“I think we sometimes confuse effortlessness with accuracy” - Chris Chabris

Today reading: Intellectual Humility - the importance of knowing you might be wrong.

A long article about why is difficult to form the habit of saying ”I was wrong”.
One cause is the one I quoted in the title of this post.

Others are related with well-known experiment in social media - ”The Dress”, people seeing two different colors, and ”Yanny or Laurel”, people hearing a name, and others the other. Of course, these experiments new media has facilitated are decades preceded by classic experiments:
   &Co
and, of course, by the more intellectual approach - Wittgenstein duck/rabbit drawing.



Another interesting take from the article:

”Similarly, psychologists find when a lie is repeated, it’s more likely to be misremembered as being true, and for a similar (effortlessness, as quoted in my title, my note, m.b.)) reason: When you’re hearing something for the second or third time, your brain becomes faster to respond to it. And that fluency is confused with truth.”

Sadly, so often we do repeat lies to us! And they become beliefs. And we have to work hard to observe that many of them are limiting beliefs.

”When we’re taught or learn to fear other people, our brains distort their potential threat. They seem more menacing, and we want to build walls around them. When we learn or are taught that other people are less than human, we’re less likely to look upon them kindly and more likely to be okay when violence is committed against them. ”

And I must highlight that is the same case with taught or learn contempt, mistrust, hate, disgust - let notice that all these are fear-related feelings. So, we do build self-fulfilling prophecies, and it becomes a sort of ready-made and effortlessly to act upon scenarios. It is to emphasize that these ”knowings” not only they are bad for our relationship, but they keep us in ignorance - and more: an ignored ignorance.

“Our ignorance is invisible to us,” David Dunning, an expert on human blind spots, says.
You might recognize his name as half of the psychological phenomenon that bears his name: the Dunning-Kruger effect. That’s where people of low ability — let’s say, those who fail to understand logic puzzles — tend to unduly overestimate their abilities. Inexperience masquerades as expertise.”

On the other hand, any human being need to have solid convictions, based on knowledge and experience, revisited from time to time to update them to new information. A sad example of to late updating was that storm of questioning Google what is EU after the vote for BREXIT. Being curios is a good position in life, in general - maybe is even more effective as a term than being open.

”To be more intellectually humble, we need to be more transparent about our knowledge. We need to show others what we know and what we don’t.
And two, there needs to be more celebration of failure, and a culture that accepts it. That includes building safe places for people to admit they were wrong”

The article conclusion is a valuable valid perspective on coaching environment too. And a true instrumental one we act upon in our NestworkingTM endeavour.

Dealing with resistance to change/findings from teaching challenges

As a coach, you are often in the situation to deal with change resistance. I myself made a small research about an apparently weird resistance - `success resistance``, read more.

In the article I share here, the authors present findings about human learning process, and propose different ways to overcome reluctance to change, but rooted in the very acknowledge of the fact that reluctance is a natural, i.e. legitimate!, reaction of people. As we easily notice, the solutions are quite similar with broad coaching techniques every school of coaching use to train their trainees.

For instance, the fact that`a learner’s prior beliefs can be resistant to change, even when presented with new information`, could be a major cause for failure of many specific training programs.
Teachers solve this problem through: `change our focus by directly confronting common misconceptions (of the learner, my note)`. Well, this is a core coaching technique.

The article emphasis that training (learning) could easily remain ineffective, if they are not integrating coaching tools, or they are not followed by coaching sessions.

Another very interesting point of view could spring from this aspect: ”Research shows that perceived efficacy directly changes “the diligence and resolve with which groups choose to pursue their goals.” Attention, is not about the student perceived efficacy, but about teachers perceived efficacy. This one - as much as it is, or is not! - could be a model for the `recipient`, be he/she a student or a coachee*. I chose the image bellow because it suggests also the ways one could raise the self-efficacy of the learner. Otherwise, as Henry Ford stated `Whether you think you can or you think you can`t- you are right`.

 source: wikispaces . psu . edu

`There’s nothing unusual about our resistance to change—it’s human nature. However, as educators, we can and should take time for introspection, leveling-up our expectations for ourselves and recognizing areas of improvement.` This is also a truth for coaching practitioners!

The entire article here
..............................
* In this respect, I am very proud of my effect - read my self-efficacy - on NESTworking participants: there are changes they start to pursue from the very first session of our workshop, and there are perceived changes reported by their peers or work partners during the learning period. And there are descriptive messages - I receive years after the workshops end  -  about post-workshop benefits they experience in their personal and professional life due to new, more appropriate habits they developed. Their self-efficacy grow! 

Dealing with barriers in the workplace

I planned to wrote something about the subject today, and, as usual, I search Internet for some trustful data to describe the addressed situation. And suddenly synchronicity reveals that my intention is legit! Here we are a post from today:

''Our reader poll today asks:
Where does the biggest threat to your organization come from?
– From within — we’re our own worst enemies: 76.82%
– From the outside — the market is our biggest threat 23.18%''
(source here: http://www.thoughtleadersllc.com/2016/02/where-does-the-biggest-threat-to-your-organization-come-from/)
  
So, the strongest barriers are within organizations, quite similar with personal development barriers which lie within our inner world.

Here we are in short some action to take within companies - from this article worth to read: Eight Ways To Break Down Barriers In Traditional Workplace Culture

Let it be (sic!):

1.  Transparent / allowed to fail

2.  Least conventional as possible

3.  Risk Neutral

4.  Scrappy

5.  Appreciation of individuality

6.  Trust on individual label

7.   Ideas are created equals

8.   Opinionated

..............
Lets make a simply observation: these very features for a performance oriented workplace are expected to be in acting in a performance oriented workshop! And they allegedly are, but the barriers to learn, to make changes are quite the same as in an organization. Well, it could proof not such an odd perspective that the way training is provided in organization could empower actually the very characteristics training is bought to change. Our NESTworking workshops have really lightning effects, ''get people outside the box'', as them selves acknowledge. Maybe because we do act in all those 8 direction - ''scrappy'' included :) 
Some testimonials in Romanian here: NESTworking works Well, ''testimonial'' is rooted in... test, isn't it? :)