This article offers some ways to put you in control of your self development without having to take time out of your busy schedule. It is intended for those who have let their personal development slip because of being too busy, for those who want to find a gradual way into developing themselves, and, for those who want to introduce personal development, step by step, to others e.g. colleagues, staff members, friends.

How would you react to the offer of a personal development course?
I’d love to but I just can’t fit it in.
I don’t have the time for navel gazing.
I struggle to take my annual leave let alone fit in courses.
I’ll do it next year once I’ve got Phase 2 behind me.
I don’t have the funding.

The volume of work, emails and meetings, along with managing people and just getting the job done, can leave us genuinely at a loss to manage anything else over and above our existing responsibilities. This means the time we could devote to self improvement slips.

Time isn’t the issue
If we want to do something, we find the time. We all have exactly the same amount of time, the difference is in how we prioritise what we do with our time. If we really want to develop a new idea, we’ll take it beyond the agenda. If the deadline is really important, we’ll make it. If we really want the funding, we’ll go the extra mile to make the best case. Our passion pushes us – as does urgency. Something we really didn’t have time for last week can shoot to the top of our priorities in a crisis. We don’t use “time” as an excuse with these two factors, wanting to and urgency, driving us.

Self belief
The language of self development includes words linked to achievement and potential - maximising your capabilities, being who you want to be, star performance, success….
How much and how soon we really want any of this will determine our commitment to our personal development.
And then there’s self belief – do we opt out of self development opportunities because it’s easier to be too busy and much harder to face the reality of personal improvement? All those role plays, experiential learning and baring our souls can wait till later when we’re less busy……. We do use “time” as an excuse with these other two factors driving us - low self belief and fear.

‘Can do’ Self Development
If time, heavy workloads or low self belief are getting in the way of your self development, here are some suggestions that bring it so close, it’s just a decision away.

Self development has a big self awareness component, so this is your starting point. You can get great results from raising your self awareness without it taking a lot of your time. It’s about creating the ‘right’ attitudes and habits. We can all think of someone who’s attended a time management course but doesn’t apply what they’ve learned. This comes down to attitude and habits.

We know that more than 80 per cent of the general competencies that set apart superior from average performers* are in the areas of:

And that self awareness is key to all these areas. If you become more aware of who you are, the impact you have on others, how you behave in different situations and with different people, you can make some choices about whether or not this is how you want to be. This, in turn, informs how best to manage yourself, how to take others into account and how to get the best out of your relationships. Attention to this will improve your performance significantly.

Re-evaluating your approach to self development in this way will make it much more accessible, do-able and meaningful. You can make some qualitative differences here to your self management, your leadership and your people management if you take on board some of the above steps to developing yourself. After experiencing these benefits, you will be more receptive to prioritising yourself, and your personal development, as part of improving your performance or simply recognising that your individual effectiveness is achieved by investment in you.

Having recognised the benefits of increased self awareness, you may then decide to attend a course to further develop your self awareness. Many courses can for example, increase your knowledge within a competency framework, but don’t necessarily increase your self awareness. A helpful way to select a course is to ask yourself how you will turn your learning into doing. Where this involves developing new habits and attitudes (not simply acquiring new information and skills) you can be sure you are developing your self awareness.

The difference between personal effectiveness and success starts with self awareness, and your level of self awareness shows through, whether it’s in an assessment centre for a top executive post or doing a routine presentation to your team. People pick up on how self aware you are, and judge you accordingly.

Maureen Bowes’ book, released in April 2006, is a self development resource.

You can find out more at www.peopleintelligence.com

* Working with Emotional Intelligence Daniel Goleman Bloomsbury 1998

© Maureen Bowes
Centre for Applied Emotional Intelligence

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As we saw last month, the first of the IE scales measures the crucial variable of our self regard, the degree to which we value and accept ourselves. Correspondingly the second scale looks at the other half of our “Life Position: rather than the degree to which we believe “I’m OK”, Scale 2 measures the degree to which we believe “You (others in general) are OK”. Regard for others is defined as “the degree to which you accept and value others as people, as distinct from liking or approving of what they may do”.

This definition immediately highlights the importance of distinguishing between ‘being’ (who you are) and ‘doing’ (your behaviour). This is a difficult concept to fully grasp and is often challenging for people learning to use the ‘ie’. Valuing and having regard for others is not conditional on their behaviour but is just accepting a person as a worthwhile and valuable human being, despite their exhibiting behaviours we may not like or agree with. This is a difficult attitude to hold, particularly if we have strong negative feelings about someone’s actions. The necessary attitude is summarized in EI Principle No. 4: “However you and they are is OK”.

As we hinted last time, Regard for others is not a truly independent variable. It appears to be so if we just look superficially at the “OK Corral”, the grid which TA uses to set out the various life positions.

This sets out the components of the four fundamental life positions as if your Self Regard (the degree to which you hold yourself as OK) were independent of your Regard for Others (the degree to which you hold others as OK), but this is not truly so because it appears to be the case that people who genuinely value themselves value other people too. In other words, they hold the “I’m OK You’re OK” position, the “healthy” or “emotionally intelligent” position.

What, then, about the people who hold the “I’m OK You’re Not OK” position, in the bottom right hand corner of the OK Corral? The point here is that although these people claim to value themselves, and behave towards others as if they value themselves, and may indeed believe that they are just fine (especially compared with other people, whom they see as inferior and bad), in fact the “I’m OK You’re Not OK” position is always a denial of and a defence against an underlying feeling of “I’m Not OK”. If they truly valued themselves, they would naturally value others too, and would not feel the need to adopt the “I+ U-“ position to bolster their underlying fragile sense of their own value. What they are doing is making other people bad so that they appear good by comparison. Paranoia and scapegoating are not the marks of a healthy individual.

A good illustration of this phenomenon is to consider bullies. They behave entirely as if they matter and others don’t. Overtly they are obviously in the “I’m OK You’re Not OK” position. But actually all bullies have low self esteem underneath. Which leads to the perhaps surprising conclusion that after laying down the boundaries about what behaviour is permissible and what is not, both the bullies and the bullied need the same treatment: help in raising their self esteem / self regard.

When using the life positions model during exploration of the ‘ie’ it is important to emphasise that holding a life position does not mean you will always behave in this way. Our predominant Life position is the one we adopted as a result of our childhood experience and is what feels most familiar to us, and is where we tend to return to under stress. How easily we revert from the I+ U+ Emotionally Healthy position to one of the unhealthy ones will depend on how strong our Self regard and Regard for others are. Which box we fall into will depend on which of these is more dominant and can be determined from the ‘Relative regard’ scale.

All of this is highly significant for a person’s emotional intelligence. People who are coming from an “I’m OK You’re Not OK” position, have a large investment in clinging on to the false view of themselves and others that they protect themselves with. The consequence is that their Self Awareness (Scale 3) and their Self Knowledge or Accuracy of Self Assessment (Scale 16, when compared with external input from others in a 360 degree format) are likely to be low, and their rigidity will tend to be high – in other words they will be low on Scale 8 Flexibility. They are in many ways the people most difficult to help to raise their emotional intelligence, given that Self Awareness is key to the whole process, and that they feel so threatened by the perceived danger of confronting themselves as they really are. They don’t like negative feedback, or indeed any input which does not confirm their own view, and will defend against it.

From all this, you will appreciate that one of the points about Scale 2 is not just that in itself it measures Regard for others, but that it is a key determinant of Relative Regard (Scale 1 score minus Scale 2 score), which is an indicator of the life position that people hold. Of course, the OK Corral is a fairly crude model, dividing the total population up into four box categories, and not too much attention is to be paid to Relative Regard scores which are not too far from the middle (i.e. where Self Regard and Regard for Others are more or less equal), but if someone’s Relative Regard is +3 or above, in other words their Self regard is significantly higher, when compared with the general population, than their Regard for others, then we need to consider that they are probably holding the “I’m OK You’re OK” life position, with the consequences that we have just considered.

Contrariwise, high regard for others, which is very healthy if it is combined with high self regard, may not be so helpful if the person’s self regard is low, and their regard for others is just a reflection of their self-abasement. It may just be the consequence of their holding the “I’m Not OK You’re OK” or Submissive life position.

Before we leave the issue of life positions, it is worth noting that your life position (measured in the by Relative regard, Scale 1 score minus Scale 2 score) is highly predictive of where you are likely to stand on each of the Relationship Management scales 11 to 15. We shall point out the individual connections when we come on to consider those scales in due course.

So why is high Regard for Others important in and of itself? There are two broad answers: without high regard for others you are unlikely to be highly Other aware, good at picking up what is going on for other people, and without high regard for others you are unlikely to be effective at managing your relationships with them. Among other things, however circumspect you are about expressing your feelings and your views of others, your estimation of them will leak out, and will alienate them. (There is an exception to the general rule that high awareness of others tends to require high regard for others: people who have had traumatic childhoods and have ended up verging on the paranoid will both hold other people to be bad and dangerous, and yet will be hyperacutely aware of others, because they need to monitor carefully the source of the danger.)

IE scores apart, the distinction between people with high and low Regard for others is pretty obvious. People who are low in Regard for others will tend to be judgmental, critical, blamey, rejecting, mistrustful and disregarding of others. As a result they will find it difficult to be accurately aware of others and their feelings. Those who are high in Regard for others will, even when they dislike, disagree with or disapprove of what someone else does or says, still be accepting and respectful of the other as a person.

So what should you do if you want to increase the level of your regard for others? Obviously the appropriate answer differs from person to person, but here are three suggestions. Remember that we can develop all aspects of emotional intelligence if we wish to do so.

Distinguish between doing and being
We tend to confuse how people are and what they do, and to react similarly. We need to be careful about the distinction because the appropriate reactions are very different. What people do, and say, may be judged, challenged and resisted, but who they are and what they feel just are and need to be accepted. As the religious precept has it, “Hate the sin but love the sinner”. Practise the distinction by picking yourself up when you judge, reject or attack someone for who they are, rather than opposing what they do or say. When you find yourself thinking “I hate X”, reframe it as “I hate what X has done” or even “I hate what X often does”.

Stretch to understand
Judgement is the enemy of understanding. When you respond to what someone does or says by rushing to judgement, stop for a moment. Ask yourself, why have they done this? How do they see the situation that makes this for them the best thing to do? Attempt to put yourself in their shoes, and understand things from their point of view, with their history, their limitations and their desires. You may not like what they have done or said any better, but you will be better able to deal with it, and with them, if you understand where they are coming from and how it makes sense to them.

Learn to listen
Conversations too often consist of people taking it in turns to talk and then to plan what they will say next while the other speaks. That way we never get to understanding the other. Practise every day listening to someone else without paying attention to yourself: don’t interpret what they say in your terms, don’t think about its implications for you, don’t judge. Just listen, let them know what you have heard and understood, and try to understand how they are feeling. That’s all: no response of your own, no advice, just being with them. It is remarkably difficult at first (because most of us don’t do it much), but it gets easier the more you practise it.

Next month we shall turn to look at Self Awareness, in some ways the most key skill of emotional intelligence.


© Tim Sparrow (Centre for Applied Emotional Intelligence) and Jo Maddocks (JCA)

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