Skills
Raise your game
Title: Raise your Game: How to build on your successes to achieve transformational results
Author: Suzanne Hazleton
Price: £5.99
Publisher: Ecademy Press
In my line of work, I tend to come across a lot of self-help books, each with their own advice on how to change your life. What differentiates ‘Raise Your Game’ is it that it starts from the premise that you are already successful and works to build on the strengths and skills that you already possess. This book isn’t designed for people who are ‘broken’ – it’s for people who are good at what they do and want to get better.
The author, Suzanne Hazleton, gets to root causes of behaviour from the get-go. She highlights the tension between choice and commitment; no choice means inflexibility towards change, but too much choice can be an excuse for lack of commitment. From the outset the reader is gently encouraged to examine what might be driving their patterns of behaviour.
What I particularly like about this book is the mix of theory, practical hints and tips and personal examples from the author’s own experience. Hazleton has got the balance just right; her advice is grounded in theory but she has also ‘been there, done that’. It makes the advice she gives more believable. What is more surprising is the extent and diversity of what she has packed into the 196 pages of this book. Neuro Linguistic Programming and positive psychology are just two of the theoretical underpinnings. These are not always universally accepted concepts (read Barbara Ehrenreich’s ‘Smile or Die’ if you want a critical account of positive psychology), but it is the fact that Hazleton grounds these in practical advice that makes the book work. Some of the hints and tips are very simple (I liked the idea of walking around with £1000 cash in your pocket as a way of changing your mindset about money, or deciding what your dream salary is, then adding a zero to the end of that number as a way of challenging your beliefs!). Other techniques take bit longer and require the reader to heighten his/her own awareness through some fairly probing questions.
The book is very well laid-out. You can dip in and out of it and every chapter is littered with text boxes showing techniques, worked examples or illustrative accounts from the author’s own experience.
Hazleton has also managed to avoid the twin traps of other self-help books; that of sounding like her advice will magically transform your life in all its facets and also she manages to avoid making her approach sound like some New Age religion. The reader is always left in charge and rather than pretending that we will be able to do everything she recommends, Hazleton takes a much more pragmatic approach. Her final chapter is about doing what you can (while running the rest of your busy life) and practical advice on how to get the best from the action you take, which also includes some advice on assessing your state of readiness.
If you are not into tree-hugging or knitted yoghurt, but instead want some insights into making changes that work for you, I would thoroughly recommend this book.
101 Coaching
Title: 101 Coaching Strategies and Techniques
Editors: Gladeana Mc Mahon and Anne Archer
Publisher: Routledge
Price: £22.99
This book ‘does what it says on the tin’ that is, it’s a compilation of 101 handy hints and tips for coaching. Each tip is described in no more than three pages, so it’s easy to dip in and out of the book and to learn about a new practical skill or technique in minutes. References and further reading are suggested at the end of each tip for those who want to know more about a particular topic. Each of the 101 tips is organised in the same way; giving a clear purpose and description of the technique and detail on how to actually execute it. There is also information on the possible pitfalls to be encountered in using each technique. This is useful for the coach as he/she can exercise greater choice in the deployment of each technique as a result.
There are twenty contributors to the book, so expertise is provided from a wide range of experiences and from different approaches including Neuro Linguistic Programming, occupational psychology, family therapy and humanistic psychology.
The book is organised into sections so if you have a problem in your coaching, it is easy to locate a technique that may help. Coaching is a process that occurs between at least two people, so it’s possible to read a technique with the purpose of adding benefit to the coachee, the coach or indeed both. Two sections of interest are ‘Developing as a coach’ and what to do ‘When a client gets stuck’. The ‘Developing as a coach’ chapter includes information on how to develop reflexivity and how the coach can use his/her own whole experience to increase the richness of the ‘data’ available and to assist the coachee. The ‘When a client gets stuck’ chapter is useful if only because at some point in their career, any coach is going to come across this situation. It contains some very practical options on what you can do in these types of situation. Other chapters deal with problem solving and creativity, confidence building and relationships.
This is a book for professional coaches or for managers who do a lot of coaching. While some of the techniques are simple, they are also quite advanced and therefore likely to be of greater interest to the expert than to the occasional coach. It’s a great reference resource for the coach who wants to add their ‘toolkit’ of skills or wants insight into dealing with a specific situation where they are experiencing difficulty. It can be dipped into or read cover to cover, but either way, keep it handy as it’s the kind of resource you will want to re-visit again and again.
Upside of irrationality
Title: The Upside of Irrationality
Author: Dan Ariely
Publisher: Harper Collins
RRP: £9.99
This is a follow up to ‘Predictably Irrational’ and it attempts to explain why we make the kind of decisions where a seemingly more logical alternative would be a better option, yet we are somehow compelled to take a different path. For example, why do we put things off to the last minute, even though we know we would do a better job and have a less stressful time if we started in good time?
It’s a great book because it’s one of those where the author has used an informal and often humorous style, yet his arguments are supported with research studies. It’s part personal experience and part experimental research, but no point is made without supporting evidence. The book is based around the principle of behavioural economics which assumes that we are not always the sensible and logical-thinking beings that we think we are. Sometimes we will behave in ways that seem irrational but what might seem as irrational behaviour may be giving us pay-offs of which we are only partly aware. Read the chapter on ‘revenge’ if you want some great examples!
There are two main sections, how we act irrationally at work and how we do so at home, including in our relationships. In the first chapter Ariely shows how the bonus culture so prevalent in business today, can actually be detrimental to performance. Size of bonus and complexity of task influence how effective an incentive can be to increasing performance. Surprisingly, offering too big an incentive for the completion of a demanding task will adversely affect performance. Fear of failure, ‘choking’ and social apprehension all begin to take their toll on the performer when the stakes are high. In the second chapter, the author extends this basic idea beyond the realm of tangible bonuses and examines the effect that the meaning we attribute to the tasks we are doing can affect how well we do that task and for how long. Perhaps not too surprisingly, if we think our work doesn’t matter, then we are unlikely to carry it out with as much enthusiasm compared with when we know that we are doing something that has a productive output. What is surprising is just how easily it is to separate an individual’s efforts from his/her sense of accomplishment, and just how quickly this results in reductions in performance. A simple Lego building task was used with two sets of individuals. The first group were required to build Lego robots and were informed that at the end of the production period, their ‘products’ would be dismantled. The second group were given the same task, but after each construction, the ‘product’ was immediately dismantled in front of the builders. This obvious demonstration of the implied ‘pointlessness’ of the task had an immediate effect on output, despite the fact that the workers could still receive payments for working. An oversimplistic experiment? Maybe, but think of just how many (often unintended) ways we can remove meaning from employees in large and complex organisations. Other chapters cover topics such as the ‘Not invented here syndrome’ and the pros and cons of our ability to adapt to changing circumstances.
A great read, presented in a highly interesting and entertaining manner, but with some powerful conclusions that make you think about how we treat employees, co-workers and ourselves. If you like quirky solutions to long-standing problems, you’ll like this book.