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Thank you.

James Irvine and Trip Allen

Your Egyii Team.

You can call it a grand quest or a mission – those who discover it find the same feelings as Stephen Spielberg: “I wake up so excited, I can’t eat breakfast. I’ve never run out of energy.”

But how do we discover this passion? All I can do is tell you how I, James Irvine, discovered it and hope that you will tap into what I say and somehow relate it to yourself. I was a banker for 10 years and was unhappy. I certainly had no passion for my work. I went through each day as if a machine was doing the work while my real self was somewhere else waiting to come out. After 10 years of enormous stress resulting not from the pressure of the job but the fact that I was doing something all day long that was against my nature, I quit.

I attended a career counselling program, and did the usual analyses with my logical mind about what interests I had had when I was a child, what I enjoyed doing in my spare time, and so on. These were helpful in a limited way, because they were all thinking processes, whereas what I really needed to do was find some quiet time to listen to my heart. What I realised was that nothing from my past was really a clue to my future.

So I spent some time working in a retail shop while I struggled with this issue. And as the days went by and I started listening to my feelings and the spontaneous thoughts that occasionally emerged, I began to feel a bit like teaching people. It wasn’t a sudden decision like ‘I want to be a teacher’. Rather, I just began to see myself talking to people and sharing some of my own feelings and thoughts, and as I saw this I felt good.

I didn’t make some grand decision to become a teacher. I decided to enrol in a certificate course in Teaching English as a Foreign Language. I knew I liked languages and grammar, so I thought this was a way to try out my gut instincts without too much commitment. Remember, I had never so much as made a presentation or stood in front of an audience in my whole time in banking or at any other time in my life. I just had this feeling that was good when I pictured myself doing this.

After two weeks of theory and instruction, we had to deliver our first lesson in front of a live audience who came from the local town for free lessons from these student teachers of English. This first lesson would last for 15 minutes, and I had no idea how I would have enough to say and do to last for 15 minutes. I spent hours preparing, but on the day I stood up in front of about 20 adult students and within a couple of minutes felt very comfortable and energised. I actually discovered a new person inside of myself during those 15 minutes. I really enjoyed the experience in a way that I had not when I was analysing balance sheets and drawing up financial proposals. I had found my passion.

Because I enjoyed the experience of teaching so much, I became good at it, and now, as a corporate talent developer with Egyii in Singapore, I wake up every morning feeling the same as Stephen Spielberg. Well, maybe not quite so excited – I still have time for breakfast!

To really improve our performance, we need to address the whole person, not just one behavioural part of it. For example, you cannot effectively change a behaviour if you have a belief that contradicts it. If I want to be great at connecting with people but have a belief that nobody can be trusted, then I will find it very difficult to achieve my goal.

So let’s look at this ‘whole person’ that is you. You can be seen on five different but related levels. At the top is your identity, which asks the question ‘Who am I?’. This is where you determine your role in a particular context, and decide your mission. If you are unclear about your purpose in life or in a particular situation, then you will find it difficult to motivate yourself and to focus on the right action to take.

Second on the hierarchy is your belief system. Your identity and mission will naturally affect your beliefs and values. Change your identity, and you will have to change some beliefs. These beliefs and values determine what you do and how you do it. You can have beliefs which open up great opportunities for you, but you can also have beliefs which severely limit your performance and achievements.

Third on the hierarchy is your capabilities, which give you the skills and knowledge you need to achieve your purpose and fulfill your role in life. They form the level of competence you need to perform at the level you want in order to achieve your goals.

Your capabilities help to determine your actual minute-by-minute behaviour or actions that you take in order to move you towards your goal and achieve your purpose. So your behaviour is fourth on the hierarchy. It is often assumed that our behaviour is something we can change through learning or willpower, but as you can see from this holistic picture, our behaviour is determined by what we are capable of doing, which is determined by our belief system, which is determined by our sense of identity and mission. To be really effective at the level of behaviour, you want to make sure that what you are doing is in alignment with your capabilities, beliefs and values, and identity or role. When these are in alignment, then you are congruent, and you feel strong and confident.

Last but not least is the environment, the fifth level in the hierarchy. We often say ‘I was just in the right place at the right time’, which emphasizes the importance of context for success. You can have the right behaviour, skills, beliefs and sense of purpose, but if your environment does not support these higher levels, then you are unlikely to succeed. And you can have some control over your environment. This writer spent many years working in an industry that just didn’t suit his temperament or talents, and try hard as he might, he didn’t achieve success until he entered a new industry.

So pay attention to yourself. Listen to your still voice which suggests a purpose for you. Change a belief if it was useful when you were small but serves you no purpose other than to hold you back today. Look at your skills and competencies. Are they going to be the right ones or enough to help you achieve your purpose? And become conscious of your behaviour. Get out of auto pilot mode and function as if on manual pilot, with greater self awareness and attention to what you are doing all day long. And finally, make sure you are in the right place for you, or that your arrange your environment to support you rather than work against you.

Good luck to all of you!

The trouble is, when we are interacting with our client we are more focused on the process than on the human magic that is taking place. We have a set of questions well prepared, and by hook or crook we are going to get through those questions by the end of the meeting. And while we are thinking about our goal for the meeting, we are missing out on what our client is really telling us with her body language, tone of voice and choice of words.

Not only that, we fail to enter this magical kingdom which opens up second by second during the conversation. We operate on some kind of auto pilot where our responses to what our client is communicating have already been decided long before she started talking.

But if we just forget about our goals, our processes and our own thoughts and enter the conversation second by second, we will find a new world of knowledge and understanding opening before us. And as we learn, we respond with an authentic thought and feeling so that as our words come out of our mouth, our client feels truly listened to and understood. And this is the magic we all need in our communication. Just open our minds, switch from auto-pilot to present consciousness, and respond naturally to whatever comes our way.

This, my friends, is the secret of persuasion.

In fact, ignorance of Metaprograms can relegate us to the group of chronic underperformers if we are in sales, management, human resources or leadership. Understanding this vital aspect of relationship management gives us one of the keys to performance acceleration and improved personal results.

One Metaprogram is known as ‘toward or away from’, and describes people’s preferences and drives. For example, if John is a ‘toward’ person, then he will be motivated by the prospect of receiving or gaining a benefit, or achieving a future goal which has positive results for him. In other words, you must show him how he can move towards a pleasurable feeling. If you attempt to persuade John by emphasising what he will lose by not doing what you suggest (e.g. buying insurance or investing in your financial product), you will fail to win him over time and time again.

On the other hand, if you attempt to influence him to invest in your financial product by emphasising the possible increase in asset values and income, he will probably sit up and listen to you. So long as you present John with a movement towards some positive future outcome, you will gain his attention and interest.

Turning to the opposite motivation, if John’s friend Judy is an ‘away from’ person, you will stand a greater chance of persuading her if you present her with the lost opportunity of not investing. You will need to show her how much profit she will potentially lose by not investing (“Imagine the increased wealth you would lose by this time next year if you don’t switch from cash to a unit trust”). In other words, she is motivated by avoiding pain. With Judy, no amount of positive messaging will encourage her to invest. She is motivated by the fear of loss, and will do anything to move away from a potentially negative situation.

Of course, ‘towards or away from’ are not the only metaprograms. You can probably identify some other of your motivations if you think about it.  The point is, no amount of skill in active listening or speaking in short, clear sentences is going to help you get the results you want if you don’t first lay the foundation of human understanding. Once this is in place, your relationship skills will come into their own and help you achieve more than you ever thought possible.

What does this mean? Well, some people such as myself, James Irvine and my partner Trip Allen at http://thethinkingcircle.com believe that it doesn’t matter how many communication or leadership skills you learn – if your beliefs or ability to put yourself in the right frame of mind are working against you, no amount of technique or skills asquisition will work.

If you are really interested in personal development and performance acceleration, start with your private voice i.e. the things you say to yourself all day long. Pay attention to the kinds of messages you are giving yourself, because these messages will directly affect your state (i.e. your mood and thoughts) and therefore your behaviour. In fact NLP teaches us that our internal communication does more for our performance than our external communication, our public voice.

Egyii’s founders know this, because Trip Allen and James Irvine have experienced the powerful impact on their results of even small changes in their beliefs and thoughts. So if you really want that performance acceleration, or you want to differentiate your company through your people’s flexibility, resilience and resourcefulness, then look inside first. You will be amazed at the difference to your leadership capabilities, relational skills and personal results even a small personal change can make.

Let me summarise the story of Plowman’s State Bank, told in John H. Fleming and Jim Asplund’s book Human Sigma.

Ferdinand Gustafson founded Plowman’s State Bank in the early 20th century in a small town in the U.S. Gus and his employees created value by treating every customer interaction differently, so that each relationship with a customer was unique. The service provided to each customer was personal, individualized and, above all, authentic. As a result of this highly personal way of building customer relationships, the bank thrived and grew.

Of course, we all know that individualized, personal service is the key to creating value in the customer’s eyes. The challenge comes when we try to scale up this model across a large organisation.

As Plowman’s State Bank grew and opened more branches, it became less feasible for Gus and his small team to see everyone who did business with the bank. As he entrusted service delivery and relationship building to a growing number of selected associates, he noticed that in some branches service deteriorated while in others it remained of a high quality. As a result, customers could not be sure which version of Plowman’s State Bank they would encounter when they visited a particular branch – the poor service version or the excellent service version.

The obvious solution was to ensure consistency throughout the bank by applying the principles of quality control. Thus they tried to create hundreds of Gus clones by scripting service. They sent their staff on training programs which told them what to say and do through a set of specified scripts and steps. The result was that the steps to follow (how to interact with the customer) were emphasised over the desired outcome. As the authors of Human Sigma say, “Unfortunately, you can’t find the solution to building genuine customer connections in making the steps of service into a routine.”

In her book The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, the late German social psychologist Fritz Heider described the concept of equifinality. To quote the authors of Human Sigma again, “In essence, equifinality describes that there are as many paths to achieving a desired outcome as there are people willing to try. No single path is appropriate for all individuals because the conditions required to reach the desired outcome are different for every individual. In other words, though the end remains constant, the means to achieve the end will inevitably vary from individual to individual.”

Needless to say, Plowman’s State Bank became just another bank indistinguishable from the rest. They lost their unique, key point of differentiation – their ability to create value in their customer’s eyes through the right kind of relationship management.

What can a service organisation do, then, to make sure they focus on a common outcome while allowing the journey to reach that outcome to vary from customer to customer and interaction to interaction? The solution is to free your people to express themselves in their own unique ways and tap into their individual talents and strenghts. And the way to do this is to provide them with powerful self-management and relationship-management tools which they can use as they see fit to create value for their organisation.

This is the new direction of people development today: a focus on the individual such that each staff member is motivated by being given the opportunity to fully express herself while building great, lasting customer relationships. Egyii, Singapore’s first provider of Performance Acceleration tools for leadership, relationship management and internal operations, can tell you more about how to turn your results around through this powerful method.