Development Archives - Nick Robinson

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How to get your mindset right for leading one on one meetings

This is the first in a series for people who want to use one-on-one meetings as a good tool for leading the efforts of their team members

It’s based on my short ebooklet available from Amazon here – free to Kindle Unlimited members or otherwise £1.99

You can read the rest of the tips when published here. They’re essentially a summary of the booklet.

By way of introduction, I wrote that short ebooklet when, in the space of a fortnight, three separate coaching clients mentioned that they were struggling a little with running their one-to-one meetings with their individual team members. It’s easy to cover those kinds of issues in a coaching session, but it seemed to me that it would make better use of my clients’ time in our sessions if I could also just give them some simple guidance to take away and use as and when they wanted. I hope that the booklet has been useful – it’s been slowly working its way up the independent management books charts anyway. The next in the series will cover Delegation.

All great management starts with the manager’s own mindset. To make a good management process work well, it isn’t enough to know what to do and how to do it, you also need to know what attitudes of mind are likely to get the best results for you. Here are the most important ones for running great one-on-one meetings:

Empowerment as an outcome of your management – you’ve got to want to inspire people to get more done under their own motivation and responsibility.

It’s a bit like having teenagers, they need to learn how to do stuff for themselves. Until you’re prepared to adopt this as part of your mindset, you’re likely to be spoon-feeding people and picking-up after them long after they could have learned to do it for themselves. I think the trick here is to actually include empowerment as one of the outcomes you’re after. Put it up there alongside the tasks that you want this person to achieve and give it as much, if not more, weight as all the other important stuff you need to ensure gets done.

Coaching as a leadership style – where you put a big chunk of your leadership energies into the longer-term development of others.

It’s not the only leadership style you’ll need to use, but it is very effective and very rewarding for you. It’s also a good partner to empowerment. You could think of a coaching leadership style as being NOT about you as leader having the answers, but about guiding people to find their own answers to things.

If I had to encapsulate it in a single phrase for leaders to use, it’d be something like:
“How about trying this…?”

The transition from doing to leading – the more your responsibilities increase, the more you need to shift from actually doing stuff yourself, to getting stuff done by acting through others – by leading.

If you’re like most people, you’ll have got to your position at least partly because you’re good at what you do. And so this can sometimes be a tricky transition to make, or even to be aware of its significance. It’s also quite scary because of course it takes you outside of what you know you’re good at doing, into possibly new territory – and people are often much more complex to understand and influence than the tasks themselves.

But this is a really important place to get your head into. Take a deep breath, stop doing stuff yourself, and start making sure that you act through others.

Let me know what kind of mindset works well for you, when running your own one-on-one sessions with your team members please? Either leave a comment below if they’re still open at the time of reading, or tweet me @nickrobcoach.

To make a good management process work well, it isn’t enough to know what to do and how to do it, you also need to know what attitudes of mind are likely to get the best results for you. Click To Tweet

When Asking, Telling and Suggesting Still Don’t Get Results

Deciding what to do when someone persistently doesn’t deliver at work can actually be really difficult!

That’s because:

We start wondering if it’s something wrong with our own management or leadership style;
It’s hard to tell if we’re being too soft and laid-back, or the opposite – if our annoyance and frustration is leaking out too strongly;
It’s exhausting!
And if you ask Human Resources about the company’s “Performance Management Process”, it begins to feel like you’ve already failed somewhere (and you worry that HR might think so too).

A short programme of one-to-one or team coaching can help get over that by:

Creating a safe space for individuals to express, and then start moving beyond, any frustrations;
Discovering whether the problem is:

1. An interpersonal one – some people are simply not getting on;
2. Structural – there are processes that don’t function properly, or conflicting requirements that block progress;
3. Competence-based – there are skills, abilities or techniques that need to be acquired; or
4. Confidence-based – self-belief, motivation or self-limiting habits might be getting in the way.

Developing more effective (and fulfilling) ways of approaching things all round.

If you’d like to know more about this approach, have someone else who is (or are yourself) in this kind of situation at work, please click here to get in touch.

Slower, Lower, Weaker

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8 ways to deal with managers who aren’t top performers

[to download a copy, click and select the image above and then right-click and select ‘Save image as … ‘]

The Olympic motto is “Citius – Altius – Fortius”, better-known as ‘Faster, Higher, Stronger’. But what about the opposite – what about those of us who might be Slower, Lower or Weaker in our potential?

How organisations regard the people in their teams and leadership positions who would never make it to the management Olympics says a lot. I believe it actually speaks volumes about the attitudes of those who shape an organisation’s culture. In particular, how they regard others (and perhaps therefore how they also regard themselves) along two key dimensions:

Whether the fact that not everyone will make it to the management Olympics is a Risk or an Opportunity; and
Whether people’s innate capacities are either Fixed or Flexible.

I’m not entirely convinced that it’s best to think of there being a right or a wrong way to regard this issue, more that senior leaders and organisations should be aware of the choices they’re making and do so consciously and strategically.

Which is your organisation’s typical response when managers might not be candidates for the Olympics?

Please leave a comment below if they’re still open at the time of reading, or tweet me @nickrobcoach

Slower, Lower, Weaker - what should you do if people in your organisation aren't going to make it to the management Olympics? Click To Tweet

The Intersecting Tracks

To make progress, great coaching runs on two intersecting tracks: Understanding – expanding what’s possible; and Doing – creating practical results

First, there’s a Doing track.

The Doing track is important because great coaching has to be a practical, tangible thing – to result in something useful that you can see or touch or hear. It’s not possible for clients to arrive at that destination without actually Doing something.

Second, there’s an Understanding track.

The Understanding track is important because great coaching should take people beyond what’s currently possible. And that requires new ways of looking at ourselves, more understanding about how best to relate to the world around us, and a deeper sense of what’s possible for us, both as individuals and in concert with others.

Clients often have an expectation that the coaching work will only focus on one or other track – sometimes they’re unaware that there even is a second track.

They might be struggling to get something done or to make a significant change, without realising that the reason they’re struggling is that they first need some new or deeper understanding. At other times, they can be flailing around, looking for the magic bullet to make things easier, when they simply might not have tried enough different ways, or even have tried hard enough.

The trouble is, of course, that it’s not easy to tell if something we’re attempting is difficult because (a) we lack some crucial insight; or (b) we should just be trying more things, or just trying harder. This is where our tracks need to intersect and why the coaching space, somewhere to reflect on those points, is such a powerful one.

So, intersecting tracks:

Track 1: discover some new Understanding because that then makes possible a different type of Doing; and/or
Track 2: try more or different ways of Doing, because the results from that doing will lead to new Understanding.

Once you become conscious of the intersecting tracks and the need to be both Doing and Understanding in a way that’s pretty close to simultaneous, all kinds of fantastic breakthroughs start to appear.

“Action without knowledge is useless and knowledge without action is futile.” Abu Bakr

What’s been your experience of this – can you understand without doing? Or push what you’re capable of doing without also getting new understanding?

Please leave a comment below if they’re still open at the time of reading, or tweet me @nickrobcoach

Great coaching has to run on two intersecting tracks – Understanding and Doing – more or less simultaneously. Here’s why: Click To Tweet

Resourcefulness

Feel like you’re unstoppable – eight steps to being a powerful, Resourceful leader

Can you meet whatever situation life and work sends you – and show others how to do the same? Resourceful people can. Resourceful people have the initiative to grasp opportunities and the ingenuity to overcome their challenges. They can make powerful decisions and help their teams and colleagues to do so too.

We have a principle in the kind of coaching I do which is about regarding everybody as resourceful.

This is such an important thing that it’s maybe one of the first points I look for when I’m working with a new client. I ask myself:

How does this person regard themselves and the people who work for them? Do they think of themselves as someone who is able to meet whatever situation arises, and who is ingenious enough to devise ways and means to overcome problems? And do they think the same of their team and their colleagues too?

Perhaps one of the main reasons why regarding yourself and others as ‘resourceful’ is so important, is because the alternative is really awful. The alternative to regarding people as resourceful, is to see yourself and others as somehow fragile and dependent.

Now, it’s true that if you bend anyone hard enough and fast enough then they might break. But that is in no way the same as being ‘fragile’. And what’s more, breaks can be mended. And it’s also true that we are all, in some way, dependent on the people around us – like the poem says, “No man is an island” – but having those kind of human links, having dependencies, is not the same as being dependent, as being unable to function at all without others.

One of the loudest complaints I hear from poor leaders is that their people: “… aren’t resourceful enough”. They wonder why nobody works as hard as them or why their team: “… don’t show more initiative”. The years have taught me that this is a 90% certain sign that this leader doesn’t regard other people as resourceful. And usually, when I get the chance to dig a little more with this kind of leader, we find out pretty quickly that they don’t really feel resourceful themselves either!

All of us have times when we lose sight of our resourcefulness. Perhaps we’ve been stretched too far out of our comfort zones too fast or for too long. Or perhaps we’ve gradually had things pile up on top of us to the point where it’s difficult to remember just what we’re capable of.

It’s taken me a long time and lots of getting it wrong along the way to discover just how important this idea of resourceful actually is. Think of it like this. If it was possible to choose between two alternative points of view, which of these do you feel is likely to be most useful?

In general, me and/or the people around me are easily broken and incapable of overcoming problems
In general, me and/or the people around me are capable of meeting whatever situation arises and are skilled at solving problems.

If you could choose – which of those viewpoints would you have?

Us coaches tend to be very practical people, so we look for what works. And over the years I’ve tried a lot of things that don’t work! Now I’m pretty certain that the best leadership approach is to regard myself and others as fully resourceful.

The principle in my coaching work is that everybody has a natural ability to resolve the challenges they face and to grasp the opportunities around them.

When we forget that, or when I want to help others reconnect with their own innate resourcefulness, here are the eight steps that I follow:

1. Understand what Resourceful means

Two things are important to grasp in whatever your own or other people’s definition of Resourceful is:

First, that the word itself comes from the Latin ‘Resurgere’ – which means “to rise again”. Right there in the word is an important clue. Being Resourceful does not mean never falling, it’s about getting up again when you do.

Second, being Resourceful is a ‘capability’, something which can and should be developed, learnt and practised.

2. Start looking for Evidence of it

I think we’re predisposed to actually look for evidence of where ourselves and others are not Resourceful. Maybe this is even more prevalent at work. Perhaps it’s because the consequences of not being Resourceful can be (or seem to be) dangerous; and that we need to compensate for them. I’m not bothered by that, it seems a natural thing to want to do. But if we want to experience more occasions of ourselves and others being Resourceful, then we’ve got to start looking for evidence of when it IS happening.

To start looking for that evidence, answer this question:

What would you see, hear, feel or otherwise notice that would let you know when you’re being Resourceful?

3. Figure out what Thought-Patterns are useful to you

Once you know what Resourceful means for you or for others, and you know what evidence would let you see it was happening, two significant thought-patterns are worth exploring further. You can dive into them by answering these questions:

What enables me to be Resourceful?
What is necessary first, in order for me to be Resourceful?
When I am Resourceful, what does it lead to or make possible?
Why is being Resourceful important?

Your answers to those questions are the cornerstones of what some people would call an ‘empowering belief’ (kind of the opposite of a ‘limiting belief’). They’re at the heart of what might motivate you to be Resourceful, and they’re the primary clues to changing your behaviour if you want to be more Resourceful. So spend as much time exploring them as you can!

4. Become consciously aware of your fears

The stuff that we’re (usually unconsciously) afraid of is what most often derails our chance to be Resourceful. Being afraid of getting something wrong stops us from trying. Being afraid of looking stupid stops us from taking a risk. It’s hard to be Resourceful when your unconscious mind is afraid of what might happen if you try!

Other common fears include being afraid of getting hurt, of missing out, of failing, of letting people down, of not being good enough. There’s a lot! I’ve written about this stuff before, so feel free to browse around here. Once you stop and ask yourself honestly, what am I afraid of, or worrying about or being anxious of, it becomes much easier to see what’s going on. Don’t try to get rid of these fears – they serve their purpose – just get to the point where you’re conscious of them, and then…

5. Actively Make Choices

Making choices, intentionally and consciously, is a very powerful (and resourceful) thing to do. Otherwise we let habit, fear and expedience run the whole show.

You can use a structure like this, if you want to help yourself or others to make powerful choices:

In order to be Resourceful, what three things do I choose to say “No” to?
In particular, what do I choose to say No to being, to say No to doing and to say No to believing?
In order to be Resourceful, what three things do I choose to say “Yes” to?
In particular, what do I choose to say Yes to being, to say Yes to doing and to say Yes to believing?

6. (Re)Discover what Resourceful feels like in your body

Remember that there’s a dynamic aspect to being Resourceful. It isn’t just a static thing, it’s about rising again when we’ve fallen or when we’re stuck or when we’re faced with another fresh challenge.

What does each part of that dynamic process feel like in your body? What do your muscles feel like? What’s the temperature of it? What feelings do you notice in your gut, in your face, elsewhere in your body? When you get to the most Resourceful part, what does that feel like? And where in your body is the centre of your own version of Resourceful?

Daft as it may sound, getting to know what your own experience of Resourceful is like in this way can be a really helpful and grounding approach.

7. Connect with others

Don’t do all of this stuff on your own. I’m a very independent person and I respect other people who like to do things by their own efforts too and I know that it really helps to be wise enough to share some of it. You can learn from, lean on and bounce stuff around with other people in a way that just isn’t possible by yourself.

8. Experiment, Practice and Adjust

Finally, I said earlier that everybody has that natural ability to resolve the challenges they face. The best way to bring that out in yourself and in others is to experiment with it. Find opportunities to be Resourceful. Get curious about what that’s like. Practice doing it like your favourite sports person would practice their skills. When you notice something isn’t working, adjust part of it, and practice some more.

Self-Awareness – A Primer

Self-Awareness is the best start for leadership development. But how do you get that? What should you look for; and how?

The ancient Greeks had the phrase “Know thyself” chiselled on the doorway to the temple of Apollo at Delphi. Real knowledge, insight and understanding about important events and people in the world around them wasn’t possible they reckoned, without first having the foundation of self-knowledge.

If that’s still true today, how do you actually go about getting self-awareness? What should you look for; and how do you do it?

I think there’s perhaps three or more important areas to consider and I’ve set out some of those below. These are often used as early as the second or third phase in my coaching approach, as they’re so fundamental to the development work we need to do after that.

This is a fairly long post for me, over 1,200 words, because I wanted to give you a rounded sense of where to be looking, what to be listening for and how it feels to be embarking, in a structured way, on this kind of self-knowledge work. What I’ve written here isn’t the only way to go about it, and even at over 1,200 words this is still only a very quick jog around the park. Anyway, I hope you find it helpful in some way.

1. Your Values

These are the things that, at the moment at least, are intrinsically important to you. They can or might change over time or in a different context. Some may be more important than others, and that also can be fluid but, most of the time, they’re fairly consistent. Here’s my own top 5 Values:

Making a difference / Usefulness / Legacy
Excellence / Strive to be the best / Learn-Apply
Congruence / Authenticity / Be true to yourself
Independence / Self-reliance / Go do it
Balance / Harmony / Wholeness

Note that these are in ‘strings’ of words, separated by “/” because often one word by itself isn’t enough to capture everything about a particular value.

A simple way to start to uncover your own values would be to remember a time, at work or at home, when things felt like they were going great, or just right, or were especially poignant in some way. What were the circumstances of that time? What was going on around you, who was present, how did you feel?

The chances are that during that time several of your values were being quite strongly upheld. People can often begin to identify those values by reflecting on that time and getting curious about what made it so great for them.

2. Your Thought Patterns

This is about how your (mostly unconscious) mind filters out what is useful information and what isn’t and how it then represents that information, so that you can make sense of the world around you.

Since this process happens very fast and mostly unconsciously, one of the best ways to uncover your own patterns is by way of a kind of compare and contrast with other people. Look at the way they do things, and see how it compares with your own way.

Here are two examples of the kinds of things to consider:

Are you motivated into action more by (a) the chance to achieve a goal; or (b) the need to solve or avoid a problem?
Do you prefer (a) to have lots of choice and variety, creating different possibilities in the way you go about things, or (b) do you prefer to stick to a tried and tested process?

Another important pattern became obvious to me when I got a new Satnav. My old one used to show me a map of my whole route when it had finished plotting. Only after you’d seen that ‘big picture’ screen, did it let you start navigating. But my new satnav didn’t give you that overview. Once it’d plotted a route, it just went straight to “Turn left”. I really found it difficult to trust the new satnav and would often ask my wife to just check the ‘big picture’ of the route in our tatty old road atlas, which she hated doing. Turns out, I’ve got a strong preference for thinking in big picture terms and, until I’ve done that, it’s really hard for me to get into the detail, even though I’ve trained myself (I’m an ex-accountant!) to work with detail. And my wife is the opposite, she’s fascinated by the detail, so she hated being asked to check the big picture of the route.

Again, these factors are not immutable, they can change and be changed. It’s important to not ‘adopt’ them as fixed determinants and to not use them to pigeonhole yourself or others, or to excuse bad behaviour.

It’s possible, although I don’t think it’s often that necessary, to go through about 20 or so of those key patterns as part of the coaching process in in easy conversational way with me. I don’t often do that, because I’d rather people take responsibility for their own self-knowledge than have me or some anonymous psychometric test do it for them.

As well as the kind of thought patterns I’ve described here, you could also look at key aspects of personality, such as introversion or extraversion. The important thing is to just look, listen, feel and think your way a little more consciously than normal really. The psychologist Carl Jung said “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

3. Your Fears, Doubts and Limiting Beliefs

What holds you back? What doubts do you have about yourself, your abilities, the kind of person you are, the way others might see you?

What things are you so unconsciously afraid of, that you’ll automatically come out fighting, even when that isn’t the best way to do things?

In what way do you sell yourself short? Or sabotage your own efforts?

What unwritten rules have you made up about how you have to “be” (e.g. a favourite of mine: “I have to be strong”)?

What shame or hurt are you carrying around about past experiences that made you feel inadequate?

I love working with fears, doubts and limiting beliefs because I see them not as ‘bad’ things, but as really useful data about what’s important to people and about how they might really shine, if they want to.

If you’re ready now to start uncovering some of your own possible fears, doubts and limiting beliefs, try completing some of the sentences below. Do it fast and without too much conscious thought:

I’m often too …………………

I need to be more …………………

I can’t seem to …………………

I should stop (or start) …………………

I mustn’t keep …………………

I shouldn’t always …………………

I must be less …………………

Every time I try to do ………….……., ……………. happens

I want to …………………, but that’s just the way things are

I don’t deserve to …………………

I ought to …………………

If you find anything at all, start celebrating, because that just might be the bit of self-knowledge that opens all the other doors. And if completing the sentences didn’t uncover anything for you, just try going back to those questions I’ve posed at the start of section 3 above and become curious about how any of those might apply to you.

After working through those three key areas, the next level of self-knowledge is to get really clear about what’s even more important to you than your patterns of thinking and your doubts and fears and about how you might apply your values to your life and your work.

10 Ways to be a Smarter Leader

How to be Smart in a World of Dumb Leaders

Thank you for reading this. There is so much to be done in the way that some people lead and run businesses and organisations, that it really needs folks to spread the word about how things could be instead.

So many times I’ll be sitting in a work-group observing, or be finding-out second-hand about something a leader has said or done that just makes me cringe: “Ouch! Why did they need to say or do it that way?” You’ve probably seen or heard about something similar yourself?

I just looked back through my notes over the last few months to find these ten examples of what I reckon are the most important differences between Smart and Dumb leaders – it wasn’t hard to find these!

Please get out there and spread the word. Let’s have much more smart leadership.

Dumb Leaders:	Smart Leaders:
Pretend to know all the answers	Are brave enough to ask the tough questions
Struggle to hide their weaknesses	Use their vulnerabilities as a chance to learn from and develop others
Never stop to see themselves how others see them	Take the time to walk in different worlds and explore multiple viewpoints
Inflict their mood-swings on everyone else	Successfully manage their emotions, to help read and influence the moods of others
Always look for the heroic, Hail Mary long shots	Make sure the daily grind is being done well, to make the most of the right opportunities
Will happily, noisily and frequently tell you what they think – and even what you think	Apply the principal of one mouth, two ears – seek to listen and understand before being understood
Don’t care who you are nor what’s important to you	See each team member as an individual deserving of their attention
Slap-down ideas and actions that don’t fit into their way of doing things	Encourage creative thinking and prudent risk-taking
Keep their plans secret	Know how to use their vision of the future to motivate and inspire people
Have low standards for their own behaviours and will justify doing as they want, when they want	Role-model the kind of high ethical behaviour that instils pride and earns respect and trust.

Personal Development Basics

Angry, Anxious, or Chaotic?
Three simple techniques for when you really need to kick-start some personal change

Sometimes before you can do any significant behaviour change and development, you first need to shift your state to be a little more positive or flexible. Or perhaps you just need to get yourself out of a temporary ‘stuckness’. Here are my favourite quick and easy actions to create some space, order and momentum. You’ll still need to do the developmental work and growth that leads to longer-term, sustainable change, but these simple actions often seem to help get that started.

Click here to download as a pdf

Overcoming Self-Doubt

Nine Lies the Gremlin likes to tell you that create self-doubt and sabotage your confidence

Lie 1:
You’re the only one who feels out of their depth, doesn’t deserve to be there or thinks they’re not up to the task

The Gremlin is a shorthand term we use for the process of self-doubt, inner-criticism or limiting self-beliefs that people experience. If there’s one thing that’s helped me have more empathy and understanding in the 17 years I’ve been doing this job, it’s the realisation that everybody experiences this process at one time or another. Step one in working with the Gremlin is to accept that this process operates for all of us – this knowledge allows us to be more accepting of other people and more empowering towards ourselves.

Lie 2:
You’re peculiar even for thinking about the process of self-doubt and self-sabotage, let alone for wanting to work on it

Imagine for a moment that you are one of the very first human-being-like creatures, sitting outside your cave one pleasant summer’s evening over 100,000 years ago. You notice that the tall grass in front of you is waving about. Do you (a) assume it’s the evening breeze gently moving the grass, or (b) assume it’s a rather large tiger looking for supper and that you’re on the menu!?
Clearly it’s safer to assume that there’s a possible threat on the horizon. All of us alive today evolved from those early humanoids whose survival depended on being aware of daily threats to their very existence. Later, as our early ancestors developed into social groupings, emotional threats to our place in the tribe were also important to avoid.
So our brains evolved to rapidly and automatically scan for existential threats and it’s this same ‘monkey-brain’ mechanism that today still seeks to keep us safe from physical and emotional harm. Nowadays, the actual physical threats are reduced and it’s the emotional ones that mostly concern us: “I might look stupid”, “I should be more self-assured”, I’m not a good enough X…”. Fortunately, we also have more evolved higher-brain cognitive abilities and can think and work our way past this Gremlin process.

Lie 3:
There’s nothing you can do about feelings of self-doubt and lack of confidence; it’s just the way you are

This is one of the most powerful lies the Gremlin tells us. Remember, this is an evolved process that is trying to keep you safe from physical and emotional harm. Outside of actual clear and present danger, its logic is flawed but powerfully simple: change is dangerous; the status quo is known and therefore safe; therefore avoid the unknown and protect the status quo at all costs. Change, and your own attempts to change and grow, are a big threat to the Gremlin.
This is why the most important step in working past this process is to begin recognising it for what it is – a safety mechanism evolved to protect the status quo. We can work with this most easily by looking out for the kind of phrases the Gremlin likes to whisper in our inner ear: (“I shouldn’t be so…”, “I must be a better X…”, “I can’t ever do Y again…”, “I mustn’t keep…”).

Lie 4:
If you were happier or were doing more meaningful work, you wouldn’t experience so much self-doubt or lack confidence

There’s a great poem by Marianne Williamson that begins

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.”

I think this poem is a great way of reminding ourselves that this Gremlin process will also operate to sabotage the good stuff and make us doubt the good times, just as much as the bad. It operates to protect the status quo – positive work and fulfillment and the growth they can lead to are perhaps even more of a threat to that.

Lie 5:
You need a really well thought-out argument to counter your Limiting Self-Beliefs

Take one of the most frequent things I hear from people’s Gremlins, which is something like this: “I’m the only one around the senior management table who isn’t really on top of things”.

To counter this, people often run through the opposite arguments: I am qualified in my subject; I have got years of experience; I did do the preparation for the meeting; I do take the time to keep up with what’s going on.
But why don’t these arguments always work?
The problem is that the Gremlin process uses your strengths against you.
So conscientious people never feel they’ve done enough preparation. Or people who are great at analysis see all the flaws in their own case. Or people with high levels of empathy sense the doubt and confusion in others and assume it’s about them.
Because it uses the very characteristics that make you a strong person, you can never fight the Gremlin head-on and you shouldn’t try. One of my trainers told me it’s like this:

Never wrestle with a pig, because the pig just enjoys it and you both end-up covered in muck!

Lie 6:
You automatically feel like this all the time

The Gremlin process sits in the parts of our brains that autonomously scan for threats and trigger our emotions. So it works incredibly fast. Especially when compared with the logical ‘higher-level’ brain functions. This speed and autonomy can make it feel like it’s always there, even when it’s not.

To free ourselves from feeling that we have these self-doubts, limiting beliefs and lack of confidence all the time, we need to practise spotting the Gremlins ahead of when they are likely to happen. This way we can use the more recently-evolved and higher-level parts of our brains to determine in advance what we actually want.

Lie 7:
You need to get rid of your Gremlins once and for all

This is another way the Gremlin likes to try and set us up to fail – and therefore preserve the status quo. Remember, this whole process exists to keep us safe from physical and emotional harm. In the right circumstances, it’s a useful trait. Even if it were possible to be rid of this process (and I don’t think it is), trying to get rid of it just denies the reason for it being there in the first place!
Instead of getting rid of the Gremlin process, our development and growth actually depends upon seeing it for what it is and learning to co-exist with it.

Lie 8:
You are weak; All your previous efforts to overcome this have failed; Better just to avoid challenging situations

Put the gremlins to one side for a while and get curious about just what it is that this process is trying to protect you from. Often the (warped) logic is pretty easy to follow. For example: If you believe you’re weak you won’t try, if you don’t try you can’t fail, if you don’t fail you won’t get hurt.
Or: If you avoid challenging situations you won’t have to let your assertive side show, if people saw how assertive you really can be they might not like you and then you’d be alone and isolated.
Taking the time to understand just what this previously unconscious process has been trying to protect you from is a great way of not letting the Gremlin run the show for you. Once you know what it’s been trying to protect you from, then you can decide consciously for yourself whether you really need that kind of protection.

Lie 9:
You should be ashamed of your self-doubt and lack of confidence

I’ve left this one ‘til last because it’s a particularly insidious lie. So that you don’t do something practical to work on the process, the Gremlin actually judges you badly for its own existence. In effect, you can have a Gremlin about your Gremlins!
There’s nothing to be ashamed of for having self-doubt and not having as much confidence as you’d like, for all the reasons discussed above.

Working with this process is about making it transparent and learning to co-exist with it. Beyond that, become curious about your own future.

When you learn to co-exist with your Gremlin, so that you see it there for what it is, and it’s useful when it is useful but doesn’t stop you when it’s not useful – then; what might be possible for you?