By Mary Fenwick  BC09

I heart teenagers. Really.

But I was a bit worried about standing up in front of 200 of them, with no visible means of support.

So, a big shout out – as we dudes say – to everyone who got in touch after my last blog asking for help with my secondary school workshop on strengths.

These are the main points, which others might want to use:

Alex Linley, founder of the Centre for Applied Positive Psychology (capp.eu) gave me the following, which is my nomination for top ten-second briefing:

“The essential thing is to understand what we mean by strengths.  A strength is something that is energising for you and that you are good at. Another way of saying energising is that it is something that you enjoy.

 The key thing to get across is that in the Capp definition of strengths, it is the combination of energy and performance that defines a strength, rather than just performance alone.

 We also take this further by adding the dimension of use, which helps us to distinguish realised strengths (which are used frequently) and unrealised strengths (which are used less frequently).  In turn, learned behaviours are things that we are good at but don’t enjoy, and weaknesses are things that we are neither good at nor do we enjoy!”

 And I was also put in touch with the first issue of the Celebrating Strengths newsletter, which specializes in positive psychology adapted for schools.

So I’m now going on the first ever UK training workshop on this specific subject in October. Another way of putting this is to say – you know how I said I was getting paid to do the workshop in July? – I’ve spent that fee three times already.

For information about the Celebrating Strengths newsletter or workshop contact Belinda Catt, bj.c@btinternet.com

By Peter Aarts ( BC2011)

A biologist might see humans as animals and, like all animals, eat other animals or vegetables in order to fuel their attempts to reproduce. The fundamentals of human nature, therefore, are the pursuit of food and sex.

Tigers have strength, cheetahs have speed and humans have large brains. Biologists may believe that once they understand the human brain and the evolutionary history behind it, they will know all they need to, about our species.

Reducing the particulars of human consciousness to the workings of genes and brain cells seems wrong however, it appears the dominant account of what it is to be human today. Evolutionary theory is now firmly established, our genome is being deciphered and there are indisputable correlations between consciousness and brain activity.

A problem arises however, when we blame the credit crunch, for example, on short-termism inherited from our ancestors.

Raymond Tallis, latest book “Aping Mankind” is an all-out assault on the exaggerated claims made on behalf of the biological sciences. He points out that a fundamental shift in our self-perception is under way and frequently going too far.

Helga Nowotny’s book “Naked Genes” offers an explanation and presents an analysis of how the life sciences are shifting our view of ourselves and the challenges this is posing.

Scientists tend initially to ascribe too much importance to processes they attempt to understand, by isolating and extracting it from its context. They look inside the living brain and give disproportional weight to the images they are seeing.

Nowotny argues that the distinction between the natural genes we are born with, and the artificial, through drugs and genetic engineering, is a fiction.

Brian Christian book “The Most Human Human” offers a fascinating insight of what it means to be human and to prove it in the face of stiff competition from the world’s best artificial intelligence. The reductionist viewpoint suggests we are merely biological machines; if this is so, then all and any of our capacities should be achievable by other kinds of machines. Many in the science and technology community are trying to prove this.  The conventional test of whether a computer can think like a human is known as the Turing Test. It works as follows; an assessor converses separately, usually via a remote terminal, with a human and with a machine. If the assessor can’t tell which is which, the machine has passed the test.

The conclusion is that, we should not allow ourselves to be reduced by these new disciplines of genetics, neuroscience and computing. Instead, we can learn from them and use them to become better at being human.

(source: Financial Times)

By Meyler Campbell

There are some things that in the normal course of events are impossible to get, even for our amazing community – but this summer we’ve been incredibly lucky to secure some briefings one would normally never access.  They’ll put you streets ahead of the game, and every single penny goes to charity. First up:

Big Bang for lawyers: what’s it all about?

Ten thousand law firms across the UK are marching in solid phalanx towards the cliff-edge – Big Bang for lawyers is due to happen on 6 October 2011, when external equity investment will be permitted in English law firms for the first time and “Tesco law” will allow in new and very different competition.  Private equity and M&A are circling and armed to the teeth, and despite their protestations even the largest City firms should be thinking differently.  A few leading edge coaches are already working flat out helping leaders keep clear heads.  But most law firms are in classic Kubler-Ross cycles – were in denial, now in suppressed panic, and most coaches haven’t woken up to the vast opportunity and need for their services.  In sharp contrast to the hyperbole of this blurb, Professor Stephen Mayson, a world authority on law firm strategy, adviser to law firms, companies, regulators and governments around the world, and the insider’s insider on the Legal Services Act, will lay out a sober, cautious and scrupulously accurate briefing on what is actually happening – the key facts, the timings, the implications. Whether lawyer, leader, coach, or all three, in this one short Breakthrough Briefing you can switch from uninformed victim of this change, to informed rider of its waves!

Date: Thursday 14th July 2011, 4.30pm to 6.00pm, central London venue.  Booking Fee £100.  If you want to come but can’t make the date, please feel free to send someone in your place: in addition to being gold dust information, this is the final glorious fundraising push supporting Ann Orton’s parachute jump for Breakthrough Breast Cancer, so we’re keen for as many as possible to attend! To book a place, please contact Claire on clairemaidana@meylercampbell.com. All places will be confirmed upon receipt of the booking fee which can be submitted by clicking the following link: http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/fundraiser-web/fundraiser/showFundraiserPage.action? userUrl=AnnOrton&faId=74454&isTeam=false

Comment by

Dick Tyler – Meyler Campbell Faculty Member

I think there are significant coaching opportunities in law firms. Some of these (a significant majority) are with the rank and file partners, who look after big books of business but don’t really worry much about Legal Services Act issues. Others (a handful, at most, per firm) are with senior and managing partners, who do. I think the Legal Services Act is one element of a change and modernisation process which is happening to the legal profession, but I’d be surprised if it’s going to be like Big Bang, even though quite a lot of suppliers of services to law firms would like it to be!

The fact is that law firms don’t need large capital bases in the way that banks do - we can spend a certain amount of money of recruiting people, opening offices or IT, but we are likely to fall flat on our faces if we do too much of it or do it too fast. The reason for this is that the thing that needs to be scaled up is culture, which is what makes each firm distinctive and takes time. And there are some pretty big firms that have got big without needing the Legal Services Act to enable them to do so.

I don’t want to rain on the parade, I just don’t want people to try and sell coaching on the basis of a false prospectus!

All analysis of which stage of the Kubler-Ross cycle I’m in gratefully received!

By Anne Scoular

I’ve been a bit shaky (sorry no pun intended but that word keeps coming out) about Christchurch since the February quake. The first big  one (September 2010) didn’t affect me too much, I thought it a miracle no-one was killed, tragic that the beautiful city I loved as I grew up – so English, in places so exquisitely beautiful – was so damaged, but consoled myself thinking Christchurch, New Zealand’s most stylish city (the only one with style in my jaded view of NZ architecture – all beauty of line and form seems to be concentrated in that one elegant town) would eventually build something fresh and inspiring to replace it.

But the February 2011 one was shocking – brutal, cruel, the eastern half of the city uninhabitable, the central business district smashed to smithereens, and most horrific of all, 181 people killed – including many young foreign students whose inconsolable parents must have thought they had sent their child to the safest place on earth. Only a few days later here in London was the launch of my book, ‘The Financial Times Guide to Business Coaching’, which I had pushed myself right to the edge of exhaustion to write while also continuing to run the business, which is my ‘baby’ representing my distilled thinking after almost 20 years in the profession, and which, thanks to Claire and Debbie’s thoughtful organising, was launched at a fabulously glamorous party (for photos, see http://meylercampbell.com/pdfs/BookLaunch.pdf ).

But the smiling faces of the audience turned puzzled during my speech, then to compassionate understanding, when I said despite it all on that happiest of days I was also carrying deep sadness. Christchurch – everyone else had been horrified too.

But the point about an earthquake, as one survivor said bitterly in contrast to the ghastly Queensland floods of the same time, is it keeps happening. After a few days the floodwaters recede, and you can get on with trying to get your life back together again. Almost unbearable as you survey the destruction of your world – but at least the waves don’t keep crashing over, and over, and over you. In Christchurch, they do. Yesterday (14 June) alone there were 28 quakes in 24 hours. “Aftershocks” they’re called. But I was talking to my friend Glenda, who said in the latest big one two days ago, she ran outdoors, threw herself on the grass in the middle of the garden, but even there lying prone, kept being thrown from side to side. Every time she tried to stand the earth would buckle savagely and she would be thrown off her feet again. Eventually after several petrifying minutes, she went back indoors to look for the family pets. She put the bird in his cage on the centre of the lawn – but then she said, with resigned familiarity with a whole new world and vocabulary “the liquifaction started coming up” – bad quakes liquify the ground, water, sewage pipes and their contents and all, and the whole brown mess is forced up above the ground within minutes of the quake – so she ran to save the bird from drowning on the lawn, and put bird and cage in her car – the strongest steel container around, but also crushed all over the city this week, thankfully not Glenda’s this time, plus the dog, and drove around craters and fissures in the road, through instant gridlock, to her children’s school. She said when she got within half a mile of the school, it was the same sight all over again – abandoned cars, mothers just getting out and running desperately to the school gates. When she got the kids “home”, she took advantage of their father arriving the same minute (divorced parents – doubles and trebles the anxiety) and said brightly to the children, why don’t you go straight off with Daddy: she wanted to protect the kids from seeing what was inside. Then she went indoors on her own and started clearing up, for the twentieth or more time. Her daughter’s wardrobe had toppled over. The things that had been on the piano were behind the sofa on the other side of the room, the microwave had smashed on the floor halfway across the kitchen – “you wouldn’t have wanted to be in there when it was happening”.

So she spends the next day shovelling the stinking liquefaction off the driveway again, rights the furniture, cries over more broken possessions, adds the microwave to the insurance claim (“the insurance companies aren’t going to survive”) and carries on. On little sleep – the shakes happen every few hours during the night.

How is the city coping? If you Google “Christchurch Press” (the local newspaper – which is producing brilliant reporting – lucid, accurate, laconically unsensationalist, up-to-the minute – despite their own building having been destroyed somewhere back there in the series of quakes) you read, along with the dry facts, tear-making stories of pitching in and supporting neighbours and strangers, daily acts of unassuming heroism. Are New Zealanders exceptional? Is Christchurch peopled by stoics with exceptional psychological resilience? I have always been interested in the psychology of the ‘spirit of the Blitz’, in all its complexity. Right now it’s too raw, I can’t look on my dear friends and cousins and the myriad actions of brave strangers, as lab rats. But archaeologists, anthropologists and psychologists all pay keen attention to “natural experiments” – things which happen real time and where careful scientific observation can yield unexpected flashes of insight into hitherto unknown human capability. Not yet, but soon I’m going to be interested in the spirit of Christchurch.

By Neil Ghosh (BC10)

I have been involved with the PHG Foundation (www.phgfoundation.org) directly from 2009, and have continued to offer indirect support after becoming a business coach. You may have probably never heard of the PHG Foundation, but it’s a pioneering Cambridge-based multidisciplinary organization whose mission is to enable advances in biomedicine and genomics to be responsibly translated into effective ways to prevent illness and provide healthcare that is accessible to all on the basis of their vulnerabilities and needs.

I’m currently supporting the Foundation’s new initiative to tackle birth defects in low and middle income countries. The initiative is called Born Healthy, and PHG has brought together an impressive community of participants amongst which are Mothercare Foundation, WHO, March of Dimes and Well Being of Women – with the potential to create significant positive change.

Even though as many as 70% of birth defects are preventable or treatable, often through quite simple interventions, over 8 million children annually are born with a birth defect. Born Healthy is a unique and forward thinking initiative based on 15 years of public health service expertise, which offers an extraordinary opportunity to save or improve the lives of 6 million children.

There’s a launch event on the evening of June 28th at The Royal College of Obstetricans and Gynaecologists in London, where companies can find out more and speak to the participating organisations. It would be great to get more corporates involved in Born Healthy and the event could be a good networking opportunity for members of the Meyler Campbell community, so should you have interest, or any contacts who might be interested please let me know (n.ghosh@jbs.cam.ac.uk) and I will put you in touch with the Foundation. The PHG Foundation would welcome your involvement in what is already proving to be a powerful force for change.

By Mary Fenwick (BC09)

Any ideas about getting teenagers to think about their strengths – other than sleeping, inventing new invective and occasionally surprising their mothers so much that they forgive them everything?

I mean this in a caring and coaching way, possums, as I own three teenagers myself and will have another one along in a minute (or 17 months to be precise).

I’m doing some voluntary work with my local Education and Business Partnership, to fill in time between massively highly paid executive assignments as a jet-setting international coach, you understand.

There’s a political context here that you may not be aware of, if you don’t have teenagers. The government has axed its “Connexions” service so two million young people will have no access to careers advice until September next year, when something or other takes its place.

My agenda is to introduce young people to thinking about what they love and already know they are good at, at the stage when they are considering their future career paths. It might mean fewer coaching clients looking for mid-life meaning in 20 years time, but hey that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.

Somewhat surprisingly this has evolved into the offer of a paid workshop (although in Meyler Campbell terms there might be a zero missing from the figure). The challenge is to devise something for:

• 14 and 15 year olds as they go into Year 11, the main GCSE year
• delivery in 20 minutes to a group of around 30 students
• repetition eight times over the morning

Oh, and it’s to be inter-active if possible. For delivery on the 20^th of July. Does anyone have a template I might adopt and adapt? Please. Pretty please, with sugar and cream and raspberries on top.

By Linda Woolston

As my Blackberry and I were grabbing the last few moments of contact with the outside world before the plane took off from Cape Town, I came across an article on the BBC website, “What would Carl Jung make of 2011?” An intriguing title of a piece written by Mark Vernon (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-13645959). It’s 50 years since Jung died, and I think he may well have been surprised about how widely, for example, his work is used through MBTI.

Something I was pleased to read in the article as I head towards a “big” Birthday was the Jung quote “The afternoon of life must have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage of life’s morning. ” The author goes on to say “For a culture with an ageing population like ours, Jung offers a vision of the glories of growing old, seeing it as a path to wisdom rather than a decline into senility. We shouldn’t despair over our mid-life crises, he thought, but seize them as the chance to find new vision and purpose.”

Purpose and meaning were too oft repeated phrases at the Coaching Psychology conference and the role of the coach in supporting clients to gain clarity around their particular purpose, their values and what brings meaning to their work / lives.

Here is an extract from the article again referencing the search for meaning:

Key theories and concepts

• The idea that personality types can be introverted or extroverted
• The theory of psychological types – which forms the basis of Myers-Briggs
• The belief that dreams reveal more than they conceal – pioneer in the field of dream analysis
• The existence of a collective unconscious
• The theory that certain archetypal images and stories repeat themselves across the collective history of mankind

Jung would spot the high levels of mental illness in modern society as well, marked by the boom in prescribed anti-depressants and other drugs in the years after his death. He would see that even politicians and economists are becoming concerned that while a nation’s material wealth can grow inexorably, it does not appear to deliver true happiness or fulfilment.

There are many factors that contribute to these trends. Jung was gripped by those that are psychological and reasoned that such concerns – real or imagined – arise in large part when we become disconnected from our spiritual side.

He argued that while modern science has yielded unsurpassed knowledge about the human species, it has led, paradoxically, to a narrower, machine-like conception of what it means to be a human individual.

This presumably explains why complementary therapies are flourishing in the 21st Century. They try to address the whole person, not just the illness or disease. Or it suggests why ecological lifestyles are appealing, because they try to reconnect us with the intrinsic value of the natural world.

In short, the life of the psyche is crucial. Jung believed it is fed not just by psychology, but better by the great spiritual traditions of our culture, with their subtle stories, sustaining rituals and inspiring dreams. The agnostic West has become detached from these resources.

It is as if people are suffering from “a loss of soul”. Too often, the world does not seem to be for us, but against us.

Towards the end of his life, Jung reflected that many – perhaps most – of the people who came to see him were not, fundamentally, mentally ill. They were, rather, searching for meaning.

It is a hard task. “There is no birth of consciousness without pain,” he wrote. But it is vital. Without it, human beings lose their way.”

I often think about the “ripple” effect of our work. We never truly know the impact of an “ah ha” moment with a client and how many others are impacted by those insights. I believe it goes way beyond the client and the ripple effect is felt by colleagues, family, even the man or woman in the street. I suspect Carl Jung couldn’t have imagined the number of corporate offices all over the world where people have been given feedback on their MBTI where the revelation, for example,  that some people are “P’s” and some people are “J’s” suddenly makes everything make sense.

By Anne Scoular

I was chuffed to bits to learn this afternoon that Mary Watts, Business Coach Graduate (BC 2009) and former Pro-Vice-Chancellor of City University, London, has been made Professor Emeritus in Psychology at City. I sometimes get cross that so much is given to so few – the network of “fat cats” who seem to keep having the plums of life heaped upon them even when they have done little, or worse, have made massive errors costing shareholders and even the taxpayer millions of pounds and personal grief – but this thankfully is one of those cases that lifts the spirits: the system sometimes does get it right! Mary has worked her fingers to the bone for years, decades actually, quietly, behind the scenes, never seeking out any personal glory but just getting on and doing what needs to be done – complex detailed thoughtful planning here, unruffling feathers there, smoothing out systems and processes all over the place, patiently bringing together groups and sectors which had hitherto been hissing at each other.

In case this sounds unspectacular, Mary has also planned and pulled off several major strategic miracles: in earlier years she was the driving force behind both counselling psychology and health psychology getting their act together as forces in their respective professions, and it’s no accident that the first time I met her, she was on the podium as the host and Chair of the Inaugural Meeting of the Special Group in Coaching Psychology of the British Psychological Society on 15 December 2004. There was many a large ego metaphorically stomping around the room that day, and much anxiety by individuals and factions about what directions could or should be taken, but Mary steered it all adroitly to a highly productive conclusion. Indeed, I regard her as one of the most important founding figures in coaching psychology in this country. She doesn’t make as much noise as some of the others, but she sure as hell makes things happen. Mary’s a master of the art of the painstaking behind-the-scenes hard work, careful thinking, and above all skilful leadership management and coaching, which is so utterly indispensable to any major change, yet so seldom seen and even more seldom properly rewarded. This time it has, congratulations Mary, I am SO pleased!

PS – she’s also a stunning teacher, as those who attended our Psychology Distilled event on behaviourist approaches to coaching in March, where Mary was Guest Lecturer, will attest – so even if she needs an extra star on her badge next time (!) I hope we can still lure her back!!

The variable that can’t be controlled – the weather!  Yesterday late afternoon, Breakthrough Breast Cancer advised the seven intrepid pink jumpers that the jump is off for this Saturday.

With particularly stringent rules for tandem skydiving and a forecast of cloud with a very strong likelihood of rain, we are grounded – well, until later!  After strenuous efforts on doodle.com in anticipation of this possibility, we’ve a new date of Sunday 28 August with a back-up of Saturday 3 September. You try getting seven business women to agree a date when it’s summer and holiday period too!

So I’m shedding adrenalin and looking at the positive:  more time to reach my commitment of £20,000 for this very important cause by 31 July (for Breakthrough’s financial year end).  I’m building on an amazing total of more that £10,000 (phew, reached the half-way mark with wonderful support from colleagues, friends and family) with other donations already committed and plans for local fundraising.  And there is still time to help – and every penny is vital and much appreciated.  Onwards and (eventually) upwards!