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Transforming: The Necessary Key to Open Future Career and Business Successes

 

Who needs to understand this material:

  • Business leaders and wannabe leaders from first-level supervisors to CEOs

  • High-level individual contributors

  • Transformation coaches

 

Types of activities that prevent leaders from achieving to their full potential:

  • Procrastinating – chronic avoiding of particular types of activities including giving candid performance reviews

  • Undermining the performance of those around them such as micromanaging, intimidating, bullying, displaying anger

  • Failing to change their culture, including processes, missions, and business models, quickly enough in response to accelerating technology-driven changes in their business environment

What got you here won’t get you there:

  • The business environment has reached the tipping point where mechanisms that served you well in the past are no longer sufficient to achieve successes in the future.

  • “Sustainable success” is no longer viable in today’s hyper-changing business world.

  • Instead, business leaders must focus on achieving a series of “repeated successes.”

 

The knowing-doing gap:

  • To lead effectively in the future, you must now rise up closer to your inherent potential.

  • Since you have achieved successes in the past, you probably have deep knowledge that you continuously improve.

  • The path to your successful future is to act now to conquer your knowing-doing gap.

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Repeated successes now require continuous learning and periodic transforming

 

In order to appreciate and manage this learning/transforming distinction, we must now explicitly recognize, comprehensively understand, and systematically manage automatic human activities.

 

We start that process by recognizing we all operate in two distinct modes – we have a thinking mode and an automatic mode. That is, we have two “selfs”: a thinking-self and an auto-self. 2Selfs Theory provides modeling of the automatic mode of human activities (the auto-self) and how it interacts (sometimes cooperating and sometimes competing) with our intentions (the thinking-self).

 

Our Thinking-Self

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  • Consumes most of our awareness

  • Creates our intentions

  • Solves our complex problems

  • Manages our explicit knowledge

Continuous learning is a familiar activity conducted by our thinking-self. It is how we execute our technical abilities, manage “things,” acquire explicit knowledge, and create strategies.

 

Periodic transforming is a much less familiar activity that requires totally different processes. No amount of knowledge-based learning will come remotely close to creating the levels of “doing” that leaders will increasingly require in the future because our auto-self controls habits and cultures. We cannot transform our auto-self’s activities through learning – we must apply transforming processes.

 

Our Auto-Self

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  • Operates mostly outside of our awareness

  • Produces our automatic, unintentional activities

  • Enacts our intentions – our “doing”

  • Controls our habits, cultures, and leadership capabilities

  • Acts like our “robot within”

Learning:

  • The “knowing” part of success

  • A thinking-self activity

  • Read, study, acquire knowledge

 

Transforming:

  • The “doing” part of success

  • An auto-self activity

  • Constructing: creating new auto-self characteristics – tedious but not too uncomfortable

  • Reconstructing: changing existing auto-self characteristics – difficult and uncomfortable

  • Reprograms our “robot within”

 

Two Main Types of Auto-Self Activities that We Must Conquer

Auto-Behaviors

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  • Our automatic, unintentional habits

  • Undermines self: procrastination, action barriers

  • Undermines others: bullying, micromanaging…

Auto-Contexts

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  • Our hidden assumptions/beliefs

  • Enables/disables thinking-self power

  • Controls the tenacity of “cultures”

Advisory Coaches

 

Most coaches, including those with coaching certificates, fall into this category

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Thinking-Self Primary

 

  • Primary focus is on improving the thinking-self

  • Coaching is primarily knowledge-based

  • Also known as consulting

Auto-Self.png

Auto-Self Secondary

 

  • Transforming the auto-self requires specialized knowledge and skills

  • Many advisory coaches attempt behavior change but come up quite short

Transformation Coaches

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Auto-Contexts.png

Auto-Self Primary

 

  • Primary focus is on reconstructing the auto-self

  • Reconstruct counterproductive auto-behaviors

  • Reconstruct obsolete auto-contexts

  • Reprogramming our "robots within" is difficult

  • It helps greatly if coaches understand how the auto-self operates at the mental level

Thinking-Self No Background.png

Thinking-Self Secondary

 

  • Transformation coaches with leadership experience can provide viable advice

Coaches with certificates have the advantage that at least they have gone through some type of formal training, but I have attempted to use a few of them, and I find that most are extremely poor at trying to transform behaviors.

 

Why Is This Crucial Now?

 

  • The ramifications of our amazing thinking-self-based technology progress has finally overwhelmed our ability to transform our auto-self quickly enough to accommodate the changes

  • The negative effects of mysterious activities such as “status quo,” “the box,” and “soft” success factors remain unconquered.

  • The coronavirus has suddenly created massive upheavals for individuals, businesses, and economies, so many people now realize that they must transform this imposed threat to their professional well-being to a new normal, but so far, the form of that new normal has remained elusive.

  • However, now that we recognize the widespread impact of auto-self activities, we can understand that our new normal will not just be that we intentionally think differently but that we periodically transform so that we automatically act differently.

  • We can let this changed business world happen to us or we can seize control and construct a new world that is in fundamental ways better than the one we previously occupied.

  • Fortunately, we now can make that choice because we understand the role automatic human activities play in fundamental changes and we can manage them, which will require systematic, reliable guidance from expert transformation coaching specialists who have a solid theoretical understanding of how automatic human activities operate.

 

Getting Transformation Help

 

I am an expert with decades of experience transforming behaviors of talented business leaders who suffer from some counterproductive habits. With a deep understanding of the auto-self, I also have systematic techniques for reconstructing obsolete cultures. I also have extensive leadership experience including technical and general management up to the C level, so I walked in your shoes before. I can train internal coaches for you

 

For a free introductory coaching session, please contact me at Barry@2Selfs.com     

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