Emotional Intelligence

Speaking about the making of her recent film Talvaar,  filmmaker Meghna Gulzar says for her, it was curiosity that triggered  the immediate, spontaneous urge to do the film.  Emotions started coming in during her research on the story. But she shut them down when when working and discussing the script with Vishal Bhardwaj and during the making of the film. Now that the film has been released, emotions are coming back.  And she is letting them.
#MyLearning
Emotions can lend sharpness and acuity to our thinking. They can also lead us astray by making us act in impulsive and unwanted ways. Wisdom lies in knowing when to engage with our emotions and when to keep them in check.

Life is About The Choices We Make

Mohan was a charming fellow, every time I ran into him on the street, he would flash his good-natured smile and wave at me. Then one day, he happily told me that he had started a catering business, and pressed his newly printed visiting card into my hand. i told him I certainly would recommend his services to people and keep him in mind when the occasion arose. And I did hire his catering services for a few family functions. At these times, i noticed, it was his wife who was running the show. A grim-faced woman, who unlike Mohan, never smiled, she would be busily looking after the details of the service, keeping a close watch on every aspect of the service. Mohan was employed in a pharma company, but when his catering business started flourishing, he quit his job, and he became the smiling front for his catering service, winning over people with his charm and good nature. Soon, I lost touch with Mohan, and my running into him became less and less frequent, and soon, he just slipped from my mind. Then one day, after years, I ran into him again. He wasn't his usual decently dressed self - his clothes seemed slightly disheveled, and so was his hair. Moreover, he passed me on the street without looking at me! I was surprised, this wasn't the Mohan, I knew, but I just dismissed at it being one of his bad hair days. This happened on a couple of more occasions - his appearance was disheveled and he did not acknowledge my greeting. Finally, one day when i met him again, i stopped him and asked him whether he had forgotten who i was and why he was behaving in this strange manner. He was silent for a while and then in a sad voice he told me, "My wife is no more." He did not say anything more, and neither did I pursue the matter further. I later learnt from people that he had given up his catering business and had devoted himself to looking after the house and his only son.

Dealing with life situations and events

Tragedies are a part of our life - we lose people and things we hold dear, jobs are lost and relationships broken, which are actually a test of our Response-ability - the ability to cope with life's situations and events in the most appropriate manner.While we may not be responsible for most of what happens, we are completely responsible for our reaction to what is happening. Rather than placing blame, this way of thinking acknowledges personal power. Response-ability is the capacity to choose. Out of many possible responses, I can always choose the one I make. Response-ability is remembering to be in charge and make careful, thought-out choices.When we respond with the best of our ability, and accept and handle whatever consequences we have helped to create, we not only benefit from your choices, but our life and relationships will improve immensely. 

10 Reasons Why I Am Passionate about Coaching

I subscribe to an interesting newsletter by E.R. Haas, whose outfit provides virtual training products for personal and professional excellence. His recent newsletter had the subject line; The Power of Why will change the way you look at business success. Intrigued, I opened the newsletter, because I must tell you, I have been struggling with this 'why' business for a long time now! Long have been the hours I have spent thinking of why I am so passionate about coaching. Unfortunately, every statement I had thought of had sounded like a motherhood rather than  a statement which captured the key drivers of my passion. Things had come to such a pass where doubts had started to creep into my mind of the sincerity of my passion! And now this newsletter had come along to rub salt into my wounds! Or so I thought, as I decided to see what this guy Haas had to say. And I must say what  he had to say, pushed me finally into getting down (once again) to find answers to the question which had haunted me all this time about why I coach. And this time I finally managed to crack it!! Here is how my moment of epiphany happened. 

The Eureka Hour!

The trigger of stimulation in Haas's newsletter was a video of a TED presentation called 'Start with Why: How Great Leaders inspire Action' by Simon Sinek. Sinek spoke of what he called the Golden Circle, which looked like this.

According to Sinek, everybody knows “what” they do 100%. Some know how they do it. But very very few people or organizations know WHY they do it. (he was telling me!) The answer, Sinek said, wasn't about making a profit, that was the result. It was the “why”, why do you do it, why do you get out of bed in the morning, and why should people care. Simple yet profound, and it immediately got me researching (aka google) my unanswered question of 'why I coach' with renewed vigour. My search led me to a presentation by the Master Motivator Tony Robbins called Why we do what we do, in which he talked of the "invisible forces" that motivated everyone's actions. I spent the entire evening mulling about what Robbins had to say. I slept over it, and the first thing the next morning, as soon as I woke up, was this sudden blinding clarity! A clarity about all the reasons why I was so passionate about coaching! All of them seemed to want to burst forth like a dam burst! The best thing was, I could relate every one of the reasons to something that had actually occurred sometime in my coaching situations! I immediately put pen to paper and started jotting down my thoughts. And here is what I wrote: 

I coach because it enables me to make a difference to people’s lives. I do this by helping them:

1. Discover things about themselves they weren’t aware of

2. Feel they are worth it

3. Convert inertia in their efforts at success into impatience to get going

4. Add new meaning and depth to their relationships

5. Make their life and work feel more fulfilling

6. See  their life and work situations and events in new ways

7. Create their own processes to learn, grow and evolve

8. Create relationships between what they are aware of about their life and work, and what they were not aware of in those contexts

9. Get new insights in the patterns of their behaviour 

10. Put things into context by connecting past life and work events with present actions, behaviours and attitudes

Most importantly, the nature of the challenges my clients face, give me insights into those of my own.Their efforts and commitment to overcome their challenges give me the motivation and the learning to act on those of my own. 

And the bottom line - my clients’ every ‘ah aah’ moments give me SATISFACTION, their successful outcomes FULFILLMENT and the learning, ENRICHES  my life.

Thank you Haas, Simon and Tony!

Coaching Using Principles of Behavioral Economics

Every day, we make decisions on topics ranging from personal investments to schools for our children to the meals we eat to the causes we champion. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. The reason, Thaler and Sunstein, authors of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, explain, being human, we all are susceptible to various biases that can lead us to blunder. Our mistakes make us poorer and less healthy; we often make bad decisions involving education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, the family, and even the planet itself. Decision makers do not make choices in a vacuum. They make them in an environment where many features, noticed and unnoticed, can influence their decisions. The goal of Nudge is to demonstrate how thoughtful “choice architecture” can be established to nudge us in beneficial directions without restricting freedom of choice. The person who creates that environment is, in the authors terminology, a choice architect. 

Reading more on Nudge in the various web references gave me more and more the feeling of just how remarkably similar the role of a choice architect is to that of a coach. Here's why: 

• Anyone  who indirectly influences the choices people make, the authors say, can be called "choice architect". A coach does exactly that, hence he is a  "choice architect" too.
• Choice architecture, can be used to help nudge people to make better choices (as judged by themselves) without forcing certain outcomes upon anyone. This is one of the basic tenets of coaching. 
• The tools described by the authors (though differing in nature and application) sound very similar to the ones a coach would use. For instance, the tools highlighted are: 
• Expecting error (the coach tool: empathy) 
• Understanding mappings (the coach uses assessments to map client needs) 
• Giving feedback (a primary coaching tool)
• Structuring complex choices (the coach is a clarifier)
• Creating incentives. (the coach uses small wins as incentives so client is motivated for the big wins)

The remarkable similarities set me thinking. How could one incorporate the discipline of behavioral economics on which the book is based, with the practice, and business, of coaching?

This article is my attempt to do just that.

Applying Principles of Behavioral Economics to Coaching

The use of behavioral principles is fundamental to any coaching practice. Behavioral economics can help coaches understand better what every coach always understood, albeit unwittingly: That people are not rational.  Any new understanding of people's behaviour can only give coaches a better understanding of how exactly coaching works. Or how they can make it work better. 

Stephen Covey the personal development guru applied his mind to why humans behave the way they do and what they could do to avoid human susceptibilities that lead to wrong decisions. The result was his book The 7 Habits of Effective People, and the first of the seven habits is Be Proactive. Proactive people, says Covey, are those who are in control of themselves and do not surrender to a stimulus in the external environment but use their personal power to deal with the stimulus, whether people or situation. How are they able to do this?

Stephen Covey's Proactive Model

Proactive people know that there is a gap between a Stimuli and Response and within that gap is their freedom to choose the right response to maintain control over their self and be above circumstances.

What about people who are not proactive? Often, resistance to change is the result of lack of clarity because of a conflict between the rational and the emotional mind which comes in the way of allowing any change to stick. Ideas, and in turn change, is effective when it stays with you over time and changes the way you think.

Weaving the two models together- Thaler and Sunstein's derived from behavioral economics and Covey's based on new age theories of personal development, could, I realized, help create a useful model for coaching: Nudge Coaching

In his Proactive model, Covey talks of the four tools humans have at their command to effectively exercise their freedom to choose. The four 'hot buttons of pro-activity' being:

1. Self-awareness
2. Imagination
3. Conscience
4. Independent Will

Through the process of Nudge Coaching applied to each of the four 'hot buttons of proactivity', the coach would be able to resolve the conflict between the rational and emotional mind, and makes change happen.

The Nudge Process of Coaching 

Choice architects, according to Thaler and Sunstein, can have considerable power to influence choices. Or to use our the authors preferred language, they can nudge. The authors explain this term as "...any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives." Most important from a coaching point of view - nudges are not mandates.  

Coaching clients are busy people who are trying to cope in a complex world and cannot think deeply about every choice they make. They adopt rules of thumb that sometimes leads them astray. The Nudge Coach brings organization and structure to the contexts in which people take decisions. Choice architecture does not seek to reduce choices - just influence them in order to improve the client's lives, as judged by themselves. Humans are susceptibile to various biases and hence the way an issue is framed makes a huge difference to the success of a coaching engagement. In other words, people are nudgable. In the Nudge coaching process, a coach helps clients to structure their choices and create strategies that makes it easier for them to do things that improve their lives. He uses four types of nudges to achieve these coaching goals:

1. Nudging Client Self-awareness: Faced with important decisions about their lives, people often make pretty bad choices—choices they would not have made if they paid full attention and possessed complete information, unlimited cognitive abilities and complete self-control. They adopt rules of thumb that sometimes lead them astray. The explanation, according to Thaler and Sunstein, is rooted in some well-documented human behavioral quirks that are amplified by information overload and trying to cope in a complex world. All this leaves people with little time to think deeply about every choice they have to make. The Nudge Coach helps create awareness of their cognitive abilities and the resources available to them for better self-control.
2. Nudging Client Imagination: Sunstein and Thaler have spent a lot of time thinking about how people can be encouraged to make better decisions, and they offer some intriguing ideas. Their central thesis: People will make better choices if they are given a clear and well-designed set of options that acknowledge and offset human idiosyncrasies. For helping client's design and structure the options available to them,  the coach has to take into account his knowledge of behavioral science. By helping to rightly structure the choices available to the client, a coach helps to nudge clients to do the 'right' thing.
3. Nudging Client Conscience: Mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik explains that the ideas of right or wrong, good or bad exist only among humans. No animal is good or bad - only humans would pity the antelope being being made meal of by a predator such as a a cheetah in a National Geographic documentary. Humans are greedy, unlike animals, who stop eating once their stomachs are full. Thus says Pattanaik, humans have the capacity to be worse than animals (greedy) and better than animals (generous). And it is in these subjective choices - greed vs generosity, right vs wrong and good vs bad that the coach, by structuring choices available to the clients, helps them to to improve decisions about their health, wealth and happiness.
4. Nudging Client Will: One of the basic tenets of behavioural economics is that people do not always take rational decisions. They have  status quo bias and change doesn't come easily. For reasons of laziness, fear, and distraction, many people will take whatever option requires the least effort, or the path of least resistance. All these forces imply that if, for a given choice, there is a default option—an option that will obtain if the chooser does nothing. The solution - helping coaching clients first make their choices, and then hold them accountable to their choice. Holding them accountable can at times  make the client feel challenged. A useful approach to overcome this is the one akin to the program in gmail. Every time a user mentions the word attachment but does not include one, prompts a pop-up, “Did you forget your attachment?” Similarly, by reminding the client of his commitment to the choice he has made, the coach can nudge the client will in non-threatening manner.

The Nudge Coach

By keeping an eye on the four nudges, a coach aka a choice architect can improve the outcomes for clients on their journey of the head and heart to fulfill their potential.

The Thief of Time

The recent crisis of the euro was exacerbated by the German government's dithering, and the decline of the American industry exemplified by the bankruptcy of GM, was due in part to executives' penchant for delaying decisions. Closer home, I used to coach a client who had a yen for delaying decisions - postponing important decisions on one pretext or another. The perplexing thing about procrastination is that although it seems to involve avoiding unpleasant tasks, indulging in it generally doesn't make people happy. And that made me wonder what caused people (including me) sit on important - and not so important, decisions.

Until recently that is, when I chanced on this review of the book "The Thief of Time" edited by Chrisoula Andreou and Mark D.White in the New Yorker.

Many explanations have been offered as to why we willingly defer something even though we expect the delay to make us worse off. The one with which most contributors to the book agree is to do with our relationship with time. Procrastinators are able to make rational choices when they are thinking of the future, but, as the present gets closer, short-term considerations overwhelm their long-term goals.

Another is ignorance - a case of "the planning fallacy". Procrastinators fail to take into account the time it has taken them to complete similar projects in the past and partly because they rely on everything going smoothly without any accidents or problems.

Both the above cannot be the whole story and a fuller explanation offered by the essayists is to do with our attitudes. General McClellan, a Union army general during the American Civil War and 'one of the greatest procrastinators of all time(!)", is a perfect example of this. Union General-in-Chief Henry Halleck writing about him said, "there is an immobility here that exceeds all that any man can conceive of. It requires the lever of Archimedes to move this inert mass." McClellan's "immobility" highlights several classic reasons we procrastinate. The general seemed to have been unsure he could do anything and was always cribbing to Lincoln about the lack of resources - whether troops or arms. Procrastinators, create conditions that make success impossible, a reflex that creates a vicious cycle and often succumb to perfectionism.

So how do we overcome ourselves of procrastination? The book suggests the use of External Aids (perhaps a coach who holds you accountable?) and the use of Reframing - dividing projects into smaller, more defined tasks.

Or perhaps you could do a variation on the the even more radical method employed by Victor Hugo. He would write naked and tell his valet to hide his clothes so that he'd be unable to go outside when he was supposed to be writing!