A great deal of work goes into the blending process of tea and coffee, to conjour up different tastes and flavours to tickle your tastebuds.  Transferring the metaphor to teams, it’s really important that you get the blend of personality types right in order to benefit from optimal performance.

In my business we use a psychometic test developed by Myers-Briggs to ascertain the dominant personality characteristics across members of our senior management team and external salespeople.

When first assessing the results, it  provided some real breakthroughs in our thinking and understanding of our team blend.  It allowed us to understand why some meetings always tended to go a certain way, who would have a natural tendency to plan or do things at the last minute, who our best ideas creation people are and who our best critical thinkers are likely to be.

When you get such clarity, it really allows you to drive your recruitment strategy and team dynamics.  If you walk away from an interview thinking that a person is really good (setting aside technical competency), often it’s because they have a similar thinking pattern to you and you seem to gel.

By using psychometric tests, you can you understand your own personality type better and ensure that you are not recruiting a company of  ”mini-me’s”, you can also have a sense check against job functions.  For example, you wouldn’t necessarily want a project manager whose natural personality was to leave things to the last minute.  Alternatively, your business might be dominated by a team of people who are all highly creative, people that love the next idea before finishing the previous, you may need to add a strong finisher/completer to provide that balance.

Managing people is considerably easier when you can get more supporting data, it allows you to marry the components of displayed behaviour you see every day, with core beliefs.  Opinions you have formed about people may be changed, levels of output increased and your blend of team tuned for optimal performance.

The key takeaway is this.  Be aware when recruiting, when holding meetings and when setting up projects of your decisions around who you select to work with you.  Choose relevant to ability to get the task done, not on how well you perceive you get on with somebody.

I had a long drive in the car today.  I love this time of year, a couple of days before we break for Christmas, everything goes quiet.   The mobile, the e-mail, the problems!  On my run in the car, I had one journalist interview for about an hour, then nothing else. Bliss!

I spoke recently about Alpha/Beta thinking, view this slideshare to see what I talking about. My drive today was mostly Alpha time.

I got thinking about how you should compare your own development to that of technology.  The example that came to mind was music, which has always been a great love of mine.

My musical journey started with a turntable and vinyl records.  When I was about fourteen my dad got my sister and I Sony Walkman portable cassette players, with orange headphones.  At the time a technological breakthrough.  We used to walk through Bracknell town centre, listening to tape cassette of the Top 40 from the previous Sunday -pirating old school style!

Only a few years  later, something called “CD’s” started to hit the news. Allegedly holding a full album of songs with studio quality on this disc the size of a saucer – no way!  I had to have one.

I set my goals on a Technics stereo system that I’d seen at John Lewis, which did everything – turntable, amp, radio, tape cassette and CD player.  I saved for a whole year,  stashing away every penny from my Saturday job at Waitrose until the day when I got this system from John Lewis.  My pride and joy, which I still own to this day (now with updated turntable which converts my vinyl to digital).  I still have every LP from my teens too, some classics there.  Wake me up before you go go….

Then something called MP3 got mentioned.  Music didn’t exist on vinyl, cassettes or CD’s anymore, you could download and never see it.  Just pressing a button – magic!  My first incarnation was a digital river MP3 player, then the i-Pod and we’ve all never looked back from that.

So, on to my point.  In that time,  in twenty-five years, at least four major iterations of  single technology have taken place.  Vinyl, Tape Cassette, CD and MP3.  Each time, we (the buying public) have upgraded to the latest version.  The music sounds the same, however the delivery technology has changed.

So if we update our technology in this way, are we updating our own technology (cognitive programming)  in the same way?

You hold on to pre-formed thoughts and actions from your programming growing up and often revert back to those in the present day as the basis of your decision making and action.  Like using the logic from a 1980′s Commodore computer.

Thinking back in my life, 20′s, 30′s and 40′s have all been distinctly different for me, each decade have seen improvements in my knowledge of self.  In terms of my own personal development, I’ve taken this much more seriously in the past decade.  It’s during that period that I realised most that my programme (thoughts and actions) was out of date and I was still bound by the cognitive distortions of my early years.

By reading, networking, reflecting, digesting and learning, my software has been updated.  I’ve kept pace, not got left behind.  I better understand my own development pathway, like a technology roadmap.  I’ve recognised which bits of my metaphorical software were redundant, which bits were good and what new bits I needed to add.

It’s never too late to update.  I think I’ve learned more in the last ten years about myself than at any point in my life – literally.  If I were to graph it, it just keeps going up and up.  Point being, learning is lifelong.  So, what are you doing about you?

What’s the last book you read?  Which cognitive distortions kick in based upon the way your parents raised you, past experiences or pre-formed behaviour? Which bits about your personality would you like to change most?  Because it can all be changed.  All that is requires is your courage, openness and desire. Software gets a patch update, so patch yourself, update your own firmware.  Do something to evolve.

Merry Xmas and  have a Fantastic 2012

As I sign off for the seasonal break, I’d like to thank you all for continuing to visit the blog.

It pleases me no end when people mention to me that they read the articles I write and how much it has helped them, in different ways – it’s a real buzz.  Blogging takes time and is a big commitment, once you’ve started, you shouldn’t stop.  I never thought that the blog would be read by so many people across the globe.

In closing, I posted this blog three years ago, I read it every year as it reminds me of how we should all be grateful for what we have at this time of year and the importance of friends and time.

Have an amazing 2012 – Phil

Ever heard that old cliche “leading is like being a conductor of an orchestra?”  Well, I’m hear to tell you it it is.  How do I know?  On Monday night this week I was fortunate enough to sit next to Internationally renowned conductor – Sir Mark Elder CBE.

Elder (64), musical director at the Halle Orchestra in Manchester, candidly answered some questions I had about the old adage of comparing a conductor to a leader of a business.  Elder is really charasmatic, intense, highly articulate and one of those people you wish you got sat next to over dinner, luckily I did!

He was able to draw so many parallels to business, he really ought to get on the speaking circuit!  However, this man is about “personal and artistic chemistry” and striving for new levels of excellence from the orchestra he leads and in his own ability to conduct music.  There was so much to capture, I didn’t get everything, however here are some of the nuggets that I managed to scribble down: -

• His first big leadership challenge came in 1979 when he had to wrestle an orchestra to his way of thinking.  At the time he was a new fledging conductor and respect had to be earned.  He was home grown within the orchestra and quickly begain to tackle the key issues of underperforming players.  He faced the brutal truth quickly that to be excellent, he needed excellence from everyone.  After a long period of working with resistant individuals he had his “if you can’t change the people, change the people” moment, he summarily issued notice to those underperforming players.  For this step, Private Eye magazine described him as “Mark the knife.”  Years later, that tough decision paid him a huge dividend as he was able to replace them with high performing players.
  
• He learns the name of all the major players in the orchestra before conducting them.  Even if hosting an orchestra for one night, he ensures that he knows who the key people are and addressed them by name.  This ensures that he wins the orchestra over quickly to work with him, realising that the performance relies on “feeling, hearing and understanding.”  A connected orchestra, with mutual respect, play better.
  
• He describes himself as a “stayer”.   In all his conducting positions over the years, he has always had a big picture in his head and articulated that vision to the orchestra.  Communication of that vision ensures that the orchestra never remains stale and continues to pursue the big picture, not just the one off performance.
• Orchestras conventions can be different from country to country.   Conducting an orchestra in America, is different to Italy, is different to Japan, is different to the UK.  Elder recognised he has to “flex” his style for each orchestra to get the most out of them, the same way leaders in business should do with their teams.
• A chain of command is important to get the right results.  The orchestra is broken down into sections, each section leader is responsible for it and the players within it.  Elder communicates with those section leaders if he needs improvement, they then get the performance from their players.  This chain of command ensures clarity of communication and feedback.
  
• The importance of courage.  Elder came back to this word time and time again.  He needed courage to dismiss the underperforming players at the start of his career, courage to take on new pieces of music and cites courage of your convictions.  Leadership is exactly the same, it takes courage to make big decisions, sometimes in the face of adversity.
• Accepting responsibility for your own errors.  I asked Elder whether someone pulls him up when he makes a mistake?  He was quick to answer, “If I know I’ve made a mistake, I immediately accept responsibility for it.”  The hallmark of any great leaders is to have humility, apologising and admitting your mistakes builds empathy with others.  Leadership isn’t about being perfect, it’s about being you, with all your vulnerabilities displayed.
• Leading the orchestra isn’t about being a robotic conductor, it’s about “the balance between brain and heart.”  Elder has real panache.  You could tell that when he talked, always choosing words carefully and answering questions with a real honesty.  You warmed to him immediately as he articulately re-told humourous stories, kept eye contact – like a tractor beam and articulated his vision for the Halle orchestra, which he leads.  There’s an important lesson there, which is to be the real you in your life.  To show compassion, care and empathy in the workplace alongside all the other excellent technical capabilities you have.

I could have talked to Sir Mark Elder all night, he’s such an interesting character.  Witty, charming, super-intelligent and statesmanlike.  Back to my earlier point, he’s make a fantastic conference speaker as I’m sure he’d conduct a room with the same passion and results that he conducts an orchestra.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been increasing the frequency of public speaking that I do as part of our overall brand reputation strategy.  Being seen as a person of influence in your sector, provides substantial benefits to your brand and puts you significantly higher up the consideration chain of your target audience.  It reaches out further and deeper than any advert you can ever place.

This week I hosted the annual Shared Services Forum UK conference in Harrogate.  Bringing together around forty really large private and public sector organisations to share examples of excellence, the names of businesses attending was like a who’s who of top flight companies.  There was a brilliant line up of keynote speakers during the day, including Molly Harvey, Adrian Webster and David Yeoman , each delivering different takes on leadership, motivating others and personal development. I was able to spend time with each of them during the prior evening dinner and during the day to talk about what makes them tick.

The one common characteristic of the three speakers is that they all continue to develop themselves, in order to develop others.  They sat in on the keynotes of the other speakers, observing, taking notes and learning.  They all possess a hunger to raise their game, refine, test, learn and be their best.

It was fascinating to see the contrast in styles and engagement between the three speakers.  Harvey, with a soft Irish accent, delivered some powerful content which had the audience listening intently. Webster, turning energy up and down in explosive stage fits of a sparky performance and Glaswegian Yeoman, engaging the audience and challenging people with his forthright views on use of words and behaviour.  He managed to get everyone up and spontaneously clapping to the Gypsy Kings, cleverly anchoring a moment where we had all just let go of tension by blowing our negative thoughts into a balloon.

Observing the audience, it’s amazing how people love to be inspired by others and catch the wind of enthusiasm of clever thoughts, connectedness and potential for change.  Molly Harvey made a great point during her keynote about “watch who you spend your time with.”  What she meant was, you have to spend your time with people who have the mindset that you aspire to, have or are developing in order for you to be challenged and grow.  If you have a think about the five people you spend the bulk of your time with, what does that say about how you are influenced?

That’s why it’s important to get out of the office, meet new people, discuss, debate and network.  To listen to others, grow, share and challenge yourself.  I learned a huge amount just being in the presence of others, I’d encourage you too.  Consider it an investment, not a cost.  Invest in a day, don’t justify a day.  Excellent people do.

  I posted back in February about something called Cognitive Distortions.  Basically, those pre-programmed reactions formed from previous experiences, which drive our future reactions to situations.  If you’re aware of them, you can do something about them, by re-framing the way you see/digest or internalise things.

I was reminded of how diferently we all see the world just recently whilst doing some reviews.  Taking a look back at some personality profiles that I’d had done on some key individuals showed how differently people communicate, process information and think.  Just because I can think and talk at the same time, it doesn’t mean somebody else can.  It makes them no better or worse than me, we just do things differently.

A great example of this can be seen in brainstorming sessions.  If you put a roomful of people together, don’t be surprised if some people look they are generating far more ideas than some others, it’s just how they’re wired.  Other people in the room can generate those same valid ideas, but may need a little longer, or pre-notice, or a couple additional days after to process and think.  Until you start to appreciate such matters, you may not get the full potential of your team, assuming that one communication style fits all – it doesn’t.

We use the Meyers-Briggs profiling system, of which there are sixteen characteristic profile types.  What’s amazing when you ask your team to do it, is that you get that “aha” moment, when you begin to understand why some people are highly organised, some disorganised.  Some introvert, some extrovert, some ideas people, some reflectors.  The bottom line is that there is a huge variety of personalities out there, some more common than others, and all subject to change based upon personal circumstances (personal pressure etc).

The lesson is this, you can’t to use the same style with everyone to get the same outcomes.  If you can adapt your style, by having a deeper understanding of your own personal style and the style of others, it can lead to really meaningful interactions across your team.  If you want to understand more about how you can use profiling to enhance performance, give Impact Consulting Psychologists a shout, I’ve worked with them for years and would thoroughly recommend their approach.

“Me In My Element” (MIME). What does that look like for you?  What are you passionate about?  What are the thing(s) that spark you into life?  I don’t mean family, that’s a given.  I mean the passions that you have beyond that.

For me, it’s business, writing, public speaking, road cycling and soul music.  Those five things get me excited, float my boat, are different enough to give me some diversity in life.  They are broad, allow me to meet a wide variety of different people, learn different things, plus feed mind, body and soul.

I’ve met a lot of people who live for business exclusively.  Never taking a moment to do anything else.  that’s OK – we all have choices.  We all have to work hard, particularly if you’re starting a business or trying to keep it afloat.  If however, your business is getting to a stage when you can throttle back a bit, invest your time in something outside of work, then do something you can get passionate about.

Setting your mind new challenges, keeps you fresh. Keeps those electrical connections going, keeps your brain active and keeps you at your best.  Physical activity, will reduce stress and help to promote long-term well being – a no brainer.  Most importantly, when we do those things and someone says “look at them, they’re in their element” – that’s the moment when you need to think, “I should do more of this”.

When you become passionate about something, it’s not a chore, it’s something you participate in willingly.  Passion adds some spice to life, makes you a more interesting personality, lets you engage with a wider social circle and makes you feel alive.  Go and grab it with both hands.

A difficult seven days. It started with my son being admitted to hospital for an unexpected appendix removal and as events unfolded also resulted in my wife being admitted into the same hospital for severe neuralgia.  Seven days on, my son is out of hospital and my wife is still in hospital.

For the first four days, I slept on the ward by my sons bed on a mattress, getting on average 3-4 hours of interrupted sleep per night.  During that time I saw some of the most empathetic nurses and others who should honestly consider changing job. I saw – first hand – how the NHS works and how you need to be assertive to get things done, how you play the system and what makes the difference between a positive and negative patient/relative experience.

Reflecting on a hectic week, there were a number of lessons that I thought worth sharing as they have a business relationship, in no particular order, here are seven things from the last seven nights: -

1. Be Decisive. Knowing that something was wrong and not hanging about.  If we’d of left my sons “severe tummyache” much longer, his appendix would have ruptured.  At times I had to be assertive with some members of the nursing staff to get things done.   So, if something needs to be sorted in your own organisation – sort it.
2. Take the lead. In moments of stress, anxiety or worry people look for a figurehead.  Someone that can give confidence and re-assurance.  If times of business uncertainty, lead from the front but don’t be frightened to ask for help or show that you’re culpable, but able to cope.
3. Listen to advice but take your own decision. You know your kids or your family.  The nuances, the little things, you live with them every day.  I’ve had to challenge some diagnoses this week, because I know my wife better than anyone.  It’s the same in business.  Listen to expert advice, but apply that advice with your knowledge of your business to get the best results, don’t rely on it exclusively.
4. Look for evidence when you need to make decisions under pressure. With lack of sleep, poor diet, stress and worry, it’s a recipe for poor decision making.  Irrational, more than rational.  One thing I’ve learned over the years is “look for the evidence.”  I had to make a judgment call to a consultants face to take my wife out of his care and take her to another hospital.  I looked at the evidence and made the call.  Best decision of the week. The learning is about ensuring you’ve appropriate evidence within the timescales allowed to be objective.  This is tough under great stress, but it lets you see clearly.
5. Mental toughness is a learned skill. So many people have been concerned for us all, that is a wonderful thing.  I’ve learned over the years that mental toughness is about dealing with things that you can influence, worring less about the things you can’t.  Staying objective, being honest and sharing the load wherever possible.  Not being a victim, but a person in circumstance.   I don’t believe in bad luck,  I do understand co-incidence and timing.   Your attitude to a situation, can influence it’s outcome.
6. Accept help. My in-laws are fantastic.  They are both in their late 70′s but two of the most wonderful people you could wish to have around you in a crisis.  Both rocks, nothing is too much trouble.  They’ve cared for us all and helped with the practical things, without them, this week would have been much tougher.  I quickly realised I couldn’t do everything with two family members hospitalised.  Look for those people in your team who can be your support you in the same way.  Trusted lieutenants and be realistic about what you can and can’t do.
7. Be clear in what you want. Just because you said something that you understand, doesn’t mean the person you said it to succesfully recieved it.  I said “My wife needs fluids” – I meant she needs a drip.  The nurse received this as “My wife needs a jug of water”.  It’s important to back-brief, clarify and repeat when discussing important matters.  Business meetings, strategy briefings.  You brief it, then get people to brief you back what you just said to them.  Same page of the same book.  Sorted.

If there’s one closing thought, it’s that business must always come second to your family.  They above anything else should be your priority in times of need or not.

Has anyone ever said that to you? Or more’s the point, have you ever said it it to someone else? You know when someone just looks like they are on another level, sometimes down in the basement, sometimes up in the sky!

Leadership wise it’s a great little anecdote there.  Question.  What Planet are you on?  Answer.  Mars!  Cue the mental image of the Mars advert from the 80′s, because “A Mars a day, helps you work, rest and play.”

Knocking yourself out on the work treadmill, working every hour gods sends, never spending any time to enjoy life,  that doesn’t make you a better leader.  Quite the opposite, you’ll disappear down the plughole of mediocrity.  I’ve blogged previously about what I called “leading lessons.”  The importance of taking a load off.

Work hard, yes. Of course when you’re running a business of any size, hard work comes with the territory.  That has to be balanced however with rest and relaxation and something that brings you pleasure or joy, whether that be kids, sport, gardening or a hobby.  Having those things in some sort of balance will do you the world of good.  Time deadlines, projects, re-organisations, budgets, travelling, resource planning will all get in the way – if you let them.

So, let your leadership mantra be.  I’m on Planet Mars!  Because I work, rest and play.

Nokia CEO – Stephen Elop – ignited some interest today when a leaked memo he sent to staff was published to the press.  In it, he used a metaphor of a burning oil platform to describe the condition of the business, it’s product development and decling position in the market.  The Finnish phone maker, formerly a giant in the mobile phone sector, has been struggling to keep up with the market, whilst other brands such as Apple have seen sales soar.

It’s so easy to try and dress this sort of information up when you are talking to staff, using colourful language to – in a roundabout way – suggest the need for change.  Reading through the memo, I thought the metaphor wholly appropriate and the tone just right.  He uses powerful and evocative language and is brutally honest about the position of the company, it’s reasons for getting there and what it needs to do to recover.  Reading through it, you’re left in no doubt as to what the leader is thinking and expects.

Nokia have lost their way of that there’s no doubt.  However, I applaud Stephen Elop for facing the facts, communicating the truth and showing some real leadership.  Here’s the memo wording: -

Hello there,

There is a pertinent story about a man who was working on an oil platform in the North Sea. He woke up one night from a loud explosion, which suddenly set his entire oil platform on fire. In mere moments, he was surrounded by flames. Through the smoke and heat, he barely made his way out of the chaos to the platform’s edge. When he looked down over the edge, all he could see were the dark, cold, foreboding Atlantic waters.

As the fire approached him, the man had mere seconds to react. He could stand on the platform, and inevitably be consumed by the burning flames. Or, he could plunge 30 meters in to the freezing waters. The man was standing upon a “burning platform,” and he needed to make a choice.

He decided to jump. It was unexpected. In ordinary circumstances, the man would never consider plunging into icy waters. But these were not ordinary times – his platform was on fire. The man survived the fall and the waters. After he was rescued, he noted that a “burning platform” caused a radical change in his behaviour.

We too, are standing on a “burning platform,” and we must decide how we are going to change our behaviour.

Over the past few months, I’ve shared with you what I’ve heard from our shareholders, operators, developers, suppliers and from you. Today, I’m going to share what I’ve learned and what I have come to believe.

I have learned that we are standing on a burning platform.

And, we have more than one explosion – we have multiple points of scorching heat that are fuelling a blazing fire around us.

For example, there is intense heat coming from our competitors, more rapidly than we ever expected. Apple disrupted the market by redefining the smartphone and attracting developers to a closed, but very powerful ecosystem.

In 2008, Apple’s market share in the $300+ price range was 25 percent; by 2010 it escalated to 61 percent. They are enjoying a tremendous growth trajectory with a 78 percent earnings growth year over year in Q4 2010. Apple demonstrated that if designed well, consumers would buy a high-priced phone with a great experience and developers would build applications. They changed the game, and today, Apple owns the high-end range.

And then, there is Android. In about two years, Android created a platform that attracts application developers, service providers and hardware manufacturers. Android came in at the high-end, they are now winning the mid-range, and quickly they are going downstream to phones under €100. Google has become a gravitational force, drawing much of the industry’s innovation to its core.

Let’s not forget about the low-end price range. In 2008, MediaTek supplied complete reference designs for phone chipsets, which enabled manufacturers in the Shenzhen region of China to produce phones at an unbelievable pace. By some accounts, this ecosystem now produces more than one third of the phones sold globally – taking share from us in emerging markets.

While competitors poured flames on our market share, what happened at Nokia? We fell behind, we missed big trends, and we lost time. At that time, we thought we were making the right decisions; but, with the benefit of hindsight, we now find ourselves years behind.

The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don’t have a product that is close to their experience. Android came on the scene just over 2 years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable.

We have some brilliant sources of innovation inside Nokia, but we are not bringing it to market fast enough. We thought MeeGo would be a platform for winning high-end smartphones. However, at this rate, by the end of 2011, we might have only one MeeGo product in the market.

At the midrange, we have Symbian. It has proven to be non-competitive in leading markets like North America. Additionally, Symbian is proving to be an increasingly difficult environment in which to develop to meet the continuously expanding consumer requirements, leading to slowness in product development and also creating a disadvantage when we seek to take advantage of new hardware platforms. As a result, if we continue like before, we will get further and further behind, while our competitors advance further and further ahead.

At the lower-end price range, Chinese OEMs are cranking out a device much faster than, as one Nokia employee said only partially in jest, “the time that it takes us to polish a PowerPoint presentation.” They are fast, they are cheap, and they are challenging us.

And the truly perplexing aspect is that we’re not even fighting with the right weapons. We are still too often trying to approach each price range on a device-to-device basis.

The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applications, ecommerce, advertising, search, social applications, location-based services, unified communications and many other things. Our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we’re going to have to decide how we either build, catalyse or join an ecosystem.

This is one of the decisions we need to make. In the meantime, we’ve lost market share, we’ve lost mind share and we’ve lost time.

On Tuesday, Standard & Poor’s informed that they will put our A long term and A-1 short term ratings on negative credit watch. This is a similar rating action to the one that Moody’s took last week. Basically it means that during the next few weeks they will make an analysis of Nokia, and decide on a possible credit rating downgrade. Why are these credit agencies contemplating these changes? Because they are concerned about our competitiveness.

Consumer preference for Nokia declined worldwide. In the UK, our brand preference has slipped to 20 percent, which is 8 percent lower than last year. That means only 1 out of 5 people in the UK prefer Nokia to other brands. It’s also down in the other markets, which are traditionally our strongholds: Russia, Germany, Indonesia, UAE, and on and on and on.

How did we get to this point? Why did we fall behind when the world around us evolved?

This is what I have been trying to understand. I believe at least some of it has been due to our attitude inside Nokia. We poured gasoline on our own burning platform. I believe we have lacked accountability and leadership to align and direct the company through these disruptive times. We had a series of misses. We haven’t been delivering innovation fast enough. We’re not collaborating internally.

Nokia, our platform is burning.

We are working on a path forward — a path to rebuild our market leadership. When we share the new strategy on February 11, it will be a huge effort to transform our company. But, I believe that together, we can face the challenges ahead of us. Together, we can choose to define our future.

The burning platform, upon which the man found himself, caused the man to shift his behaviour, and take a bold and brave step into an uncertain future. He was able to tell his story. Now, we have a great opportunity to do the same.

Stephen.

Everyone has had a dent in confidence at some point in their life or career. It can be triggered by the smallest thing, person or event.   Often lack of confidence come as a by-product of some past experience.  Those experiences can lead us to have a distorted view of the world, seeing things irrationally or in an exaggerated manner – known as Cognitive Distortions.  I recently read a book about cognitive behavioural therapy, as it was a topic that interested me following a session with some business psychologists.  Cognitive distortions came up as part of that session; can you recognise any in yourself?

1. All-or-nothing thinking: You see things in black and white categories.  If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.
2. Mind reading: You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you and don’t bother to check it out. You anticipate that things will turn out badly and feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact.
3. Jumping to conclusions: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion.
4. Overgeneralisation: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.
5. Mental filter: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened
6. Disqualifying the positive: You reject positive experiences by insisting they “don’t count” for some reason or other. You maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.
7. Emotional reasoning: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: “I feel it, therefore it must be true.”
8. Magnification (catastrophising) or minimisation: You exaggerate the importance of things or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear insignificant.
9. Labelling and mislabelling: This is an extreme form of overgeneralisation. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: “I’m a loser.” When someone else’s behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to them.
10. Personalisation: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event for which, in fact, you were not primarily responsible.