When I am asked what I do as a Leadership Psychologist, I often say, ‘I transform people’. Regularly, people in a variety of social situations will reply with the statement, often framed as a question, ‘Yes, but people don’t really change, do they?’ Inside, I wonder what they think I have been playing at for the last 20 or 30 years! Somehow everyone believes they have the qualifications to make assumptions about the science of psychology where they might not challenge a physicist, an IT expert or a neurologist. Most people don’t know about theCochrane Library which set out to compile a data bank of meta analysis of only the most rigorous, statistical analysis of random controlled trials. It turned out that there was far more indisputably researched and proven evidence – based research in psychology and psychiatry (excluding Freud , of course!) than there was in medical science, including some of the most popular surgical and medical treatments.
Not many of our clients question us about the rigour with which we approach leadership coaching . . . . but it is important to us to know the science that underpins change.
I take joy, delight and immense job satisfaction from the fact that people have the capacity to change so dramatically, once they have achieved insight into the impact their beliefs and behaviour have on their own success and on other people around them. Our clients tend to be dynamic people who want to improve and achieve a range of ambitious goals in their lives. That is a good starting point especially if you also are open to realising how much choice you have in your life. Positive Psychology talks about behaving as if you were, ‘born yesterday’. That means making a choice about what limitations, hangups, phobias, bad habits you would choose to pick up and what other great behaviours you would choose instead. You make choices every day about who you want to be and what you want to achieve.
Reading Transition by Iain Banks while on holiday I came across this quote which puts it much more eloquently than I can,
‘We live in an infinity of infinities, and we reshape our lives with every passing thought and each unconscious action, threading an ever- changing course through the myriad possibilities of existence.‘
