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This month we have the shortest day of the year and the Christmas period: two things which add to the normal everyday stress.

We all know that Christmas can cause us extra stress: thinking about presents and finding the extra cash for them; preparing the expected feast; and the often obligatory visiting with various family and friends – which also sometimes means travelling in bad weather. A time which was intended to be a celebration and originally a mid-winter time to relax and enjoy yourself can turn into a flurry of activity and duty and cost.

What we tend to be less aware of is the stress of our short hours of daylight. No one likes getting up in the dark and coming home from work in the dark, as far as I know. However, our bodies like it less than our minds. It disrupts our natural rhythms, because our biology is designed to work in synch with nature, not against it. So we have to force ourselves to be active, even though it’s dark, because our bodies respond to lack of daylight as downtime.

So please, be a little more kind to yourselves this month.

Simplify some of that Christmas madness

• Agree with other grown-ups in your life to just give token gifts to each other
• Make sure some of your Christmas break is me-time, and just relax
• Agree to do some of your visiting relatives at a more pleasant time of year

Give your biology some allowance

• Let yourself have lazy evenings for December
• Sleep in at the weekend, so at least sometimes you get up when it is light
• Top up your fuel tank with good comfort food, things to make you laugh, favourite warm clothes – you’re using up more energy than usual

Give yourself the best possible Christmas present this year – be kind to yourself for a month!

May you have a delightful and peaceful Christmas period.

With love

Di and Jo

As I mentioned last month, I recently saw the Disney movie, ‘Christopher Robin’. In the film there were so many nuggets of wisdom, and I was struck by just how poignant and powerful the messages were that were held in the film.

What was wonderful was that as Christopher had aged (he’s now an adult in the film), so Pooh, Piglet, Tigger and all the other Hundred-Acre Wood animals had too. I’ve always considered Winnie the Pooh to be a source of sage wisdom, and for those of you who’ve worked with Meta over the years you’ll know that we have often used his stories to illustrate our work. Now Pooh was older and wiser than ever.

In the film, Christopher Robin is now grown up and has left Hundred-Acre Wood. He’s become a responsible adult, with a sensible job with a luggage manufacturer, is married with a young daughter and has all the responsibilities that go with having the family. He has also lost his innocence, playfulness, his joy and ability to have fun. In his role at the organisation he is asked to ‘reduce costs of the luggage by 25%’ and ‘by the way, we need you to do that by Monday!’ So out of the window goes his promised (and long overdue) trip to the country with his family for a weekend break and work and duty once again takes precedence.

It’s heart breaking to watch because you know that’s Christopher Robin! And he wants to be with his family, but he feels he must conform and do what his organisation demands of him.

He’s being asked to do something that many of you will be familiar with – to reduce costs and he’s also going to have to be creative and innovative in order to get to that 25% reduction in production costs in a few days. The problem is that he’s stressed, he’s running on empty, he’s beating himself up because he’s let his family down and, as a result, the ability to be creative, to be innovative, has completely gone out of the window. How on earth can he do the seemingly impossible in this state?

Thankfully Disney beautifully conspires to re-unite that stuffy, uptight, responsible adult with his childhood chums and what results is a wonderful and inspiring exposition that creativity requires imagination and imagination requires the ability to have fun, play and actively do NOTHING sometimes.

Whilst sitting under the pine tree at the top of the Hundred-Acre Wood in Pooh’s thoughtful spot, Pooh delivers for me one of the most brilliant and sage lines from the film:

“Doing nothing, I find, often leads to the very best kind of something.”

That line stuck with me. Because I have found that when I am busy doing something, there’s no space for the creative ideas to come through. If there’s one thing that is missing in most of our work lives right now it’s space and time for reflection, thinking, and doing nothing. The result? A dearth of creativity and innovation in many organisations.

“But surely doing nothing is a bad thing Jo!” I hear you cry.

Well actually, when was the last time you did nothing at work? When was the last time you had real time to think? When was the last time you had enough time to reflect? When was the last time you allowed yourself space to just be creative?

A dear friend of mine is a top design consultant. He was asked recently by a large global consultancy to set up a design office for them. When I talked to him, he talked eloquently about how important the culture, the environment and the working practices were to a) attract the right type of creative talent and b) to ensure those talented people were able to be at their creative best.

When you stop and think about it, Pooh’s suggestion of the fact that doing nothing leads to the very best kind of something is accurate. We are so often rushing from one thing to the next that there is no space for thinking about anything else other than whatever is next on the to-do list.

Creativity and innovation require time and space. They require time for reflection and time for the inspiration to come in! If you’re busy being busy, the likelihood is that you won’t be very creative in your work.

So why do we need creativity? If I’m not a designer or in a creative profession, then what has creativity got to do with me?

The simple answer is – EVERYTHING.

If you need to write a report, it’s creativity that makes your report the one the board likes to read. If you need to write a proposal, it’s your creative flair that will make it a winner with your potential customer. If you’re looking to solve a major problem in the project you’re working on, the likelihood is you’ll need all your creative juices flowing to get a sustainable and workable solution. If you are a leader facing another round of cost cutting and efficiency saving in your department, you’ll need to get creative to make that possible.

Creativity is at the core of our work-lives; it’s a part of who we are. If we’re not being creative, then life and work is dull and lifeless. Creative places aren’t quiet and silent, they are animated and dynamic. Centres of innovation know that for every innovative and successful idea there are probably 10 that failed or didn’t come up to scratch.

To be at our creative best we need to have not just outside time and space, but inner space too. We need to make sure our minds and bodies are fuelled properly. We need to create the mental space to ensure we can give maximum brain processing power to the creative solutions we may need to come up with. Innovation needs to be FED and running on empty is a sure-fire way to ensure mediocrity.

So what can we do? We all have very busy work lives and a heck of a lot to do! And it’s important to make space for us to think, reflect on and prioritise our work. It’s also important to download your workday, either before you leave the office or when you get home, so that you can free up some mental capacity when you are home.

We suggest carving just a half-hour a week to start off with, maybe at the end of a day on Friday, or first thing on a Monday, or maybe mid-week. Perhaps you need to find a space where you can do nothing, as admittedly the likelihood is that in a busy open-plan office you might not feel comfortable in putting your feet up to just think. So maybe take that half hour away from your desk. Have a walk, or sit in a nearby coffee shop with a cuppa. The important thing is, that you do NOTHING. At first your mind will race with all that needs to be done, but you can always write those down, and after a while it’ll settle down and that’s when the ideas will start to flow.

Once you’ve got into that habit, find yourself more time and space wherever you can. Be that at work or indeed at home. I have found buying and reading a Sunday paper a great way to unwind, and although I’m doing something, I’ve found that it clears my mind of work ‘stuff’ and provokes different more creative types of thought. OK, so I confess it takes me nearly a week to read it, but hey.. Small steps and all that!

At Meta we’re passionate about helping you to be at your creative best. We believe that everyone has the capacity to be brilliant and amazing, and we’re in business to help and support people like you to be your very best.

In February we’ll be starting our Journey to Mastery programme. It’s all about how you can be your excellent best more often, so if this blog has interested you why not drop me a line and I’ll send you some information about next year’s Journey.

And of course we have lots of tools that can help you and your teams to be even more creative, and it’s part of our purpose to share those, so do get in touch if you’d like to inject some creativity and innovation into your team or organisation!

So why not practise doing nothing this month, and see if it leads to the very best kind of [creative] something for you?

I do hope you’ve enjoyed this month’s blog; I’ve certainly enjoyed writing it.

Have a wonderfully creative November!

In peace,

Jo xx

As many of you who’ve known Di and me for years will know, Winnie the Pooh holds a dear place in our hearts. There is sage wisdom in that ‘bear of little brain’ and we’ve often used stories from Winnie the Pooh in our Meta programmes over the years.

This week I went to see ‘Christopher Robin’, the new Disney film which focuses in on Christopher Robin as he grows up and leaves Pooh, Piglet, Tigger and the other animals behind in Hundred Acre Wood. I was read Winnie the Pooh as a child so I have a particular fondness for him. The film is poignant, deep and surprisingly thought provoking. What I love about Disney and its partner Pixar, is that they seem to be asking the questions of society that perhaps more of us need to be asking.

In the film we see the adult Christopher Robin (played most beautifully by Ewan McGregor) devoid of joy, giving everything to his work, working all hours god sends and not having time for his wife and daughter. All joy seems to have left his life; the fun-loving playful Christopher Robin of Hundred-Acre Wood seems a lifetime away. He’s playing the responsible, stiff, obligated adult extremely well. It comes to the point where he has a choice, to go with his family for a weekend away or return to the office to work on ‘reducing costs and cutting staff’ for his manufacturing bosses. Work wins out and his family leave for the country without him. What’s interesting is that this is not a modern re-imagining – this is happening in post-war London. But the theme I’m sure will be something that will sound familiar to most of you reading this.

OK, so maybe your workplace hasn’t asked you to work on the weekend recently, but how many times have you checked your emails over the weekend or just checked in online on a Sunday night? Maybe you haven’t had to not go on your family holiday, but have you been asked (or just expected) to work longer hours? If you’re a leader have you been asked to reduce costs and reduce headcount? Have you sometimes had to put your organisation first? Have you missed the odd bedtime with your children? Have you not seen as much of your children or your partner as you’d have liked?

This is what Disney is highlighting (among many other things in the film such as loss of innocence, how seriously we take life and how we all need to play more, have more fun and enjoy life) and it’s an issue we all need to look at and do something about.

In a recent survey almost two thirds of staff and leaders interviewed said that if money were not the driver they’d leave their current place of work. In another survey of some 3,000 people, 47% said that their working hours had a heavy impact on their work/life balance and a further 39% said that it did have some kind of impact – that’s a whopping 86% who said that work was impinging into their home life.

This is not something that is going away, it is something that is getting worse, not better. Now I don’t want to paint a bleak future, I want to highlight something that for many of you is very real right now.

The tide of work is still coming in, and it will continue to do so until we ourselves decide that it’s time to stem that tide and create our own non-negotiable boundaries: what we will do and what we will not do for work.

For many of us there just is no work/life balance right now, it is dominated by our work. So how do we redress the balance?

We need to create boundaries, hard boundaries that are not to be crossed (unless in an emergency). For some of us that means turning our technology off over the weekend, for others of us it means always being home in time to tuck our children into bed and read them a bedtime story. For some of us it’s about leaving the office at a pre-determined time every day and for others it’s about always taking a lunch break away from our desk. You choose what the hard boundaries are for you, and then you have the softer more flexible boundaries that allow you to be the flexible worker that organisations need right now. At Meta we see just how committed staff and leaders are to their organisations, so committed that they are working themselves beyond what is sustainably possible – mentally and physically.

This year mental health and well-being are at the forefront of many organisational agendas, and it’s important that they are. Far too many people that we know and love are suffering from stress-related health issues right now. So in order to have that mental health and well–being, we actively need to address the WAY in which we are working, not just put on some yoga classes, give a mental health phone line to call, or promote healthy eating. All of these things are GOOD, don’t get me wrong, but we need to look at the causes of stress within the workplace. We need to address the ‘hard work culture’ we have in many organisations, and the longer hours that inevitably come from having more to do in shorter deadlines, with less staff and less budget. The reality is that most of you reading this are now doing a role that was once done by two or three people.

I’m not advocating a revolution; I’m saying that it’s time to re-assess what’s important in our lives. Nothing should be more important than our own well-being, our families wellbeing and yes, that of our staff too.

It’s time to look at HOW we work, so that we can work in a smarter way, one that understands and maximises our brains amazing powers, one that works in harmony with the physical body we inhabit. We need a way of working that realises that our energy and our state are incredibly important to our ability to perform and that inspiration often comes in the quiet, reflection times.

We need to be looking at creating a fun, dynamic and exciting environment where people can be their creative and brilliant best, a culture that enables all in it to flourish, grow and realise their potential. This requires a shift in mind-set, away from results at all costs and doing things faster for less, into a more sensible, common-sense approach that give realistic deadlines, space to think, create and innovate and, importantly, the right level of resource to enable the BEST results.

This is not just some dream that is unattainable, it is absolutely attainable. Look at many of the global tech-companies who do understand how important it is to create the right culture and environment to enable creative brilliance. Note as well, CEOs, Directors and guardians of your organisational cultures that are reading this, that those companies are also amongst the most profitable and successful in the world.

This isn’t about doing these things to ‘tick the box’ for the mental health and well-being agenda, this is about getting the most from your staff, increasing productivity and creativity through developing the right culture.  It’s about working more effectively and efficiently through smarter working practices that enable all your staff to give of their best more of the time. It’s about reducing sickness and turnover of staff, whilst increasing your organisation’s ability to attract the best talent. It’s about increasing quality and innovation whilst delivering more. In short – it just makes SOUND business sense!

So what can we do about this? Well, first of all, as mentioned earlier, it’s important to have an agreement with yourself about what are your boundaries when it comes to work, and to stick to them. We also here at Meta have a whole raft of smarter working tools, that we’re more than happy to share with you, so do get in touch if you’d like some of those.

If you are a leader, you have some influence. At the very least you have influence over your own team. What can you do to create a team-culture that advocates well-being and work-life balance? What can you do that encourages and enables those that you lead to fulfil their potential and be their very best?

If you are at the top table it’s time to ask a different kind of question. The questions of working practices and organisational culture are not ones that you should put off addressing any longer. In the coming years there will have to be a change in organisational working practices, because the younger generations will not tolerate the hard work, deliver at all costs culture that their parents did. A change is coming, the question is do you want to be ahead of that change curve or lag behind?

The future is not in working hard; the future is in working smarter. At Meta we are really passionate about helping individuals, teams, leaders and their organisations to make that cultural transition. It’s not rocket science; it’s actually much easier than you think. We’ve been doing considerable research into the field of smarter working, mental health and well-being, and cultures that enable excellence. We also love to share what we’ve learnt. So if you’ve enjoyed this blog, why not get in touch and talk to us some more about the topics we’ve touched upon?

In the meantime I hope this blog has given you some food for thought!
And I wish you a wonderful month,

In peace,

Jo xx

Last month I suggested that looking fully at the outcomes you want can significantly improve the results you get. This month I want to look at the effect you have on any interaction.

We often forget how powerful we are. Our body language, our voice tone, the words we use, will all affect how well or badly others react to us. We are not usually conscious of this and therefore can take our bad mood, fed-upness etc. into a meeting and wonder why, despite our efforts to be polite and constructive, it doesn’t go well. It is because how we are really feeling shows through despite our best intentions, and has an effect on others involved.

So an important part of our preparation for meetings and conversations takes place just before the event. It is the way we choose to set ourselves up. So often we rush from one meeting to another without stopping for a moment to establish how we want to be in this next interaction, which means we take with us the mood and attitude we finished with in the last one. Now if this was a good meeting and we are feeling good, that could be useful. However, if we have run out of energy or been disappointed, then those are the things we will carry over.

It only takes a few moments to reset ourselves, yet it can make a big difference.

1. Shake off any negative effects from the last thing you were doing – move your body and release the tension.
2. If your energy is low, give yourself a moment to recharge your batteries – have a cuppa, look at something to make you smile.
3. Take a deep breath or two and see yourself having a constructive and useful next meeting.
4. Set up your expectations that it will go well – imagine coming out of the meeting feeling good about it.
5. Remind yourself of reasons for the other party to want this to be a constructive meeting as well.
6. Picture times when similar meetings have gone well.
7. Take another deep breath, let your shoulders relax, and smile to yourself.
8. Now go into the meeting.

All this doesn’t take long at all – not much more time than it takes to read it – but it does change your state and give you a much better chance of a useful meeting.

The extra moments used to prepare yourself properly can really make life easier for you. Try it out for yourself and see…

Di Kamp

Leadership Director of Meta

‘If you haven’t thought about what you really want, you may get something you don’t want.’

When we are preparing for meetings or important conversations, we’re usually good at making sure we have all the relevant information, and have thought of answers for questions that might be asked. These are the things we call good preparation.

And I want to remind you of a couple of other areas of preparation that we often forget to do so thoroughly. This month, I’m looking at defining the outcomes you want from the meeting or interaction.

Now most of us will be clear about the result we want: that the others agree with us, approve our plan of action, act on what we’ve told them etc. However, this result is not the full story of the outcomes we want from the interaction. If it were, then we would never encounter those times when we do get the result we wanted, yet still feel a bit disappointed.

For example, you may have wanted your team to agree to focus on an area of work where performance has slipped a bit, and everyone agrees that they will. And there are a lot of miserable or fed up faces around, and your ‘demand’ gets thrown back in your face if you ask about any other aspect of their work. The focus is happening, the performance is improving, but there is resentment in the air.

If you fully think through your outcomes, you realise that it’s about more than what you want them to do; it’s also about how you want them to react to your request, and wanting them to approach it constructively. So the second stage of the outcomes is to think about what will motivate the team to want to focus and improve that part of their performance. It also prompts you to think about how you can present your request in such a way that it doesn’t feel like a reprimand or restriction.

There is a third stage to a fully formed outcome. This is where you consider, not just the immediate impact on the others, but also the longer term impact or effect. You don’t want the improved performance at the expense of slippage in other areas of their work, nor do you want increased resistance to or resentment of any other requests you may make in the future.

What the act of thinking through, fully, what you really want as outcomes does for you, is to help you prepare far more than just your facts and arguments. It helps you to clarify the approach you will take, the way you will engage the others with what you want to achieve, and how you will make it an attractive proposition.

And as you think through these different aspects of your outcomes, you will find that your mind automatically starts to think of ways you can do this. It’s worth the extra time thinking it through, because it can enhance the likelihood of useful results significantly.

Di Kamp, Leadership Director of Meta

We all have those tasks to do that we put off, because it looks like a big job. It may be a report, or sorting out your inbox emails, or those meeting notes you’ve taken at the time but not really looked at – you get the gist. They are usually tasks that are a mixture of being somewhat complex and also not very exciting or motivating.

The trouble is, the longer we put them off, the bigger they seem to get, so we need a way of tackling them that is not daunting. So, my suggestion is to break it down into smaller chunks – as the saying goes, the way to eat an elephant is to take small pieces at a time!

Clear 10 extra emails a day, sort through one set of meeting notes, get the info you need for the report from one of the sources – just do some small piece towards it. Those small pieces don’t take too long or too much effort, and cumulatively they bring the task down to a manageable size.

Now sometimes we tell ourselves off, because we know it isn’t really such a big job – but we still don’t do it! There’s no point in judging ourselves or being logical about it, because that doesn’t help to get the job done. What does help is still to break it down into even smaller chunks. For example, to respond to that email requires checking your diary to see if you’re free, checking what else you are doing that week, and doing some prep for it – the travelling time, the info you’ll need. So make it a 5 or 6 step project. Once you have started it, it will get easier to finish.

Things that are left hanging because they feel daunting don’t usually go away – in fact they occupy a part of our mind all the time they’re left, and often seem to keep growing bigger! That uses energy we could more usefully put elsewhere. And once you start chipping away at them, they almost always turn out to be easier than we thought.

So come on, do that first small step on that thing that’s hanging over you, and make your life easier.

Di Kamp
Leadership Director of Meta

I remember my boss at the time once asking another member of staff to bring him the report on his clients by the end of the week, in the middle of talking to me. Dave said: ‘Yes, of course,’ and carried on to wherever he was going. My boss turned back to me and said: ‘He won’t, you know..’ And he didn’t. And the boss was angry with him. Yet he knew that the verbal agreement was not what was really going on with Dave.

Do you recognise this syndrome? I have since seen it repeated many times, and it still seems daft to me that we will all sometimes accept words alone as being the communication with us, and then complain because the words were not fulfilled.

If we take a moment or two to notice what’s really going on with the person, we can respond to their full communication. The tone of voice, the language used, the manner of speaking all give us more information about how that person is, and how they are reacting to us, or the particular message. Their body language tells us even more. That ‘knowing’ that my boss had, was because he had picked up more information about Dave’s response, yet he chose to ignore it, to everyone’s cost.

In that instance, Dave was distracted and about to go into an important coaching session, and he just forgot. It could have been that he was unsure how to do the report, or already feeling he had too much to do, or resenting the way in which the boss had asked him. We don’t necessarily know why we’re getting a mixed message from someone, just that it is a mixed message.

If we take the time to notice what’s going on, and check it out, we can do something about it. We can ask them if there’s a problem, and if we can help with it. That way we can avoid the likelihood of failure on one side, or resentment and annoyance on the other.

And of course, if we know we are the one giving a mixed message, we could take the time to say: ‘I’ll do my best, but I’m really busy this week, and I’m not sure how I’ll fit it in’, or: ‘Can you put a note on my computer – I’m just going into a meeting and I might forget.’ Or whatever may clarify our response.

Words are great and we can’t do without them, but they are never the full message. Just take a moment to notice what’s really going on, and you can save yourself a lot of extra hassle.

We’re told that we need to learn from our mistakes, and there’s no doubt we can, if we can get over feeling bad about making them in the first place, and if we can then work out a better way of handling whatever it is. It isn’t the most effective way to learn and develop though. If it were, we wouldn’t need teachers or role models!

However, the prevailing culture is one that emphasises mistakes and problems. We analyse them to death: why did it happen; what caused it; whose fault is it; and eventually, what can we do about it. If something has worked, we usually just tick it off the list and return to problems.

Excellent people take a different approach – they learn from what went well. Imagine if we spent as much time on those things we do well, asking similar questions: what worked; what helped it to work; what contributed to the success; what made the difference; and then, where else could we apply what we’ve realised.

When we do begin to analyse what went well, we discover good practice that can be used in lots of situations, in terms of the approach used to achieve this specific task or project. Most things work well when the people involved are motivated, and really clear about the outcomes they want to achieve. People usually need to feel it’s something worth achieving – there’s some benefit or value to it. It also tends to work better if those involved work together well and all value each other’s contributions. The list goes on, and each point identified can be used to enhance the likelihood of success in other aspects of work.

This form of analysis gives us immediately useful information for planning the next project or task, as well as making us feel even better about our achievements!

I’m not suggesting that we stop paying attention to mistakes and problems. It just might be useful to give an equal amount of attention to the good stuff – it has rich information to give us.

Di Kamp
Leadership Director of Meta

Last month I wrote about using your critic more effectively. This month I am looking at the other half of the story: continually growing the habit of appreciating all the helpful things that others do.

It is easy to take for granted the everyday things that people do. We notice the big gestures of course, when someone goes out of their way to be helpful, but we don’t tend to pay attention to the smaller, more routine things that people do. Yet these are the building blocks of relationships, which create the environment for successful teamwork.

On any given day, it is likely that some of the following happen at work:

• Someone does their part of a task and hands it over on time
• Someone makes a cuppa at just the right moment
• Someone lightens the mood when things are tough by making you laugh
• Someone takes a message for you while you’re away from your desk
• Someone has cleaned up the office before you arrive for work
• Someone has made sure the technology is working
• Someone has solved a problem that could have landed up on your desk.

(And of course, there is a long list of things that ‘someone’ does which make it easier for you to be at work; the chores that you don’t have to do, whether that be gong to the supermarket, looking after the kids, or driving the bus or train you catch!)

We forget, sometimes, how reliant we are on other people to make our lives easier; and, of course, you do some of the same things for others as well, so we can justify not always appreciating what others do by saying that it balances out. However, we re missing out in thee big ways when we don’t show appreciation to others.

1. Positive appreciation of what others do creates that environment of helpfulness and cooperation, and encourages people to do those helpful things even more. We all like to be appreciated, and respond positively to it.
2. Everyone involved gets a boost to the feel-good factor – those you are thanking, and you as you thank them. And this encourages more people to appreciate others more often, continuing to build that useful environment.
3. Our lives get even easier! People are more likely to help us out if we appreciate what they do already.

And it doesn’t have to be a grand response: ‘Thank you for..’, ‘It made a difference when you..’, ‘I notice that you…’ Just a simple sentence can make a big difference. Just for one day, notice all the little ways in which others make a positive difference to your life, and say thank you whenever possible. You will be surprised by how much others make your life easier.

Di Kamp, Leadership Director of Meta

We have all learnt to notice what others do wrong or don’t do, and we’re good at it! This is not surprising, because we live in a culture where the media reports predominantly on the mistakes and wrongdoings of others, so that ‘flavour’ is constantly in front of us. What’s more, most of us have been brought up and ‘educated’ through having our faults, weaknesses and wrongdoings pointed out to us – they are what drew attention to us more than our good behaviour.

However, the fact it’s normal doesn’t mean that it’s effective. Being critical of others doesn’t make us feel any better about them, nor does it improve the situation. It also makes them feel bad, if we voice it, and often resentful of us.

So what can we do that would be more effective?

Firstly, we need to ensure that whatever we are criticising is in perspective. Do they always do it? With everyone? Is it in certain circumstances? Or is it a one-off? And when are they getting it right? In most cases, the focus on their bad behaviour causes us to forget to notice the things they do well, and the times they perform well.

Secondly, we need to think about what outcome we want. Do we just want them to know we’ve noticed, or to feel bad about it? Or do we want their behaviour to improve? I assume that most of us would prefer the latter!

Thirdly, we need to consider what might help them to improve. Often, people don’t realise the impact their behaviour has had on others, so they don’t see it as a problem. For example, someone who leaves things till the last minute may not be aware that this makes those who pick up the next stage of the task anxious, in case this time they don’t deliver. Since the negative impact on others is not deliberate, it is important to just make them aware of it, not use it as an accusation.

The other aspect of helping them to improve is to identify what exactly would be an improvement. I find it useful to complete this sentence: ‘It would make a real difference if you could..’ For example: ‘It would make a real difference if you could show that you are going to complete your part of the task on time, instead of dismissing queries about it from others.’

Finally, having expressed a clear positive step to them, it is important to check out what might help them to do that. After all, if it were obvious to them, they would probably have done it already.

And of course, we also all notice our own faults and mistakes and beat ourselves up about them with our inner critic. Wouldn’t it make sense to apply this same process to ourselves?

1. Get it in perspective: It’s not my constant or only form of behaviour.
2. What outcome do I want? I want to feel better about my own behaviour.
3. What might help me to improve? What is the one thing I can do next time the same situation occurs that would make a difference.
4. What would help me to do that?

Our critical voice can be really useful in helping us and others to develop, if we use it as a starting point, an identification of a possible improvement, rather than as a finishing point, a judgement.

With that in mind, we wish you a wonderful month ahead.

Di Kamp, Leadership Director of Meta