The season of new life
Spring is a well-known time of renewal or resetting. The sun starts to come out, the air feels fresh, and new life seems to be all around us. Transferring these refreshing principles over to our working lives seems natural and correct. I have often wondered if we might do better if we moved ‘new year’s resolutions’ from January to April. Trying a big change in life in one of the coldest, wettest, and darkest months of the year always seems like we’re setting ourselves up to fail. Even still, spring is a great time to embrace a new attitude and to learn something new.
Does change have to be hard, or unappealing?
Change is in the air. Unpredictable war and economic unrest across the globe is reminding us of just how vulnerable we are to the whims of forces outside of our control. In response, many of us take a curious attitude to change, one which is the opposite of our normal reaction. When forces outside of our control affect us negatively, many people embrace change with open arms and even a sense of possibility and excitement. This is so far away from the most common reaction to change, that is one of fear and uncertainty. When we’re cornered into a fait accompli, we seem to shed our attachment to fear and consider things we would never have considered before, because we have no choice.
This is starting to feature in many of my courses. People are unhappy about the negative effects on their lives of rising prices and squeezed salaries, and so are seeking a way to fight back, to learn something new, or to change an old previously-held attitude that no longer serves its purpose.
The usefulness of Covey in changing
It reminds me very strongly of the late Stephen Covey’s Sphere of Influence. I remember reading about it for the first time and being struck by how true it was and how it explained something I’d felt many times but not understood properly. According to the theory, there are three things we need to consider in life:
- Things that concern us, but we can’t influence or control.
- Things that we can influence, but can’t control.
- Things that we can control directly.
This theory has many messages. But the most important one for me was this:
We should be focussing on the things we can actually influence and control.
My advice to my delegates at this stage is usually this: take a piece of paper, draw three circles or segments on the paper, and sort all the things you worry about day-to-day into one of Covey’s spheres (concern, influence, control). Invariably, delegates come back together as a group with quite a long list of things that they worry about in their concern and influence spheres, with their control spheres being fairly sparse.
The most important project we have is ourselves
There is a deeper message Covey had, that comes out of all the smaller aspects of his theory.
We are at the controls. Not over the world, but over ourselves. Therefore, items in each sphere are not static, and can be moved.
One of the most critical steps you can take if you’re looking to learn a new skill or shift an old attitude you have is to realise (and embrace) that you have control over you, and you only. It’s a hard pill to swallow sometimes, but we must accept that many of the things that worry us about the world are outside of our control. But here’s the great part – if there is something about the world around you that you don’t like or would like to change, you still have some control: your effort then needs to go into moving that thing from the concern sphere to the influence sphere.
Adopting new habits
Many people go on my courses because they want to change. They want that spring ‘refreshing’ or ‘resetting’. There’s nothing wrong with that at all, but there is often the implicit expectation that I have all the answers and that I will ‘flick a switch’ which will then change them as a person. It’s a nice idea, but that’s rarely how training works! Returning back to Covey, I encourage each delegate I train to grasp the meaning of the spheres.
To that end, I always encourage an attitude shift first. A common request might sound something like this, ‘How I can I get my team do X?’ or ‘How can I tell my employee to behave Y?’
But remember Covey: these questions are looking at the right area but asking questions in the wrong way. Using the spheres, we could rephrase our questions something like this, ‘What attitude can I adopt that will encourage X?’ or ‘What habits can I demonstrate that will motivate my employee to behave Y?’ If you wanted something a bit more hands-on, it could be, ‘What tasks could I set my team that would lead them to X?’ or ‘What targets could I make that would direct my employee to behaving Y?’
We must try to always shape our objectives around attitude shifts, especially in ourselves.
From here we can see why the theory is so important to understand. If we truly want people to change, to become better colleagues, then we have to lead that process ourselves. Thinking about it logically it seems crazy to expect everybody else to change without changing ourselves.
Conclusion
If you’re feeling a bit stressed or have too much on your plate this spring, remember Covey. A great first action is to do that ‘hard reset’ that is sometimes needed.
- Take a sheet of paper or some post-its. Write down all the key things you’re worried about or feeling pressured on. It could be anything.
- Then take another sheet of paper, place it landscape, and draw three equally spaced vertical lines. Like the French flag.
- At the top of column 1 write ‘Concern’, 2 ‘Influence’, and 3 ‘Control’.
- Assign each item from your first sheet into its relevant column.
- For the concern column (a good example might be ‘The world economy’), develop a list of tasks you can undertake that will move as many as possible to the influence and control column.
For example, for ‘The world economy’ you could write two objectives. First could be ‘Encourage and train team not to over-order stock’. Second, ‘Increase personal vigilance over business cash flow’. Congratulations! You’ve now taken the impossible to manage (the world economy) and given yourself some influence and control over it. All with a simple attitude shift. Thanks, Stephen Covey!
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