More and more I find my coaching is as simple (or hard) as helping people take a different perspective and/or change their focus of attention. Last week I was discussing this with a colleague (a proper neuroscientist with a PhD etc) and she gave me a neat neuro-biologically informed explanation of how to discover what change is required by thinking about your strengths.
The basic neuro-biology is that we literally see what we focus attention on, and are correspondingly "blind" to what we are not focusing on. So changing perspective and shifting our focus of attention are actually both about altering our perception. Once we see / perceive the situation or the person differently we can act / react differently. So far, fairly obvious.
The interesting bit is that by thinking about your strengths you can quickly identify what you habitually pay attention to, hence what you will typically be blind to and how you will tend to mis-interpret what you do see. Knowing where you habitually focus attention makes it much easier to shift it elsewhere. And knowing you have a (literal) blind spot is an essential first step towards seeing what is in it!
The easiest way to explain this is with an example.
Suppose your strength is that you are decisive and action oriented. This suggests you pay a lot of attention to looking for decisions to be made and actions to be taken. As a result, you see lots of decisions to be made and lots of actions to be taken. You are literally blind to other possibilities. So you carry on making decisions and taking actions - because that's all there is to do! From another person's perspective, of course, you may appear to be over-using your strength - they may see you as too dominant and/or too hasty.
Take this further, if you mostly pay attention to decisions and actions you will only see those aspects of other activities (or other people) that affect the decisions and actions you are paying attention to. Nearly everything else - even a suggestion that you pause for thought- will be seen as either a challenge to be overcome or a delay to be avoided or ignored. And, of course, if all you are seeing is your decision or your action, it's actually true - that is the self-fulfilling prophecy, ie "What You Get Is What You See".
So how do you get to see a more complete picture? The answer is to shift your focus of attention. Practice asking yourself: "What if a decision or action wasn't the only thing needed right now, what else might be needed?" or "What if this other activity / person was not just a delay or a challenge, what else might it / they be offering that is helpful?". It's that simple.
However, if your brain is telling you that even pausing to think is a delay, it won't necessarily be easy. That's why you have to practice!
