Another Times article caught my eye - about how even the most ‘modern’ of fathers don’t change their working arrangements to be involved with bringing up their children. [click here for the full article]

This is such a relevant issue for me right now. Ever since my son Alex was born four years ago, I’ve taken out one working day a week to look after him. And soon, that will change because he’s off to school in mid-September.

Taking time out to look after a child is incredibly rewarding; a beautiful, poignant thing. And it’s boring and lonely and hard-work and will affect your business or your workrate and the way people regard you at work.

I’m sure mums will already know this.

And one thing that’s shifted in a big way for me is that I’d now employ a person who has brought up children instead of somebody who hadn’t. If you can do that and juggle the other ‘home’ stuff, work is a delightful doddle!

Eventually, I got a pattern of working which meant I could run my business and have a relatively guilt-free weekday with my son.

Because they can, I know that a great many men will stay longer at work after their kids are born -  it’s easier and more interesting there. I think that’s sad and short-sighted and says a lot about how dis-empowered many men really are.

And would I have done more, say two or three days a week, if I’d had a job where part-time was a possibility? Maybe.

I wanted a relationship with my son, right from the start, that gave us a special bond and that will go somewhere even beyond that. And I think I have laid some of the groundwork for that, even with my small change of one working day.

Now I have to decide what to do next, when Alex goes off to school.

An article in yesterday’s Times reports that we use our intuition to decide in just a tenth of a second whether we like or trust somebody - all based on facial features!

[click here for the full article]

What the article doesn’t say is just what facial characteristics our intuition uses to infer likeability, trustworthyness or competence. So, I flicked through the paper to see what reactions I had and I was struck by pictures of Keith Richards and Mick Jagger - both with full heads of thick black hair and the craggiest, unhealthiest faces I have seen in a long time. I don’t feel I would trust these two guys at all!

And what I think is going on here is the incongruence of their faces.
Perfect teeth, perfect hair, but skin that looks 120 years old!
Something about that doesn’t add-up.
It’s inconsistent and I wonder if that is one of the things our intuition is doing? - silently adding-up all the information about somebody’s appearence to see if they really are what they appear to be?

So if I’m coaching people in their leadership or just their ability to succesfully influence other people, how do we use this information?

Suppose it’s true, that everybody you meet will judge your personal congruence in the blink of an eye? And then they’ll use that to decide if they like you, if you’re trustable and even if you’re competent.

I think what this means is that if you want to succesfully influence others, you’d better be totally aligned with who you really are, and have your appearence reflect that.

Remember what Polonuis says to Laertes in ‘Hamlet’:

This above all: to thine own self be true.

Chatting yesterday with a client from a very senior job in a very large business, mostly about the issue of control. And maybe you’ve seen this paradox too, that the higher-up the company ladder you get, the greater your responsibility grows, just as your ability to ‘command’ diminishes.

For a great many reasons, because you’re working through other people (most of whom are senior too), because the issues themselves aren’t that clear-cut with no ‘magic bullet’ answers, because authority needs to be vested in those nearest the work, it becomes increasingly hard to give direct orders like “You, you and you - do X, now”.

An army client said something similar to me ages ago, about how the higher you go in the military “command structure”, the less you use the tool of the direct order. This is also because of those issues AND in the military because of the consequences of giving an order which somebody doesn’t follow.

So I guess that leads to two conclusions:

(1) don’t bother climbing the promotional ladder if what you’re after is control

(2) if you want to be succesful at the top, you better know how to influence results, not drive them through regardless of others.

Sitting in a client’s shared offices last week, I came across an article in a back issue of Children Now [click here to read full article].

The article is about the links between self-esteem and behaviour and quotes a study by psychologist Nichoas Emler. Interestingly, he found very little link between low self-esteem and crime and delinquency.

In fact, it seems that these problem behaviours are more likely to be linked to high self-esteem, raising the issue of how to deal with people who are perhaps too confident and have too high a sense of their self-worth.

I was interested, not just because that describes me (and my early teenage delinquncy is maybe the subject of a separate blog entry sometime!), but also because I work with a lot of clients like this. I don’t mean delinquents, but people who are very challenging, externally very confident.

That high self-esteem brings with it a whole other set of issues for my clients, ranging from how to influence and encourage other less assertive people, how to collaborate with other challenging high self-esteemers, how to deal with life when they don’t personally measure-up to their own demanding expectations, to how to deal with their requirements for challenge and ‘frisson’.

If you’ve got the ‘front’ for it, it’s an interesting job this!

Talking about changing habits (which I was yesterday), I’m starting a new exercise programme next week. It’s going to be free-weights, core-fitness based and I’ll be doing some of it at home.

So, on the instructions of my new trainer, I’ve had some equipment delivered. Yesterday, my new dumbbells arrived - and I sprained my wrist as I took the package from the parcel guy!!

When I’m not wincing from the pain it quite makes me laugh.

By the way, I’ve filed this under the “360 Confidence” section, because a lot of my personal confidence comes from being in touch with my physical being - not necessarily to do with fitness, just from regularly ‘using’ my body.

What do you do when you’re trying to achieve something but feeling like you don’t know where to start or like there are no options available?

How do you get out of a rut and stay out?

Here’s my magic formula: 

Progress rather than Perfection,

Something rather than Nothing