Feeling Stuck?

Have you ever had one of those days (or weeks, or months) where you just feel stuck? What do I mean by stuck? That feeling that you are not making progress. That you are doing the same thing over and over and nothing is changing. Solving the same problem time after time and knowing that tomorrow you will probably be solving the same problems again. That feeling that you are working really hard but not really achieving anything.

If you do feel that way, I'm going to let you in on a secret - it's not just you. Unless you have talked openly to others about this (and how many of us have done that?), you probably feel like it's just you. That everyone else around you feels fine and is having a great, fulfilling experience. But they probably aren't. That feeling of being stuck is pretty common. Most of us have spent weeks, months or even whole careers feeling like that. It's not much fun. It's draining. Soul destroying. It leads to stress, burnout and just plain unhappiness. Fortunately, there is something you can do about it.

CoachingDave Martin1 September 2020capability building, complexity, development, coaching, psychologyComment

How Do We Deal With Failure?

Failure is part of all of our lives. None of us is perfect (sorry if that comes as a shock to you). We all, in spite of the aura of competence we project, fail at things constantly. From the major things like failed relationships and doomed projects to the smaller stuff. The failure to resist that block of chocolate. The failure to concentrate on writing a blog post and not get distracted by YouTube (yes, guilty, many times). Our lives are a constant string of failures, big and small.

We tend to talk a good game where it comes to failure - we talk about learning and experience and the idea of failing fast to learn fast, but often, the game we talk, and the game we really play are quite different. Although our intentions around failure are often good, we often fail to live up to those good intentions (another failure to add to the list). Even when we think we are responding well to failure, our actual response is often quite negative.

CoachingDave Martin3 March 2020development, coachingComment

Complexity & The Crisis of Development

Last time, I started talking about complexity and uncertainty, and how the rapid increase in both has made the world a very hostile and confusing place to many people. Why would a rise in these two things cause the world to look hostile? The study of adult development gives us the reason - people only develop the ability to understand and deal with complexity and uncertainty at later stages of adult development. Until people reach those stages, they will seek certainty, or at least the illusion of certainty.

When that illusion is shattered, as it so often is these days, people need to re-form their illusion of certainty around different things - maybe my job is no longer certain, but at least my family is stable, and so on. When this happens again and again, people feel that their defences against the world are constantly under attack - the the world is against them. Their view of the world, one that might have served them perfectly well in the past, is now constantly under attack. All the old certainties that people used to rely upon - job, family, community, identity - are being continually challenged.

CoachingDave Martin18 February 2020development, complexity, coachingComment

Agility, Uncertainty and Complexity

I thought I'd kick the year off with a few thoughts on coaching. I should make it clear at this point that I mean proper coaching - helping people develop themselves and not the "showing people how to to agile" type of coaching that should really be called agile process consulting rather than agile coaching. Over the last couple of years, I have been moving away from "agile" coaching and towards a more developmental style. As I have made that shift, I have seen that typical agile coaching is fundamentally limited. I'm not saying that it has no value, just that it has real value only to a relatively small subset of the population.

I remember when I first found agile techniques and they felt intuitively right to me. They felt natural. They felt liberating. Many (if not all) of the agile coaches I have spoken to about this had a very similar experience. As coaches, we have all had the experience of an individual, or a team, or even an organisation that just "got it". They got what agile was about and just went for it. But we have all had the opposite (and far more frequent) experience of individuals, teams and organisations that just fail to grasp what agility is about. For whom agility is just following a new set of rules. Having different meetings. Doing standups and retros. When I speak to those people about agility they have a very different reaction to my first reaction. For them, agility is confronting, wrong and even suffocating. Why would that be? Why would people have such diametrically opposed reactions to the same thing? My journey into developmental coaching has given me a hint of the answer - it’s our relationship with uncertainty and complexity.

CoachingDave Martin4 February 2020development, coaching, complexityComment