Dr Carole Pemberton

Remember the plane that crashed into the Hudson River and the extraordinary presence of  mind of pilot Chesley Sullenberger.  He had seconds to take action when a flock of geese flew into the plane’s engines, disabling them and leaving the plane in imminent danger of crashing into New York.  He made the decision to land on water, knowing it would mean the end of the plane but had the possibility of saving lives.  How was he able to keep that presence of mind when most of us would have frozen in terror, panicked or been overwhelmed by the emotion of seeing our impending death?

The answer he gave in his autobiography, was not that he was superhuman, switching off emotion and operating with ice cold logic.  He writes “I knew this was the worst aviation challenge I had ever faced.  It was the most sickening, pit of your stomach, falling through the floor feeling I had ever experienced”, but alongside that he was able to do something that is often elusive.  He was able to feel the emotion without becoming the emotion.  Even in the most critical moment of his life, he was able to experience the emotion, whilst also holding onto the cognition that he knew what needed to be done.

Contrast that with how those of us not trained as pilots respond to challenges which have no life threatening implications.  Take yesterday, when I received a piece of news related to my work that was insignificant in the grand scale of things.  How did I react?  Not like Sullenberger.  I became the emotion.  The sinking feeling in my stomach was converted into negative thoughts.  Within minutes I had catastrophized the meaning of this event, for my working relationship with a client, and had created a future that only heightened my emotional response.

What I had lost access to are the skills that come with not being caught in being the emotion: the ability to focus on what needs to be done in that moment – to deal with the job at hand, rather than being caught by thoughts of the future.  The difficulty was quickly resolved when I regained control of my emotions, and just asked ‘what do I need to do now to fix this?’.

Sullenberger talks of having developed that ability to focus through his training as a pilot.  The Head of Leadership at West Point Academy in the US, Colonel Thomas Kolditz sees it as a key skill developed in military training.  He talks of sharpening focus and turning outwards in times of high risk, rather than getting dysfunctionally excited and self absorbed.  If soldiers can learn that skill when faced by danger to life, how can those of us without that discipline become better at managing our emotions to stay in control of our brains.

The answer that many people are now discovering is mindfulness. Learning how to pay attention to the present moment, non judgementally – to be able to notice the emotion, rather than becoming overwhelmed by the emotion is at the heart of  mindful practice.  Adapted from Buddhist practice, research is now supporting what Buddhists have long known: that mindfulness improves ability to focus attention, it increases flexibility of thinking, it speeds up the processing of visual information and enhances psychological well being.

What this means is that the processes trained into pilots and soldiers can be learned by those of us not on the front line, so that when we face our own challenges we have the resilience resources generated by mindfulness available to us.

If mindfulness is a new idea for you then check out the  website of Michael Chaskalson, a leading practitioner of bringing mindfulness into working life.  www.mindfulness-works.com

When a CEO resigns because of a disclosure about his private life, the expectation is that they will disappear from public view,  become a private citizen once more, and rapidly be forgotten.  What made the former CEO of BP Lord Browne different, was that he wrote about what happened next in his autobiography.  What was  noticeable in his account  was his recognition of the value of having faced difficulty and learned from it. He talked  of being happier than he has ever been and of his recognition that the person he had become was arrogant, and was hiding his loneliness in his work.

Steve Jobs talking to Stanford graduates in 2005 made a similar admission when he spoke of the learning that came from being sacked from Apple: the company he had founded. While his instinct was to run away as a very public failure, he slowly began to realise that the most important thing was what he loved doing, and so he began again. From that new beginning emerged Pixar, which in turn was eventually purchased by Apple. He came back to where he had started. Except of course he didn’t. The person who re-entered was changed. As he said, “Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith”.

This pattern is found again and again in accounts of those who have faced failure in public ways.  As painful as it is, there is something about facing reality and accepting failure that allows for moving forward.  At the point of facing rather than running away from what has happened, there is a liberation from which new possibilities emerge.

Russ Harris calls this the ‘reality slap’, and in his new book of the same name, he writes about the value of 4 steps to moving forward:

1. Hold yourself kindly.  The instinct when something bad happens is to move into harsh self judgement.Show a bit of compassion to yourself, in the same way as you would to a friend going through a hard time.
2. Drop the anchor.  You are in the midst of a storm being buffeted by the winds – dropping anchor is about finding ways of grounding yourself.  Learning simple mindfulness exercises can be a powerful way of separating yourself away from the whirlwind of thoughts, and recognising you  as separate from the problem which is impacting you.
3. Take a stand.  Difficult times are when it is most important to ask yourself ‘What do I stand for?’  ‘What is important to me?’  ‘What meaning can I create from this experience?’
4. Find the treasure.  Just as Lord Browne found that his life was better and more authentic as a result of his public exposure and Steve Jobs went on to even greater success using his learning from setback, there is treasure to be found in difficulty.  It will not be apparent at the outset, but by following steps 1-3 it will become clear where that treasure lies.

Facing the reality slap contradicts most of the advice given to those who are experiencing career difficulty.  Among all the books that are written on careers, the attention is primarily on the skills for success – find your strengths, hone your brand. Very little is given to the importance of facing and learning from hardship.

For anyone reading this who has just experienced a career setback that is affecting their view of themselves and their possibilities, take these 3 steps.

1. Be  kinder to yourself  today than you were yesterday.  This could be a thought, or it could be an action.
2. Sit down, feet on ground, back against a chair and close your eyes.  Allow your breath to get into a regular rhythm, and when it does take 10 breaths.  During those 10 breaths notice the thoughts that come into your mind (as they will) and let them go.  Don’t hang onto the thought, but treat it as a car going past your window.  After your 10 breaths open your eyes and notice how you are feeling.  Build this into your daily life.
3. Ask yourself how do I want to be after this experience?  How can I use this time positively so that it contributes to my life’s journey, rather than it being a detour?

By working on these steps, the treasure will emerge.

Having worked as a careers coach through 3 decades, the last few years have been remarkable for how little interest there has been from organisations in career coaching. An environment of growth provided opportunity,and career coaching conversations have often focussed on ‘what more do I want now that I have experienced success?’, or ‘what do I need to do to get . . .?, Conversations which assumed abundance, and an expectation that will and belief could control outcomes. Career coaching has often focussed on the ‘talented’, and for them a career conversations has had the implication of that more will be on offer.

In that climate career conversations have focussed on skills, interests, values, strengths and motivations – with a belief that once the data was gathered the right opportunity would be available. But things have changed.

The mood of the country has changed. There is no sense of confidence about the future.  How can there be when there is now talk of a triple dip recession, and when the statistics show that this recession is outlasting any of the 20th century.  Individuals who never expected to be in the job market are finding cutbacks and changing strategies have placed them there.  Once there, it is taking them longer to obtain work.

But it is not only those who leave who are facing difficulty.  For those who remain the issue of career is still  relevant, but the reality of the career journey looks different. Fewer opportunities, changing skills demands, less budget for development. Managers, HR professionals and internal coaches are becoming involved in career conversations which are demanding:

• How to bring the skills of support while not denying reality.
• How to help someone back on track whose resilience has been
  sapped by disappointment
• How to balance belief in the resourcefulness of individuals without it seeming like naive optimism

That is why we need a new approach to careers coaching, which can work with the tough stuff skilfully, and with integrity.

That is why Coaching to Solutions has developed 2 new offerings for those who are being asked to coach :

• A programme for those new to career coaching which provides tools
  and models for working with range of career issues.
• A programme for those with established coaching skills which focuses
  on career coaching to build resilience.

Both programmes lead to a recognised qualification from the Institute of Leadership and Management.

Career coaching is easy when times are good, but it is even more essential when times are tough.

You deal with changing job, changing employer, moving home and take it all in your stride.  You manage the daily ups and downs of life which call on you to swiftly change plans and readjust.  Then ‘Bang’ something happens which floors you.  The person  who could roll with the punches disappears.  You find yourself struggling to keep things in perspective, to retain any sense of optimism and confidence goes through the floor.  What’s happened?  You have lost your resilience.  You still turn up at work, but the person you bring is changed. The person who could see endless solutions, can see none.  The person who loved a challenge,  will only work within their comfort zone. The person who prided themselves on managing their emotion finds they have difficulty controlling them, or the only emotions available to them are negative.  The loss of confidence is picked up by clients, or colleagues notice you bring less energy and engagement to the work you do.  Resilience is more than an individual issue it is a business issue.

Resilience is that elasticity which enables people to both be stretched and to get back into shape.  It is a quality that is tested when individuals lose their jobs.  It is equally tested when the job remains but the demands on it increase, or those things which made the role satisfying are removed.  There are many in UK plc whose resilience is being tested, and the people judged the most talented, may also be the ones who are feeling less than resilient.  That is why it was a timely topic for the recent Association for Coaching Conference.

So if UK resilience is being diminished by the current climate, what can organisations do?  Professor Anthony Grant of the Coaching Psychology Unit at Sidney University argued that resilience can be increased through a combination of training and coaching.  In a randomised control study in an Australian Insurance company, he showed that training in resilience skills immediately followed by coaching led to significant increase in goal attainment, a reduction in depression and an increase in workplace wellbeing, whilst those offered training alone saw a worsening of all 3 dimensions in the weeks following training.  This was reversed when later offered coaching.  At a conference of coaches you would expect coaching to be part of the answer, but it is not the whole answer.  Given that organisations will get more value from self confident, optimistic individuals who can manage their emotions and adapt to changes, there is a role for training in helping support the building of resilience.

In a field which is fast expanding, the work of consultancy Team Focus offered a model which captures key themes of resilience building.   It works from the premise that when resilience is lost, the individual has become Frozen in a view of themselves. “I did not get that promotion, so my career is over”.  Unfreezing it comes from enabling them to look at their view of self to examine how well it holds up to a reality check. “My career  is not dependent on the outcome of one promotion decision”.   With the loosening it becomes possible to Reformulate new possibilities. “If I look to develop through taking on that project I have been avoiding, my possibilities will widen”. From which a Reframing of a new and realistic self concept emerges, “I can see why that promotion was not right for me at this time, but I now know what I need to do to move forward”.

If losing resilience is about losing bounce refinding is not about bouncing back.  To bounce back suggests nothing has changed.  When resilience is knocked the learning is about being able to move forward with new insights.  Or as Dr Chris Johnson author of The Power of Hope highlighted, resilience is the pearl in the oyster.  Just as the pearl is formed from the oyster responding to the irritation of the grit, losing resilience has powerful lessons to teach from which an even more resourceful self can emerge.

Ask most people why they did the first job that they did, and the answers will usually reveal the power of family messages. Middle class families often have direct role modelling – think of acting dynasties, or the generations of doctors, lawyers or teachers that are often found in one family.

For working class families the influences are often more aspirational: the desire to have a doctor, lawyer or teacher in the family. For both groups the story they have created is one that has often been given to them. It is only with increased distance and maturity that that such narratives begin to be questioned.

Often it is in the 20’s that the story begins to feel uncomfortable. A tension can emerge between doing what others want for you and your own growing sense of unease. Working with GPS I was struck by how often their story was one of following a career that gained considerable approval from others, only to find that the reality of living the role was not what they expected. Discovering that what you do does not meet your own needs, although it may meet others is a difficult place to be. Marcia B Baxter Magolda in her book Authoring a Life interviewed 35 adults over a 20 year period, and found that facing a career crossroad was a significant feature of her interviewees. At some point, individuals began to hear an inner voice which told them that their needs were different from what they had come to believe. That voice was often suppressed because it opened up fears of disapproval, but at some point the individual had to make a decision. Do I continue on this path that has been set for me, or do I start to risk listening to and trusting my inner voice? The process of building trust in that voice as a guide to taking action was not one of linear progression. Often the interviews reveal how people moved towards and then away from accepting their own values and beliefs over a number of years. Gradually and tentatively they came to recognise the strength of that inner voice. They moved towards what Magolda calls ’self authorship’. Becoming one’s own author provided a compass point for dealing with life’s challenges in both work and relationships. It was not that their lives were any easier because of developing that voice, but that they had something they could call on to get them through the vicissitudes of life, and to help in decision making on career issues.

Every body has a career narrative. Become its author

A starting point for developing that voice is to examine your own career narrative.

Sit down and write your career story so far – not as a cv story, but in terms of the following questions:

• Think of the role models you were presented with in childhood and early adulthood and how they influenced your decisions about work?
• Has there been a point when you were challenged by something in life that changed your perspective on your career?
• If you have passed over a career crossroad, which road did you take and why?
• What has resulted from the road you chose?
• If you are currently at a crossroad, what is the tension you are caught between?
• How much of what you are doing now is guided by your own inner voice?
• If you are on a journey towards developing that inner voice – then when is it at its strongest, and when does it get drowned out?

In a world where careers are constantly changing in response to global, economic, social and technological shifts, creating self authorship will become ever more important. A starting point is to take time to reflect on how well your career narrative is working for you, in order to check if a different story needs to be written.

The shelves of career planning books in the self help section of bookshops, present a dilemma.  Most successful people I have coached would claim that they have never planned their career.  Those who claim that they planned their career, then point to some disjuncture which threw the plan off course. Or even worse, they say that following the plan stopped them assessing whether they wanted what they were creating.  They achieved their goal and than asked themselves ‘Is that it?’.  Yet at the same time, we are encouraged to believe that planning is the key to success.

Planning is logical, but the world is not.  If individuals were predictable, if rational thought was the only basis on which we made decisions, if performance was the only predictor of success, if organisations were in complete control of their own destiny then planning would make perfect sense – but none of the above are true.  So those who are successful in achieving careers which are satisfying and which engage their skills and motivations, and which attract the rewards which matter to them, are not  career planners, but they are skilled career managers.

The dangers of trusting a career map

What is the difference?  It is not mere semantics.  To manage is according to dictionary definitions, the ability to guide, conduct, treat with care.  To manage is to have a sense of ownership for something which you treat with respect, because you want to make the best use of it. In career terms, it means that you may not be able to predict the eventual outcome, but you can navigate the journey with  care, so that wherever it takes you you will land well.

My experience of those who have careers which deliver what they want, is that they have navigated their journey with skill, and they have done this by being able to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously in considering their career.  By doing so they display a degree of career intelligence that is often missing from those who adopt the ‘In five years time, I will be . . ‘approach.

Management guru,  Charles Handy, once described the ten year career plan he was offered by the oil company he was working for. It promised him that given he performed well, 10 years on he would be in a role heading up a division in an African country.  ‘Ten years on, the role did not exist, the division did not exist, and the country did not exist’.  The danger of the career plan is that it exists carved in stone, unconnected to what is changing both around and within the individual.  Never has the danger of career planning been more evident than at the moment, as we watch well known names implode and new names appear.

So what are these multiple perspectives that allow individuals to have careers that flourish regardless of the unpredictability of the external world.  I believe there are four key abilities that some are born with, and some learn along the way.  They are:

• Scenario Awareness
• Skills Currency
• Self Management
• Magnetic Marketing

Scenario Awareness

Scenario awareness is the ability to lift your thinking beyond the immediate demands of your role, and the current state of play in your organisation, and to look ahead to see what is coming into view that could impact on how your organisation operates.  It demands an openness to look not just at the current business climate, but to consider what broader trends could impact on how your business operates, and what that could mean for opportunities.  It is the difference between seeing the future as an incremental advance on the present, where it is the success of your current strategy which will shape your career opportunities, and a willingness to consider ‘What if . . .?  By posing the ‘what if . . .? question, both the unlikelihood of the future being a mere extension of the past, and the possibility of new career options opens up.

Skills Currency

A follow on from scenario awareness is an openness to looking at the currency of your skill set against the emerging environment.  It is obvious that change has removed many roles which once provided paid employment.  From the disappearance of the bus conductor to the death of the tea lady; but we are often less attuned to the shifts in business focus or the demands of a new role which mean that our currency exchange rate is re-evaluated.  We become attached to particular skills because they bring personal satisfaction, but risk losing sight of when their value is declining in our particular context.  Those who are skilled career navigators regularly assess their currency rate, and if it is decline, they either look for another place where those skills are still needed, or they are willing to shed skills and acquire those which have greater currency.

Self Management

Self management is about understanding your self, and in particular understanding your own strengths.  Those who are successful in their careers are able to identify what it is that they do particularly well, and even more important they know where to focus that strength.  They are able to differentiate between what they can do – which may be many things, and what they do that makes the most impact.  They think more widely than organisational competences to identify what is their ‘core competence’ ie those things which differentiate them.  It may be being able to keep people motivated when the going is tough. It could be giving staff a sense of self belief that enables them to do more than they believe possible.  It may be being ‘bloody minded’ and able to keep pushing once they believe in an outcome.  Whatever it is, it probably doesn’t appear in a competency profile.  Once individuals know what their real strengths are, they are able to find those situations in which their strengths are essential to success.

Magnetic Marketing

Knowing that self marketing is an aspect of creating a career does not make it any more comfortable for many people.  They hold in their head an image of self promoters who network furiously, manage upwards and claim credit for anything they can put their name to.  This push model of self marketing has successes, but it equally evokes resistance.  A look at those who are skilled career managers is that their marketing is based on pulling people towards them, so that they want to buy what they have to offer.  How they do that is by listening closely to what the other person needs and wants, and by showing what they have to offer that is relevant to their need, rather than by shouting their own virtues.  They create a positive word of mouth that does their marketing for them, rather than having to expend energy on selling the message.  What they do spend their energy on is building meaningful relationships with people, and in doing good work.

So if you are reading this as someone who wants to manage their own career more effectively – ask yourself these questions:

Scenario Awareness

• What scenarios can I imagine for the sector/organisation I am part of (or want to be part of)?
• What could that mean for career opportunities going forward?

Skills Currency

• How strong is my currency right now?
• What would add to my   currency strength?

Self Management

• What with no due modesty are my real strengths?
• What situations are they right for?

Magnetic Marketing

• Who do I want to market myself
• How can I better understand their needs, so that I can signal what I have to offer?

Managers often believe that coaching is time demanding, but the opposite is true. It is missing opportunities to coach which leads to time being wasted.

In this clip, the costs of allowing a talented individual to carry on behaving ineffectively are highlighted. The rest of the DVD shows how a range of diverse individuals with different challenges can be supported to perform through short focussed coaching conversations.

As the nation watches from its sofas the extraordinary achievements of Olympic competitors, the question many of us ask is “Could I have done that?”  If I hadn’t spent my teenage years avoiding PE, and my subsequent years adhering to the late John Mortimer’s advice “Exercise if you’re fit you don’t need it, if you are unfit it’s dangerous”, could I have been a contendor.

When Heather Stanning and Heather Glove won Team GB’s first gold medal, they generously claimed that anyone could do what they did, if they committed to the task.  But is that true?  When at Gordonstoun, Heather Stanning’s school mates voted her the girl most likely to be an Olympian, suggesting that they saw something special in her.

The evidence is that their perception was correct there is something different about Olympic champion, as according to research undertaken at Loughborough University.  They studied 12 Olympian champions (8 men and 4 women) and concluded that they shared a combination of 5 personality attributes: a positive personality, confidence, motivation, focus and perceived social support.  Together they helped them deal with the demands of becoming a world class competitor

“Olympic athletes experience considerable adversities during their preparation, training and competition, often over long periods of time,” said Mustafa Sarkar, a PhD student in sport and performance psychology at Loughborough University, and co-author of the report.While these challenges have potential negative effects on athletes’ mental health, “the world’s best athletes develop and maintain a specific combination of psychological attributes that enable them to thrive on such pressure and perform at their best in Olympic competition

While, it may be an armchair fantasy that we too could have rowed, run, cycled or swam for our country, there is still something we can learn from those who do, that we can use in whatever field we want to achieve in. Having a positive personality may come with our DNA, but those other traits can be developed:

• Confidence comes from being able to trust in our actions.  That trust comes from application and hard work.
• Motivation comes from knowing what is important to you, why you want to achieve a goal, rather than just having a goal.
• Focus means denying yourself distractions. As 15 year old gold medal swimmer Ruta Meilutyte said in her post win interview, ” I can do other  things for the rest of my life, but I can only swim for a few years”.
• Social support means ensuring you are staying connected to others, and giving support as well as asking for it when you need it.