We all have a collection of things in our lives that we would like to change. When it comes to change, we often find that it's a lot harder than we expect it to be. Even small things turn out to be much more difficult that we think they should be. The problem comes down to control.

In order to change something to be exactly the way you want it, you need to control it. If you try to change something you have no control over, you will fail. A lot of coaches and consultants will get you to draw diagrams showing the things you control vs the things you don't. The message is that you can change the things you control and can only influence the things you don’t. If you want to change something the way to do that is to expand your sphere of control - try to gain control of the thing you want to change. Unfortunately, 99% of those diagrams are completely wrong. We generally have control over far less than we think we do.

I'm sure we have all been in this position - you are in a meeting where ideas are being shared. Someone puts forward an idea and someone raises an objection. The raiser of the idea reacts as if they have just been punched in the face - angry, defensive, aggressive. Or sullen, withdrawn, silent. Fight or flight. And all because someone raised an objection to their idea. People tend to hold their ideas very tightly. They identify with them. They are their idea. So an attack on their idea is very literally an attack on them.

Or what about this one - you were just in a meeting and someone says to you "that was a pretty bad idea they raised.. what a fool they must be". In this case we are associating the idea with the character of the person who raised it. The idea was bad so therefore, by extension, they must be bad. We see both of these situations all the time. Both associating strongly with your own ideas, and conflating the quality of an idea with the attributes or character of the person who raised it, are things most of us do all the time, and they are both extremely unhelpful.

One of the most effective things any person or team can do to improve the way they work is to make their work visible. Unless you work in a factory building physical things, chances are most of your work is invisible. It lives in emails and in documents and in conversations. It's not physical stuff that you can easily see in front of you. It's hard to get an overall picture of where all your work is in your process and where things are getting stuck. On a factory floor you can see a pile of parts build up in front of a bottleneck. It's really hard to do that with invisible work. Invisible work generally only becomes visible when there is a problem.

So if you want to understand your work, you need some way to make it visible. Make a big board somewhere and put cards on it representing all the work that is in flight and where it is in your process. By visualising work that is usually invisible, you can start to see patterns and make changes to improve the flow. If is invisible you can't control it. You only become aware of it when it jumps out at you and causes you a problem. By making the invisible visible you gain control over something. That works great for things like invisible work, but what about other invisible things? Things like our own internal states - our thoughts and emotions.

Last time I wrote about the drive for change being caused by a tension between the way we want the world to be and the way the world is. We looked at the two ways in which to release that tension - change reality to match your vision, or lower your vision to match reality. We explored the sad fact that most of the time it’s much easier to lower your expectations and what happens when you do that. We also looked at how you can keep your dreams alive in the face of difficulty - by not fixating on reaching the goal but focusing on the progress made along the journey. That post generated a bunch of questions from readers so I thought I'd write a follow-up to address them.

There were three main questions raised - does the goal have to be an external goal (change the world) and not an internal goal (change me); is any changing of your goal a bad thing; and what to do if you are a really goal oriented person and keep focusing on reaching that goal.

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.

Last time we asked the question - "What makes a great leader?" and in order to answer that, we had to look at what it is that a leader actually does. What really is leadership? It turns out that the function of a leader is to allow large groups to work in a coordinated and purposeful way. Then we started to look at what sort of skills leaders are encouraged to develop and which of those skills really make the difference between a leader and a great leader.

The skills that really make a difference are not the ones that many people assume are the important ones. Technical skill in whatever it is you are doing is fairly unimportant. How driven you are personally is not that important. The reason for this is that those skills are ones that don't scale. Being technically good as the leader doesn't make the group any better once you hit the capacity of that one leader to dispense technical advice. Being driven to succeed as a leader doesn't make the group driven to succeed. Those things are individual things. They have a scale of one. What matters when leading groups are skills that scale across the whole group - things that lift the whole group up, not just the leader.

What is leadership and why do we need it? If you do a search for leadership books on Amazon you get back thousands of titles, all with a different take on what makes a great leader. Some emphasise technical skills. Some emphasise people skills, others emphasise whatever magic formula the author believes holds the secret. You could read leadership books for the rest of your life and and up more confused than you were when you started.

So what is the secret? What does make a great leader. Why do we need leaders anyway? The only way we will answer the question of what makes a great leader is to work out what leaders really do.

As a brewer, when you hook up a keg of beer to the gas and hook up the tap, one of the things you learn quite quickly (unless you really like drinking nothing but foam) is that the pressure of the gas pushing the liquid through the tube creates a resistance in that tube that poses the flow. The more pressure, the more resistance. Eventually the resistance becomes too much, creates turbulence and the tap will pour gas and foam rather than lovely beer. Electrical engineers recognise this phenomenon as well - the more current you push through a wire (the pressure of the electrons), the more the wire will resist their flow and cause energy to be lost as heat. Eventually the wire will get so hot that it will melt.

This is a well known phenomenon of many of the physical sciences. Whenever you push one thing into or through another thing, there is resistance and that resistance is proportional to the pressure doing the pushing - small pressure, small resistance. Large pressure, large resistance. Importantly, that resistance can build to a point where it will cause damage to the materials involved. Push too hard and the wire will melt or the pipe will burst. Pushing harder may actually get you less flow because the resistance is greater. So why am I telling you this? Because it applies to coaching as well, but unlike the physical sciences we often don't recognise it.

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.