When I talk about beliefs I’m not referring to the things that we assume to be true so that we can get through our daily lives effectively; I’m talking the things that we are not prepared to question or challenge.

A belief that is held firmly creates a schema and organises our experience – we see the things that reinforce the belief and delete the counter-evidence. So if beliefs are self fulfilling prophecies, are we making our world smaller when we hold a belief firmly? Are we moving even further away from reality? What happens when our belief clashes with reality? Do we get emotive and irrationally defend the belief?

What if we hold beliefs more gently as an operating principle? It’s true enough for now, but I’m happy to question it…  What if we were more curious and open to new ideas that challenge our own beliefs? Does that bring us closer to reality? Does that stop us from getting into a pickle?

However – Complete disbelief can be just as unhelpful…

"I don't believe it"

What happens when you attempt to explain a current problem or irritation to an archetypal celebrity? What happens when you attempt to articulate your current challenges in the style of an archetypal celebrity? Check out the picture below taken after such an experiment – it was surprisingly profound…

This is a silly expression. In order to create this conflict (between work and life) you need to make work and life mutually exclusive.

Work is a big chunk of your life, if you are not seeing it that way you could be compromising yourself by spending most of your time doing something you don’t like. The hours at work really add up, and if we consider them to be not life and delete them we don’t have much life left over.

You’ve probably developed relationships at work that are genuine friendships, you may continue to see them for years even if you move company. Many people meet their life partners at work (and their business partners through their social life).

The use of social media in business is creating a culture where the individuals are the brand, not the business. We are getting great results from personal, informal, transparent messages and networking individual to individual. The less difference between the ‘work you’ and the ‘life you’ the less conflict you will feel and the more effective your communication will be.

Next time someone talks about the challenge of X/Y balance, question whether these two things are really an either/or.

Whenever anyone talks about mind/body, I’m tempted to ask them how the decapitation happened???

When I was eight I took apart my record player to find out how it worked.

All I discovered was the component parts – what it was made from – I was none the wiser as to how it worked.

It struck me that I could learn more about how it worked by watching it working.

I love this… Click on the article to view the video…

I have been a fan of Prêt-A-Manger for some time; their sandwiches and stuff are delicious, they have a genuine social conscience, their responsible attitude towards ingredients fills me with hope the way their team members behave is an inspiration.

I have always wondered how they engender such fantastic customer service behaviour. I have recently been lucky enough to spend some time with the Prêt Academy finding out how they do it and I think that we can all learn something from the positive consequences of their approach.

I have had conversations about maybe working as a consultant to the team at the Academy, and learnt that consultants, as well as senior managers in the organisation, go out to a retail branch and do a ‘buddy day’.

What a fantastic, creative approach; get right to the ‘coal-face’ and connect with what the business really does. I can almost hear the ivory towers crumbling.

I spent my ‘Buddy Day’ with a fantastic team of people in Guildford on the 11^th October.

The morning involved learning what was important about preparing the food whilst making sandwiches and rolling wraps the Prêt way. After lunch I learnt what was important about the retail space whilst clearing and cleaning tables, sweeping the floor and talking to customers about their food.

I loved it!

There are a handful of simple principles in each environment, described in an easy to remember way and conveyed through examples. It provides enough detail for the team member to know if something is good enough or not, but at the same conveys the spirit of it; the intention of what they are doing, and requires the team member to constantly use their judgement; their initiative.

If I’m lucky enough to do some interesting work with Prêt, I’m no longer a detached consultant.  I was already a frequent customer, and I now have a tacit feeling of what it’s like to work for prêt. They are an inspiration!

If you were to observe a proficient footballer doing ‘keep ups’ (juggling the ball with his/her feet and keeping it from making contact with the ground) you may suggest that they have good ‘ball control’ or that they are ‘controlling the ball’ well.

Obviously they are not ‘controlling the ball’. They can’t make it stop in mid-air. They have no control over the ball whatsoever. They have the skill and experience to constantly react to the ball (whatever it does) so precisely that it creates the illusion of control.

So often when we work with an organic system (like a person or a group of people) we attempt to manage or control – but they are far more wildly unpredictable than a ball!

If you want to be influential I would recommend that you let go of ‘control’. It’s not possible anyway.

You can influence, provoke or seduce – but you cannot control.

Would you rather be ready for everything or ready for anything?

Ready for everything suggests a great deal of preparation – imagining every possible scenario and preparing for it. Of course you would also need to plan for the unexpected: The tangents, the distractions, the objections, the heckles and the miss-matched expectations.

Ready for anything suggests having the ability and flexibility to go with whatever happens and make it work.

It’s great to have a plan – it gives us something to deviate from.

Have you ever noticed that whenever you think about about ‘managing relationships’ you never really have them? Maybe you do on a surface level, but not many on a deep, open, effortless level. Your really great relationships probably don’t need any managing.

Relationships are not things, they are a collection of experiences, and if you think of them as things to be managed you are dissociating from the experience; like hosting a party and not being at the party.

Similarly, ‘Managing change’ is surely a constant necessity – how exhausting! How about creating the conditions so that you don’t need to manage change because it’s just what happens around here and it’s embraced?

‘Managing stress’ seems like a crazy idea. Stress is not a thing it’s a bio-chemical process. Don’t learn to manage it – learn do something else instead! (I know that sounds silly and flippant, but really, it is possible to condition yourself to have more unconscious choice of responses – different bio-chemical reactions).

To be creative: Be in the moment, having the relationship and fully engaged in the experience with a choice of responses – rather than being stuck with only one response and ‘managing’.

I love this question.

I asked it a couple of times last week and enjoyed watching the typical confusion followed by revelation. It’s a fast and elegant way to become aware of counter-examples and open your mind.

I’m running a self-application experiment this week and I urge you to join me: Every time I catch myself being narrow-minded and over-simplifying things (indicated by my being very ‘certain’) I’m going to ask:

What do I have be ignoring to think that?

If you join me in this game, I would love to know what happens…