Developing Global Empathic Capacity
By · CommentsIn response to education being one of our most critical global imperatives in our new century, Matthew Taylor (Chief Executive of Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce- RSA) suggests “fostering empathic capacity is just as important to achieving a world of citizens at peace with each other and themselves”. In this RSA Animate video, Matthew Taylor discusses 21st Century Enlightenment, or the emergence of self aware autonomy.
Empathic leadership needs to fully understand this concept: educational leaders in particular have a huge role to play in raising global empathic capacity.
To pinch another quote from this piece:
“(A better world needs us) to resist our tendencies to make right or true that which is merely familiar, and wrong or false that which is only strange”
This is well worth 11 minutes of your time!
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Listening – the key to all successful leadership
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Listening is the most powerfully enabling human behaviour. The thing is, we are rarely taught to listen, we learn to listen. Our default listening styles are usually autobiographically oriented: we tend to listen for ourselves. Listening that engages, enables and that helps create a new future, is focussed on the speaker, for the speaker. Great coaches listen for the coachee, not the coach, for example.
In TheoryU, Otto Scharmer proposes 4 levels of listening (shown from most superficial to most deep):
- Downloading – listening by confirming habitual judgements or assumptions
- Attentive listening – listening for things different to what you already know
- Empathic listening – with the perception of the position or context of the person speaking
- Generative (or what we would call Emergent) listening – when new futures or possibilities emerge, and you are no longer the same person as a result.
To get at anything deeper than ‘downloading’, we need to abandon default autobiographical listening for, example, observational listening. Observational listening is listening with the purpose of feeding back what it is that you see and hear. By observing, you starve the brain of attention and energy that drives judgement, assumption and opinion. It is observing key words, key energy, expressions, observed emotion… anything you see and hear in succinct form.
Take this example:
A colleague or friend breaks down in a conversation and cries in front of you. You could nod knowingly, and say “I understand how you feel” (downloading) or you give them all of your attention and say “I can see the feeling you have here…” (empathic listening).
Simple observation has moved what was intended to be empathic (but most often is patronising) to truly being felt by the person as empathic.
Listening can change the world – but only if it is non-autobiographical and observational.
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Teach them RESPECT!
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I am at the world conference for the Alliance of International Education in Melbourne, a gathering of some of the sharpest and most engaging minds in international education. Yet even here, I’ve heard the call to action: “we need to teach our students more respect”.
Think about this for a moment… when was the last time that you were ‘taught’ respect by another? Have you ever been taught respect, or rather, have you simply learnt it? In my view, respect, like all values cannot be taught, but are adopted or osmosed. Think of a strong magnet aligning the compasses near it as a metaphor.
So what are the mechanisms, or behaviours, that influence values alignment? Research shows us that three key behaviours by teachers, leaders and parents have high ‘alignment’ potential:
- Observational listening without judgement, assumption or advice
- Unconditional love and/or respect
- Universal belief in the ability of the person to find their own path/solution/answer
When these behaviours are detected, respect, for example, in its true form, is adopted as a value and as a habit.
So don’t teach them respect, just BE respectful, and they will follow!
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Motivation and performance – the real story
By · CommentsThis is required watching for anyone who is concerned with leading improving performance through motivation. It puts to bed the myth that carrot and stick rewards for complex cognitive engagement once and for all. How will this change the way you engage and provide motivation for those you lead. For more, see http://www.theRSA.org
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Brain-based change: 3 things you need to know
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To name this post as ‘brain-based change’ is a tautology. ’Brain-based learning’ is very much the same – the fact that we need to label change and learning in this way speaks of how little we pay attention to the brain when we try to create learning or change.
1. Nobody thinks like you do: you brain is unique, period. Nobody, historically, right now or in the future, is likely to have a brain identical to yours. So often we try to give others our solutions, advice, opinion, but rarely does this ‘land’ in a way that is ‘native’ to the other person’s brain. Better to help them ponder, tease, reflect and articulate: this is how we all map the outer world to our own internal brain geography. Conclusion: Advice is a poor growth tool where change or learning is the goal.
2. The brain is plastic: not artificial or shallow, just very malleable. Your brain changes minute by minute, new connections being formed and pruned as the brain manages its limited resources. Things you pay repeated attention to over time become ‘hard-wired’, things that you ignore lose priority through connection atrophy. Old habits that you ignore just become less dominant, new skills starved of attention disappear almost altogether. Conclusion: create the conditions where attention is paid to solution, not problem.
3. Harness your attention: we spend most of our time not being aware of how we spend our attention. If attention is the key to learning and change, and if what we pay attention to becomes hard-wired, then the more we are aware of our attention, the more we can manage the how we spend this resource. Attention awareness is, itself, a skill of mindfulness. Paying attention to our focus over time habituates greater control over attention. Conclusion: without awareness there is no change.
Apply these principles to yourself and you become a better manager (of things and processes). Apply them to others and you become a better leader (of people).
Further reading:
Further learning:
Third Generation Leadership Workshop, June 22 Sydney (Doug Long)
Success Zone Classrooms: using neuroscience and coaching to solve engagement and behaviour management
Advance Notice: Success Zone Workshop for Teachers
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Success Zone Classrooms Workshops: Becoming an Education 3.0 Practitioner
Exciting news: we are beginning a round of workshops designed to help teachers teach their students about their brains using Success Zone principles. This naturally leads to a ‘behaviour management system’ (I hesitate to use this term) based around knowing the best brain regions to trigger, and those to avoid.
This is a fabulous opportunity to shape your teaching career as a beginning teacher, or to reinvigorate your career as an established teacher.
- Is behaviour management wearing you down, taking up untold time, and the focus of your day?
- Are your behaviour management techniques fraying a bit at the edges (like you)?
- Are you looking for better ways to engage and involve your students?
- Are looking to stay calm under pressure and manage your own emotions well when faced with conflict or angry/aggressive parents or students?
- Do you wish for students that take more responsibility for their own behaviour?
- Do you ever wonder what secrets of engagement outstanding teachers are using?
Currently only about 1 in 20 teachers are outstanding*. Would you like to be one of the minority, or would you like more of your staff to be outstanding in the eyes of students?
This innovative and inspiring workshop will show you:
- Aspects of the brain that are critical to the learning and teaching process
- Two key mind states (the Blue and Red Zones) that impact on behaviour and learning
- How your mind state impacts on the behaviour and learning of students
- The ‘secret’ skills of coaches and influential leaders that trigger high engagement
- How to teach brain awareness to students
- How to use brain awareness to build a framework of behaviour management and self-managing students
“Andrew’s style models everything he is presenting. His work is engaging, interesting, challenging and experiential. Best of all, you can walk away with immediate tools and skills that you can apply at home and at school.” Nella Cascone, Assistant Principal, Iramoo Primary School.
Date: Wednesday, June 16 2010, 9am to 4pm
Venue: Season’s Botanic Gardens Hotel, 348 St Kilda Rd Melbourne
Cost: $97 per participant
More information and booking details are available at:
http://successzoneclassrromsmelb1.eventbrite.com
Announcing a business seminar in Sydney, 22 June 2010
Third Generation Leadership is the component that can draw together the various leadership approaches being used by any organisation so that the leadership provided in this 21st century is increasingly effective.
The workshop covers:
- What is Third Generation Leadership and how does it enhance existing leadership approaches?
- How do our ingrained value systems impact on our leadership?
- How can leaders deal with the increasing complexity of today’s world?
- What are the behaviours we can use in order to be 3G Leaders?
Prior to attending the workshop, all participants will be required to complete the The BrainMap® & Yo!Dolphin!TM questionnaire and you will receive feedback from this at the workshop. Each questionnaire takes about 15-20 minutes to complete on-line. The BrainMap® & Yo!Dolphin!TM will enable you to better understand the issues involved in implementing Third Generation Leadership and for being a 3G Leader.
In your lifetime, your brain may make fundamental shifts in the way it is wired several times. And each time it does, it may produce very different new values and beliefs. And when it starts using these new values and beliefs, the world will actually look very different to it. This is critical for Third Generation Leadership and 3G Leaders.
The BrainMap® & Yo!Dolphin!TM are registered trade marks of Brain Technologies Corporation, USA
What you will get:
In this workshop I will help you understand:
- Your brain’s locus of control and how this impacts on you as a leader and on your followers
- How you can shift your brain’s locus of control to the “blue zone”
- How you can facilitate growth in your followers
- How you can better engage your followers with both their work and the people they work with
- How to use this knowledge and be a Third Generation Leader.
Workshop facilitator
Douglas Long is a Director of Group 8 Management Pty Ltd. He is responsible for leading Group 8’s work in the corporate sector and ensuring the delivery of high quality and value-adding services to clients around Australia and the region. He has a PhD in organisational psychology.
For more than 40 years Douglas Long has been learning about, practicing, researching, teaching and facilitating leadership and change.
Where and when?
Tuesday June 22, 2010, 8-30am -5-00pm
North Sydney Harbourview Hotel 17 Blue Street, North Sydney
(100m down Blue St towards the Harbour Bridge from North Sydney Railway Station)
Fee:
$495 per person inclusive of GST, includes your The BrainMap® & Yo!Dolphin!TM profiles, all materials, coffee on arrival, morning tea, lunch and afternoon tea.
Download the flyer and registration form here: Third Generation Leadership
Explaining your Blue and Red Zone mind states
By · CommentsThis video introduces the concept of Blue and Red Zones, and how these states arise out of activity in different parts of the brain.
Site maintenance and upgrade…
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Please bear with us – you might see some quirks and transient bits while all of this happens.
Cheers…
Want to influence others more? The secret is…
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- Image by Orange_Beard via Flickr
Listen. That’s it… just listen.
Think of two to three people who you know listen to you really well. People who do not interrupt, that just listen. It is more than likely that these people are amongst those that you hold as influential.
When we listen to others, more often than not we are listening for ourselves. Even when our purpose is to help another, still we tend to listen for us. Think of the last time someone spoke about a problem they are having… Did you listen to the detail, come up with some answers and make suggestions about what they should do? If so, the listening was for you, not for them. So that you could come up with the answer. Those special few who do just listen do so without engaging their own thinking – they use all of their available attention on the speaker.
So a few key points then:
Listen to observe: if you listen as if you were going to observe back what you see and hear, you tend to disengage your thinking, freeing up scarce but critical attention. When people ‘feel’ your attention as being on them alone, and for them alone, they feel validated, acknowledged and accepted. In return, their respect for you goes up, as does your influence on them.
Listen with optimism: listen with the belief that they can and will find their own answer. This shifts the solution responsibility from you to them, and further helps focus your attention on them and not you. This doesn’t mean that you can’t suggest, advise or direct. It’s just that your belief in someone triggers the neural circuits for confidence and creativity.
Know where your listening attention is going: most of the time we are unaware of what we are listening to and for. Watch yourself as you listen, and if you find yourself immersed in trying to find the solution for someone, step back up a level, disengage your own thinking and just listen to them, for them.
The results can be astounding… for you and them!
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