Last week I shared an experiment with you. We looked at ways to read the room and tune your antennae – with a view to effective positive change in your meetings or interactions with others. I shared an experiment to help you do just that.

The article is here if you missed it.

Here are the kind of things you might notice now that you hadn’t really noticed before (or if you had – you’d not done anything about it).

People committing to things and then not doing them. As one person said ‘When I did the Reading the Room experiment it became obvious to me that commitment was lacklustre at best. I realised we need to understand why we’d got into this pattern and what we need to do with it. It’s almost become accepted that people won’t deliver on time’.

‘It made me realise how much people talk for the sake of it and don’t add anything new to the conversation. This is seriously adding to overwhelm and time wasting for everyone. It also made me realise how much I do that too’. Ooops! Work to...

One of the things I struggled with as a leader (and in my early days as a coach) was being able to ‘say it as it is’.

I hear my mother’s voice (God rest her soul) in my head telling me not to ‘ make personal remarks’ and ‘if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all’.

I get it – but these messages we pick up in our early years are not always helpful to us or others as we navigate the adult world of work and life.

Now of course I’m NOT saying that we should make intentionally hurtful remarks or start behaving like mad internet trolls and being vicious, spiteful and mean.

But something gets lost in translation along the way.

I had to do a lot – and I mean A LOT - of personal work to understand that there is another way – a way to be refreshingly honest AND show empathy at the same time. My desire to please people and to be liked had a positive side. But they also stopped me from helping others to grow, develop and change. (If I could avoid giving a difficult message, I woul...