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How do you rate your capacity for real collaboration?

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Cooperation is often considered collaboration . . . But efforts applied to the former can seriously inhibit the latter . . . All approaches to real collaboration benefit from the parties' competence at navigating conversational complexity and differences . . . Typically, people over-estimate their ability for this, trusting that the necessary skills will somehow become available if and when required, even though they have insufficiently practised and mastered them . . . Most seem unaware of … [Read more...]

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Don’t take it personally

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It’s a common human tendency when criticised to think we’re under attack. Although all that we know, at first, is that someone has a problem they want heard and understood, we readily take offence if it seems we’ve been chastised, insulted, demeaned, derided, disrespected, harmed or in some other way mistreated. Once we've taken it personally like that, our emotional chain reactions and reflexive (knee-jerk) fight or flight urges are primed for release. Unless quickly altered, those ideas … [Read more...]

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Our own part in conversational problems

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Having a ringside seat at other people’s quarrels can be unpleasant. But they're valuable events for me when I realise some of the ineffectual behaviours in use resemble my own. When conducted in public, especially with as much acrimony as the occasion discussed here, they offer similar mirroring to a much wider audience. To intentionally change a behaviour we must first become aware of it. Golden rules Understanding our own part in creating a problem is the beginning of wisdom. Kong Qiu … [Read more...]

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Aim to heal, not hurt

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We can heal or hurt people simply by the judgements we make about them. When we extend healing to others, we also heal ourselves. The ability to choose between the discomfort of becoming aware of our judgemental habits of mind and the discomfort of being ruled by them, is a vitally important self-management practice. The small, tight-knit specialist peer group I belong to learned that one of us, (I'll call him Andrew - not his real name), appears to have committed and confessed to a repugnant … [Read more...]

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Choose how you respond to pressure, disruption and uncertainty | Tom Watkins

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Struggling to accept what we are sometimes faced with is a normal part of being alive, like a tax on being human works-in-progress. Our battles with reality are usually won, in the end, by reality. But have you noticed that for very many people, reality increasingly involves relentless pressure and frenzy? Three inescapable societal trends are behind this. Being overwhelmed by them is optional. I was with a friend for one of our regular discussions we have, over coffee or during a 30-minute … [Read more...]