellence through powerful conversation and purposeful movement.” Having worked with athletes and corporate leaders, she uses a wide range of training techniques that combine the person’s physical, mental, and emotional states.

In addition to improved performance, her clients report a shift in the way they see the world and the way they hold their bodies, often resulting in increased ‘executive presence’, authenticity, and performance excellence. Her approach is purpose-driven, holistic, and dynamic. She also contributes to her community via volunteering to work with foreign domestic workers and youths with learning difficulties as a fitness dance coach in a local vocational school.

Dr Katrina Gisbert-Tay, PCC, NBC-HWC

TWP Partner and Director of Health and Wellness Coaching

‘Dr Kat’ is a medical doctor trained in Functional Medicine, an executive coach, integrative health coach, and coach supervisor with years of experience coaching executives and creating workplace wellness programmes for multinational corporations in Asia.

With a strong interest in human behaviour and development, Katrina graduated with an honours degree in psychology, before going on to study medicine. Because of her great passion for continuous learning, she then pursued a course in coaching supervision with Coach Supervision Academy and is a Certified Integrative Health Coach with Duke Integrative Medicine in North Carolina. She was the first National Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach in Asia and created the Health Coach Certification programme for TCP.

Katrina is thrilled about the opportunity to bring together her experience in coaching, psychology, and healthcare through Integrative Health Coaching. She works with clients to empower them to take concrete steps to reach their health and wellness vision and support their progress. She envisions a shift in the dynamics of healthcare to being patient-driven and patient-centred, therefore creating more effective and sustainable results. She brings this knowledge into her executive coaching, offering holistic coaching that focuses not just on business goals but also on performance and well-being. Katrina is also bringing coach training into universities and healthcare systems, changing the way healthcare is delivered by empowering patients to be take ownership of their wellness journey.

Clemence Blondel, PCC

TWP Coach and Corporate Training Director

Clemence began her career with 15 years in Marketing, Communication, and Sales. She achieved success in these roles because of her deep understanding of buyer behaviour.

It was this love for human psychology, linked to decision-making and behaviours, that attracted her to the field of Education, Learning and Development, and Coaching.

She has taken many clients from different nationalities on a journey of transformation in leadership development, performance, and change, to truly impact their lives. She has also utilised this passion and expertise to help tertiary-level students find their purpose, develop their personal brand, and prepare for the next steps in their careers.

A highly personable coach, Clemence is known for her ability to make her clients feel at ease, cut through the noise of the everyday, and get to the heart of the issue.

Suggestions For Further Reading

Chalmers Brothers Language and the Pursuit of Happiness: A New Foundation for Designing Your Life, Your Relationships, and Your Results

“In this book, the author leads you on an eye-opening exploration of yourself, your language, your conversations, and their connections to your physical and emotional well-being. He introduces you to an emerging and thought-provoking way of thinking, one with very old and very new roots.”

Chalmers Brothers Language and the Pursuit of Leadership Excellence: How Extraordinary Leaders Build Relationships, Shape Culture and Drive Breakthrough Results

“Drawing on conversations with thousands of CEOs, business owners, and senior leaders of all types over the last 10 years, [this book] provides an eye-opening organisational blueprint, coupled with powerful, practical tools that leaders at all levels are employing to dramatically improve workplace relationships, shape culture, and drive breakthrough results.”

Chris Balsley Stop Controlling, Start Leading: 27 Secrets for Effective Leadership at Work Home & Play

“This book holds 27 leadership secrets that can change the actions you take in the world and take your leadership to the next level without your having to try harder. These strategies will inspire you to think and act differently.”

Alan Sieler Coaching to the Human Soul: Ontological Coaching and Deep Change, Volumes 1 to 4

“Coaching to the Human Soul breaks new ground in the literature on coaching, as it provides a comprehensive coverage of what is probably the world’s most advanced approach to Executive Coaching and Life Coaching. Ontological Coaching is based on a new understanding of human beings and human interaction.”

Amanda Blake Your Body Is Your Brain: Leverage Your Somatic Intelligence to Find Purpose, Build Resilience, Deepen Relationships and Lead More Powerfully

“Your Body is Your Brain invites leaders of all stripes into a massive shift of their mental models, allowing them to access their highest and best selves.”

Carol Courcy Save Your Inner Tortoise!: Learn How to Cross the Finish Line Joyful and Satisfied

“Save Your Inner Tortoise! shares step-by-step tools and includes great activities and exercises that showcase alternative life strategies to help tame the self-sacrificing, never-enough overachiever in you.”

Marcus and Sari Marsden Fit To Lead: Transforming Your Leadership with the 5 Pillars of Performance

“Frank and forward-thinking, Fit To Lead offers a dynamic new vision of leadership development that places the role of your physical body firmly alongside that of your thoughts and emotions. Written by husband-and-wife team, Marcus and Sari Marsden, the book combines the principles of personal development, executive coaching, nutrition, fitness training, and movement to provide you with a holistic system for transforming your leadership and producing breakthrough results for yourself and the people you lead.”

About the Author

Marcus Marsden is the Managing Partner of The Coach Partnership and The Works Partnership. His work is informed by more than 30 years of business and management experience, developed in senior management roles in Europe and Asia.

Marcus graduated from Oxford University and began a career with Unilever in marketing, before falling in love with the world of personal and professional development. He specialises in experiential leadership development as well as coaching individuals and teams in interpersonal excellence.

Marcus lives in Singapore with his wife Sari, who is a Nike+ Training Club trainer and championship-winning fitness model, as well as an ICF-certified (PCC) coach. In 2017, they co-authored Fit To Lead, a groundbreaking book that serves as a companion piece to Start With Who.

Read more at Marcus Marsden’s site.

About the Publisher

Founded in 1999, Candid Creation Publishing is an independent English-Chinese bilingual publishing house based in Singapore.

We provide a one-stop publishing service that takes individuals and organizations from idea to market. Our objective is to lower the barriers to getting published and to make professional publishing accessible to all and with a personal touch.

In contrast to self-publishing services, every book by Candid Creation is carefully curated by experienced professionals to ensure all titles meet the highest quality standard. Our professional services include consultancy, coaching, conceptualization, planning, project management, writing, translation, copyediting, design, illustration, typesetting, proofreading, printing,  e-book publishing, distribution, sales and marketing.

We have built a reputation of being the publisher of choice for many renowned personalities and esteemed organizations, an honour made even more special as this was made possible through personal recommendations from the satisfied clients we have served.

We are book publishers who do not restrict ourselves to any particular genre of books but instead, seek to understand the needs of our authors in order to extract and express their voice through their books. We have helped hundreds of authors from the age of 12 to 80 to publish their books in both print (pbook) and digital formats (e-book). To date, we have published over 300 titles in a wide variety of genres that include categories such as: the arts, autobiographies, children’s books, critical prose, finance, humanities, literature, medical, music, personality profiles and self-improvement; among many others.

Candid Creation Publishing is a member of the Singapore Book Publishers Association.

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Contents

Acknowledgements

Forewords

Preface

Introduction

Part I The Ontological Approach

1 Single and Double Loop Learning

2 Distinctions

3 Distinctions of a Human Being

4 Distinctions in Language

5 Distinctions in the Limbic System

6 Distinctions in Somatics

Postscript

Key Learning Points

Part II Who Are You? (How Do You Know?)

7 Context and Content

8 Observer and Identity as Context

9 Context Development

10 Problems with Identity

11 Opportunities with Identity

12 Declarations, Authority, and Authenticity

13 The Power of ‘Who’

Postscript

Key Learning Points

Part III Feedback

14 What is Feedback?

15 Misconceptions of Feedback

16 Why is Feedback Useful?

17 Master Assessments

18 Barriers Surrounding Feedback

19 Effective Feedback

20 Adding Speech Acts to Feedback

Postscript

Key Learning Points

Part IV Bringing It All Together

21 Barriers to Starting With ‘Who’

22 Sustaining the Change

23 Building Belief

24 Case Studies

Postscript

Key Learning Points

Part V Conclusion

25 Storytelling

26 Knowledge, Truth, and Facts

27 It’s All Made Up

28 In Closing

Postscript

Key Learning Points

Appendix

A1 The Sarius Squares

A2 Start With ‘What’ and ‘Why’

A3 Start With ‘Who’

About the Author

The Works Partnership

The Coach Partnership

Selected TCP/TWP Coaches and Trainers

Suggestions for Further Reading

About the Author

About the Publisher