Author: Jeremie Averous

How Real Relationships Induce Change and Cannot Remain Static

“Real relationships tend to change rather than to remain static” says Carl Rogers in his famous book ‘On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy‘.

Friends-coffeeReal relationships are relationships that go beyond the superficial into real giving and receiving. They are relationships in which we are authentic and were we discover ourselves.

Thus, necessarily, this quality of relationships will tend to create change in ourselves and the relationship equally needs to change to adapt to these new circumstances.

Following the same idea, Carl Rogers, notes, in his practice of psychotherapy, “If I can provide a certain type of relationship, the other person will discover within himself the capacity to use that relationship for growth, and change and personal development will occur.”

Poor relationships foster defensiveness, passivity, and prostration. Real relationships, on the contrary, foster growth and expansion. Their potential can be unlimited.

Review your relationships and ask yourself which are those that change and mature over time. These might be much deeper relationships than the others.

Share

How True Leaders Focus on Growing People

What makes the difference in terms of leadership is how true leaders focus on developing people.  They understand it is vital part of their duty, and how only this behavior creates the conditions for great work.

true leaders creates more leaders“The leaders of great organizations do not see people as a commodity to be managed to help grow the money. They see the money as the commodity to be managed to help grow their people.” – says Simon Sinek in ‘Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t‘.

But that should not stay at the level of lip service and budget assignment, or even the creation of company university. A clear symptom of this is when true leaders go themselves to teach classes to their managers and employees; from the company introduction to newcomers to advanced classes about managerial and leadership skills.

Actually, the question merits to be asked. If a leader does not spontaneously involve himself in mentoring and training, and spend a significant par of his time in these activities. can he really be a true leader?

Share

Why We Should Welcome Uncertainty in Our Lives

“It’s funny that when people look back at their careers, the moments that stand out the most – the things they’re most proud of – are often the times that were the most uncertain” says Hugh MacLeod of Gapingvoid.

big chasm illusion
How do you feel in times of uncertainty? And if that was an illusion?

He continues about an example of great success (Netflix when it moved in video streaming instead of sending DVD through the post): “When they were stressed and afraid and not really all that sure anything was going to work out for the best…in fact, they were quite sure it wasn’t. But they kept pushing, until something gave way. That’s the thing about success. It doesn’t appear until it’s over and the results are in.”

It is obvious that it is when we push beyond our comfort zone that things feel uncertain for us. It is when we  persist in our idea even if it looks weird that we are able to cross the chasm and reach a new state that seems more stable.

Don’t be afraid of uncertainty. Welcome it even if that is not comfortable and even if it exposes you to the critics of those who remain on the safe side.

Just go for it.

Share

How to Make Commercial Departments More Creative

Following our post ‘How Commercial Is One of the Most Creative Activities‘, let us dwell a little bit into the organization of most commercial departments – and how these organizations seem to be designed to stifle creativity rather than fostering it.

Boring PresentationI am always amazed at how many commercial departments are run in a very bureaucratic manner, with a focus on compliance to procedures, requirements to report continuously and long-winded PowerPoint presentations even on the topic of marketing efforts or even on the status of negotiation with some prospects.

Of course, compliance is needed to make sure that certain limits are not exceeded; reporting and creating databases of commercial efforts is useful. But there needs to be space for creativity and I can’t find it in a number of commercial departments. Clever solutions need to be found to create the most compelling (and competitive) offer. This requires time to think and experiment; time to brainstorm and produce quality work (note – quality work is generally in the form of a text document, not of a set of slides). Where is that space for creativity?

Create a formal space for creativity in your commercial department and ensure for your organization a definite competitive advantage! And for my sake, reduce your addiction on PowerPoint slides: get to the work of creating real documents that will force you to put your ideas in order!

Share

How to Leverage Contracting as a Creative Activity

Commercial activities are to be creative. Does that mean contract development and negotiation is also a creative activity? My answer is clearly yes – with some safeguards. However most organizations focus on the safeguards and forget the creative part, with sometimes dire consequences.

Thick Contract
This Thick Contract is the result of a creative process!

Safeguards need to be implemented to protect the organization – the legalese that is often boring, sometimes useful and never to be forgotten for your piece of mind. I am talking about limits of liabilities, mutual indemnities and all these clauses that you must have in your contract to protect yourself in case things go really awry.

Still beyond this we should not forget that a Contract is there to reflect a commercial deal; and that a commercial deal is fundamentally the result of a creative process; therefore, for the contract to be successful, it needs to reflect the creative result of the negotiation (which hopefully will make the safeguard clauses superfluous).

Contract Managers in the industry are too focused on establishing compliance to a set of norms. They do not understand enough that a Contract needs to reflect the outcome of a highly creative process whereby we have developed a commercial approach tailored to the situation. The contracting process (including compliance) and format needs to be flexible enough to accommodate this creativity – without certain bounds.

Let’s transform our contracting processes to account better for the creative nature of this endeavor!

Share

Next Public Speaking Occasions: Singapore and Oman

Following the publication of my last book, I will be speaking about Project Cost Control on the following occasions in the coming months:

  • public-speakingin Singapore with the Singapore Project Management Institute (SPMI) on Tuesday 2 Dec evening (7 to 9pm – NTUC Center – 1 Marina Boulevard) – click for details and registration.

Please join if you are interested by the topic or just to meet!

Share

How to Avoid Despair – a Choice that is the Greatest Responsibility of Man

In his book On Becoming a Person, Carl Rogers refers to Kierkegaard. “He points out that the most common despair is to be in despair at not choosing, or willing, to be oneself; but that the deepest form of despair is to choose ‘to be another than himself‘. On the other hand ‘to will to be that self which one truly is, is indeed the opposite of despair‘, and this choice is the deepest responsibility of man“.

be yourselfWho are you really? Who do you want to look like really? Is that you?

As I often observe, this tension is indeed a very critical element of people’s well being. Many dysfunctions of individuals can be explained by this gap between who they are and who they want to be.

And it is a choice for each of us. We can choose to stay the way we’ve been raised when other people were shaping us and maybe transferring their expectations upon ourselves. We can choose to try to fit so completely in society’s expectations. Or we can choose to be ourselves, which has some advantages regarding the congruence of our actions; avoids deep despair; but can be quite stressful in a social context.

Indeed it could be our deepest responsibility to make this fundamental choice: do we choose to be ourselves?

Ponder this choice for a moment. Be honest with yourself.

What did you choose?

Share

How to Listen to the Language Of Our Physical Reactions

“Physical reactions are often the language through which we express painful feelings, especially when it isn’t safe to say them to the people we’re upset with. We often say with our bodies what we can’t or won’t say with our mouths.” – writes the psychologist Susan Forward in Toxic Parents.

back acheAnd these repressed feelings translate into various conditions of chronic pain, tension, insomnia and other symptoms. Just because we can’t say it with our mouth, it endures in our body.

In the particular case of toxic or even abusive parents, Susan Forward’s approach is to enable to talk to the person. Granted it cannot always be a dialogue but the therapeutic impact of just being able to express one’s feelings on a difficult subject, in a calm manner, makes a lot of physical symptoms disappear (it might take quite a lot of time though to reach the stage when this single expression is possible).

If you suffer from some chronic pain that can’t be directly linked to a physical condition, consider whether you would not have some deep feelings repressed somewhere. Then consider how you could express these feelings, calmly, to the person concerned.

Share

How Commercial Activities Are Part of the Most Creative Activities

I have come to realize that commercial activities – from business development to the development and the negotiation of a commercial deal or even the implementation of a general commercial model – are among those activities in a company that require the most creativity.

Commercial creativityIt requires creativity because first, it is all about creating something. Not the product of the company, of course, but another tangible deliverable that is essential: the commercial proposal, a document that will describe how we create value to the client or to the market in a way that will fit its needs.

It is also creative because it requires to develop a solution to a particular issue, often while discussing with a client to understand its particular needs. And depending on the situation, our usual commercial approach might not be appropriate, and we need to demonstrate creativity in setting up a solution that will fit the constraints and the needs.

This observation about the fact that commercial activities are fundamentally creative activities have a lot of consequences on how they should be implemented – and on the profile of the people that should do them. Did you realize it?

Share

Why We Should Take More Time to Enjoy Where We Are

“We’re so busy watching out for what’s just ahead of us that we don’t take time to enjoy where we are“. This quote is quite accurate I find (I am not sure about the attribution, it seems to be another internet wisdom pieces). Although I struggle too often to take the time.

enjoy the present momentThe interesting twist in this quote is that I probably don’t take enough time to enjoy the present moment because I am watching our for what is just ahead of me, but because I am looking to far away in the future (self-test shows that I am very future oriented from the time perspective).

So it is not quite what is just ahead of me, but what is on the horizon that makes me move forward too fast.

And you? Do you take enough time to enjoy where you are right now?

Share

Who is Wiser – Our Mind or our Body?

A lot of modern writings focus on the power of the ‘gut feeling‘, and intuition, and how following body perception and emotions can often be more effective than following our rational mind.

golf-gripIn a similar approach, in the excellent novel around golf, ‘the Legend of Bagger Vance‘, Steven Pressfield writes: “Intelligence, I have told you, does not reside in the brain but in the hands. Let them do the thinking, they’re far wiser than you are“.

Is our body really wiser than we are? Have we outgrown with our mind our body’s self-balance, and its ability to integrate experience to foster our decision-making?

I think we always need to remember that there are instances where we need to respond – where we have to positively exercise the choice to respond to what is happening, instead of reacting. And that requires our mind at work. It might be rare. It might not be in these situations where we have trained and repeated movements thousands, millions of times – situations where we’d better follow what our body wants to do without interfering. But as the body is wise in most instances, so is our mind the wisest overall even if it should interfere much less than it does usually.  Even if it chooses only once in a while to decide against our body.

Share

How to Manage Your Daily Reserve of Self-Control

“Self-control is a finite resource. You can only ask so much of yourself each day” – says Nick Crocker. He continues: “You’ll snap or warp or splinter if you ask too much. You have a limited capacity to direct yourself a certain way. It’s worth considering where that directive capacity goes every day“.

self-control - don't explodeSeen from that perspective, we need to be careful in our utilization of self control and be wary not to exceed our capacity in a given day.

This probably means that if you realize you have used a fair bit early, you need to make sure you don’t put yourself in situations where significant self-control is required.

However I do believe that certain exercises of self-reflection and physical exercise can increase one’s self-control reserve when that is really needed.

In any case, if you feel you are exhausting your self-control reserves don’t explode yet! Maybe wait until the next day to tackle the new situation?

Share