What we do know is that people take on new behaviours best when there is a parallel shift in their personal development. Interpersonal skills aren’t just something you use at the workplace and then leave at the office when you go home. The whole person is what’s important, and any programme Impact Factory creates has stuff in it that people can use in all aspects of their lives.

Individuals need to be skilled in what they can do to positively affect the outcome of any kind of communication. This is true if the communication is a presentation to 500 people, an annual review with a staff member, the initiation of new work practices – indeed anything that requires one person to be in communication with others.

In the simplest terms, being able to communicate effectively means relating well to other people. It means being able to listen and really hear what others are saying. Part of being a good listener is knowing how to respond without stonewalling or hijacking other people’s ideas.

It also means being able to convey information, feedback and requests clearly and directly, give appropriate levels of praise and advice and take responsibility for making sure things are understood. This means that people must be able and willing to deal with conflict and confrontation. Conflict resolution can be effectively achieved by negotiating what is known as ‘win/win’ solutions.

There is not one ‘right’ way to communicate, but there are certainly many ‘wrong’ ones. Impact Factory’s development work concentrates on what’s already working about an individual’s interpersonal skills and developing that. Gaining insight and awareness about the effect they have on others, coupled with developing specific tools and techniques for managing people, puts people more in charge of the communication process.

So why do we need it?

There have been changes in every sector where people are being asked to do more and take on more responsibility, often with less support than ever before. As a direct result of these kinds of pressures, dealing with difficult people or situations can be more problematic. Time constraints, deadline constraints and fewer people to do more work, means that communication may suffer, conflicts stay unresolved, dissatisfaction fester, tempers get frayed and inefficiency become more prevalent.

On top of that, there is an insidious assumption that if you are good at what you do – professionally – then you will be, ipso facto, a good manager, communicator, delegator, etc. That simply isn’t true. We see this across all business sectors: people who are highly capable in their jobs but are far less adept at dealing with other people. Conflict arises because not only does the organisation assume that if you’re good in one aspect of the job you’ll be good in all, but you yourself may feel you already ‘ought’ – by dint of your position – to be able to handle difficult situations and therefore, won’t ask for the support and training you need.

Some organisations have such issues well in hand and have the kind of company culture in place that supports peoples’ development. More often than not, however, organisations ignore or sideline these issues with the outcome that communication suffers and morale gets worse.

Yet if employees are motivated, confident, communicating well and resolving differences; if they are being acknowledged and appreciated, then stress is reduced, people are more efficient and effective and work means more than a place to earn a paycheque. In our experience within organisations where these skills are encouraged and developed, there is a profound affect on employees’ performance and their overall well-being, and a corresponding increase in the bottom line.

The economic implications of poor people skills in the workplace are far greater than many organisations would like to admit. We are often approached by the Occupational Health Departments of companies who say they are seeing more and more people with stress-related illnesses and absences and are aware that good training could make a significant difference in the health, morale and therefore efficiency of the staff. The cliché ‘time is money’ exists for a very good reason. If for nothing else, a better functioning workforce will affect the bottom line. Time wasted on poor communication, unresolved difficulties or inefficient work practises means time away from the core business of doing what the company does best.

Many companies know there are issues that need to be addressed; they even know that some kind of people skills training could help.

There doesn’t have to be a problem

The need for development work does not presuppose a problem. When Impact Factory provides this kind of training for many companies we aren’t there to ‘fix’ something that’s wrong.

Given the added pressures in today’s workplace, companies are not necessarily asking us to provide training to alleviate stress or correct a problem. Rather they are looking for excellence not competence. They are interested in gaining a competitive edge, offering their employees additional skills to develop their current capabilities and become both more accomplished and more confident.

So, why don’t more people do it?

Here are some refrains we’ve heard more than once:

“We tried something like this before and it didn’t work.” – “It’s clearly not right for us.” – “We don’t need it.” – “It’s a waste of time and money.” – “If we’re going to invest in training, we’d rather have technical training.” “We’ll never get buy-in from our senior managers.”

If you look at the way some interpersonal skills training is done it’s no wonder it’s got a bad reputation. A lot of it follows what might be called the sheep-dip approach: large groups; all chalk ‘n’ talk and little participation; lots of rigid rules and regulations; a damaging emphasis on what’s wrong with people; and unreal examples and exercises. That kind of training is de-motivating and often does more harm than good.

Lists of how tos, dos and don’ts and sets of rigid rules treat everyone the same. The individual becomes less important than the ‘right’ way to do something. Of course, there needs to be structure and guidelines in any kind of training, but if the training does not allow for individual needs and priorities then, ultimately, it will fail to develop the individual.

If people have had inadequate training, they will in turn feel inadequate when confronted with additional stress. The training will not have given them the real tools and techniques that could help them manage this pressure more effectively. Some assertiveness training is a good case in point, where people are told specific things to do in certain difficult situations. Which is all very well if you are capable of doing them. However, we know that for many people assertiveness training doesn’t work. The solutions they are given are not things they feel able to do.

Not only that, there are training companies now offering interpersonal skills training over the Internet! Wow! We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating, this way the sheep don’t even have to leave the meadow, they can be dipped right at their desks. We’re truly fascinated with interpersonal skills training that doesn’t have other people to be interpersonal with.

If people are treated and respected as the professional adults they are. The results can be startling, exciting and effective.

Professional Personal Development: why it’s a good investment

· Gives people more confidence in dealing with challenging or new situations.
· Offers people a range of behaviour choices to try.
· Creates a solid basis for all other kinds of training.
· Gives people the tools to manage pressure more effectively.
· Is motivating.

What you’ll get working with Impact Factory

· Programme content that fits your requirements as opposed to off-the-peg workshops.
· Flexible formats that take both the organisation’s and the individual’s needs into account.
· Emphasis on what what’s already working rather than pointing out what’s wrong and needs fixing.
· Small groups to maximise individual participation and attention.
· Programmes that develop the whole person.
· No pressure to do things the ‘right’ way.
· Enjoyable, easy, doable exercises that give people practise and experience in trying out new ways of doing things.
· Accessible to all levels in an organisation.

If you were fully aware of how you talk to yourself and talk to the world about who you are, you’d be shocked. We’re all guilty of this to some small degree, but for many their self-talk is debilitating.

Take a minute to answer these questions:

Are you talking yourself out of living your fullest life with the self-concept you’ve created?

Who do you tell yourself you are with your self-talk?

Which of the following scenarios is closest to your self-talk? Maybe you are saying to yourself, “This is the year I’m going straight to the top,” “This is the year I become a superstar,” or “I’ve got everything going for me and this is my year.” Or you could be telling yourself, “Things don’t look like they’re going to be much better this year; in fact it might be a little worse than last year,” “Maybe it’s time for some belt tightening; I don’t want to take any chances,” or even “You never know what could happen, better to be safe than sorry.”

Is there any doubt in your mind which of these examples shows the confidence that will build self-esteem, and which are the ones that demonstrate low self-esteem?

Here are a couple more personal development questions in follow-up:

Which type of self-talk creates a better atmosphere for personal success and living an abundant life?

What do you think is the difference in income and professional development between people with these two types of self-talk?

What goals do you think each of these people possesses?

Who is having more fun and excitement?

Who do you want to be?

Your level of self-esteem sets the personal success bar for everything about you. Every decision you make is filtered through your self-concept. Your self-concept is the out-picturing of your self-esteem.

Take a look at just eight reflections of your level of self-esteem:

1.Your career choice

2.Your friends

3.Your primary relationship with another

4.Your level of income

5.Your home

6.Your car

7.Your free time and hobby choices

8.Your vacations

Changing what you believe about yourself will change your life in an instant.

Build self-esteem and you will build your self-concept. But, your self-concept requires attention and care to be maintained. It’s not as simple as saying you feel good about yourself and that’s the end of it.

Do you know that your self-talk comes at the rate of a magazine page of text every single minute of the day? That’s a lot of talking to yourself! If you fill your mind with positive input, it’s a pretty good bet that most of your self-talk will also be positive and foster personal and professional growth.

Use this personal growth quiz to become aware of your self-talk. By changing what you say to yourself and transforming what you believe about your personal success, you will automatically build self-esteem.

The Career Mentoring Institute’s personal and professional development package concentrates on the personal and interpersonal capacities. Beyond a certain point seldom do people stumble in the technical areas. It’s the personal and interpersonal areas where things generally come unstuck and come unstuck they do very often. The widespread existence of the “Peter Principle” is testimony to the fact that things come unstuck.The Career Mentoring Institute’s personal and professional development package is aimed at providing people with the tools to grow and develop their personal and interpersonal capacities. In doing so they will be much more effective in the workforce as well as better at partnering, parenting and more creative and effective in the wider social world. The Five Step program’s steps are as follows:

1. Matching talents and interests with a field of work in the new emerging conditions; where it will not be business as usual. This is hardly a world shattering first step, but we are astonished at how many people are doing work and engaged in activities that do not match their talents or interests. This step has important implications for determining a person’s career options, and in making decisions on their career options that is linked into the other four steps in the personal and professional development program.

2. Charting a life and career path through the different levels of complexity of their chosen field of work and industrial sector, and what it will mean to deepen the qualities and capacities that will be needed to deal with increased complexity. We help people identify the different levels of complexity in their life path and field of work and also help them build goals to navigate your career path;

3. Creating a plan that involves developing their technical, psychological and interpersonal qualities that are required in today’s world. This is the key step in personal and professional development plan as its focus are qualities hidden by the seven secrets of the modern workplace. These are the qualities that successful people know about and use to achieve success, but which they seldom reveal. These will be explained in more detail shortly.

4. Step 4 recognizes that life in the twenty first century makes six demands on all of us concerned with how we define our relationship to our work, our family life and our broader social relationships, and includes issues like having a vision, pursuing mastery and excellence and having an inner standard to judge performance. Each of these demands also imposes major psychological challenges that personal and professional development must help people to meet.

5. Step 5 is concerned with a person’s level of awareness. They will learn that we all go through different stages of awareness and that we have the potential to expand the way we define different aspects of our lives. Successful people know that they need to expand their awareness in order to deal with the ever increasing complexity of life in this era. This is particularly important at this time when many of the certainties that we have lived by have broken down.

The five steps provide the most comprehensive set of tools for the personal and interpersonal dynamics of personal and professional developed ever developed to help people excel in the most challenging and demanding period ever faced by human kind.The core segment of the Career Mentoring Institute’s personal and professional development package to aid staff development for more effective employee development is concerned with helping people develop the capacities hidden by what we call the seven secrets of modern life.The seven secrets are about:• Matching your talents and your interests with a field of work and industrial sector that is compatible with your talents and interests. This is the first of the five steps and is incorporated as part of the seven secrets; • Responding in real time to the challenges you face in the most effective way possible. It’s a major advantage to be able to respond in the right way as events unfold. Most people recognize what they should have done when it’s too late. • Adopting the role of a player rather than a victim when life deals you one of those set backs that seem to be inevitable for us all; • Achieving emotional mastery, so that you can use the energy of the emotions constructively, and not be overwhelmed by emotions such as fear, anger or guilt; • Mastering crucial conversations where opinions differ, where the stakes are high and emotions run hot; • Negotiating by using the crucial conversation skills to seek common interests that everyone can sign up, and that results in the best decision where everyone is satisfied; • Acting with integrity by making and honoring your promises through commitment conversations; These bullets points do nothing more than summarize what is involved. On their own these bullet points don’t convey the transformational power that knowing and using the capacities the secrets hide involve, in leading to the creation of personal and professional development plans. In order to appreciate the transformational nature of the seven secrets we ask that you visit the home page of the site, and then register to receive a copy of a short ebook “The Truth of the Crash and a New Career Development Plan. This will then take you to a full statement about the transformations power of this five step program. We believe that you will truly appreciate how much peoples’ lives will be enhanced by learning and applying the seven secrets, and the other four steps, in their personal and professional development, and many other areas of their lives.

If you’re spending free time reading novels or listening to music, you’re missing a major key to personal and business success. People who achieve high levels of abundance generally read two or three inspirational books every week. They aren’t parked in front of the TV all night.

With today’s technology you have many choices of how to best receive personal growth information. There is no longer an excuse for not having time to be educated.

Look at this partial list of delivery methods for getting professional development information to you:

Read online or listen to PDFs online–software can read text to you!

Listen to audio or watch streaming video online

Download audio or video to your iPod

Download print, audio or video to your cell phone or PDA

Print out a PDF to take with you in a folder

Read a print book

Listen to CDs or watch DVDs – in your car, on a plane, on your TV or computer

You’re probably thinking, “I barely have time to complete all my tasks now. How could I add anything else?” But, we all have the same 24 hours each day.

Since you can’t add hours, it’s up to you to decide how to spend the ones you have. The advent of the iPod makes it easier to access professional development tools. Now you can listen discreetly while standing in line or waiting for an appointment. iPods aren’t just for kids. They’re important tools for business success and personal growth.

To create the life of your dreams, you must make new choices about how to spend your time. If it were possible to achieve your personal development goals by doing what you’re doing now, you would already have everything you want.

I’m sure you’ve heard the adage that you can’t solve a problem with the same mind that created it. It’s the same with any personal growth change you want to make in your life. You can’t create a new life with the old habits that produced the life you have now.

Just as when you were a child and books magically took you to places you’d never been, inspirational books will guide you to become the person you want to be and will help build the business success of which you dream.

Every multi-millionaire I’ve met had many personal growth obstacles to overcome in their lives. Not one of them was born into a life of ease. They dealt with circumstances ranging from total poverty, abandonment as a child, abuse, depression, life-threatening illness, divorce, business loss and bankruptcy.

This reality shatters all the excuses you’ve been using throughout your life for why you can’t succeed. For many, inspirational educational tools were the beginning of their road to personal and business success. These professional development tools will start you on the road to your dreams, too.

Let me give you some examples of abundant people who are big readers. Robert Allen, real-estate guru and author of best-selling books including my favorite, Multiple Streams of Income, reads several books at once by leaving them in various rooms throughout his home so a book is always available.

Cynthia Brian, co-author of the best-selling Chicken Soup for the Gardener’s Soul and author of Be the Star You Are, finds it easy to read several books a week because she carries a book everywhere and spends at least two hours nightly reading instead of watching TV.

David Anderson of Famous Dave’s really raises the bar. He’s a self-proclaimed night owl, sleeping an average of five hours. He not only reads two or three books a week, but 20-30 magazines a month! He reads continually for personal development and to stay current on business trends.

You say you want more from life, but will you move outside your comfort zone to make it happen? Maybe reading a book every week seems unfeasible. Commit to reading one book this month, or in the next two weeks. When you find it’s not so difficult, up your quota.

The key to effective use of inspirational books, audios and videos is that you implement what you learn. Put your new knowledge into practice; don’t just read, listen or watch for the sake of spending time doing it.

This is because there’s an awful lot of talk about personal development and for some people, they’re not quite sure how it relates to them. Often when we become adults, learn new skills, have a job, a relationship (or not), friends, colleagues, we’re pretty much set in who we are, how we think and behave and what the nature of our emotional selves is.

Personal Development can sometimes seem like a pretty daunting ‘task’ rather than something to be desired or pursued. Do I have to change everything about me? Won’t it be painful and emotionally wrenching? Do I have to change everything about me? I’ll lose my friends if I change too much.

Common myths. And myths they are if you look at the gentler, more humane way to approach personal development. It shouldn’t be wrenching; you don’t need to have an ‘epiphany’ and change your ways forever; it should be a natural evolution of who you already are, not a tearing apart and a putting back together again.

Although Impact Factory primarily works with people in the workplace, the issues surrounding personal development are the same in any area of your life.

And here are a few reasons why:

Reverting to type and dealing with the feelings

What is very clear to anyone that works with people is that under pressure, people will ‘revert to type’. In normal circumstances, when there’s no pressure, everyone knows how they would like to deal with things differently. However, when decisions need to be made quickly, when things aren’t working as you would wish, when others become more demanding, most people under stress will behave as they always have. They will not have the time, nor will they make the time to weigh and measure their options.

What they will do is react to the current situation and do what they’ve always done to get a speedy result. What they have always done may not – often is not – the most appropriate choice to make; but it seems to be the only one available to them at the time. It is in hindsight that other options become clear.

People cannot help reverting to type. It is how the species has survived: when a mastodon came into view, people didn’t take time to ponder their options; they acted immediately. That vital mechanism is within us all: under threat we will react without conscious thought in order to survive.

However, without well-developed people skills, pressurised communication in all areas of our lives can look like bullying or blaming where it’s easier to accuse or order someone around rather than encourage. It can mean that people will avoid conflict and back down from useful confrontation where differences could get resolved. People will make incorrect assumptions and then act on them. Reverting to type can also mean avoiding getting support from others because you feel you have to do everything yourself.

When people revert to type, they are usually driven by their feelings, and it will usually be feelings that get in the way of being able to change behaviour constructively. Most people know how they would like to behave, so teaching the ‘how to’ is not at issue here.

Feelings that can get in the way of effectiveness can be anything from nervousness about presenting, to fear of humiliation for saying something stupid, to being intimidated by a particular person who seems to wrong-foot you all the time. Feelings can make you shy away from handling tricky situations from saying no to Christmas dinner with the parents to asking for a raise or communicating more honestly with a colleague.

At Impact Factory we address the fact that at times (more often than not) uncomfortable feelings will make it difficult, if not impossible, to create the outcome you want. Otherwise, people are trying to cope with new information and new techniques without acknowledging that their emotions can, at times, stop them making any change whatsoever.

That’s not personal development, and trying to learn new things without that essential acknowledgement usually means the learning won’t stick.

Changing yourself to change others

We hear over and over again in people’s personal and work lives that things would be much better if only someone else would change the way they do things. “If my sister wasn’t so stubborn, we’d have a much easier relationship.” “I’d get on much better if only my line manager would give me more time to get things done.” “My job would be easier if only my secretary was more efficient.” “My parents are so frustrating; if only they would start treating me like an adult.”

In these and many other examples, the solution seems to rest with someone else. Therefore, the responsibility for moving things forward rests with others as well. There will always be situations where life would be far better if someone else would just shape up and do things the way we think they ought to be done! However, that attitude puts all the power and influence into someone else’s hands and leaves us feeling impotent and often inadequate. You can have a good moan, but nothing changes.

Changing what you do, changing the way you speak to others, changing your attitude towards recurring difficulties will change the normally predictable outcome.

When we talk about change, we are looking for simple changes; tweaks, adjustments, small alterations, rather than looking to change everything about a person. At Impact Factory we talk about the least amount of change for the greatest impact. Striving for small but effective changes rather than complete transformation.

That’s’ how true personal development needs to happen: not massive life-changing upheaval, but easily manageable, incremental changes that don’t require you to change everything about yourself (or expect everyone else to change as well).

When we work with people’s personal development on our workshops we make it easy and enjoyable and filled with variety, so that there is ‘something for everyone’. What works for one person, won’t necessarily work for others. We believe that the way forward is to find a few things that you know you’ll be able to do, to have fun doing them and to experience enough small wins as you practise them. These are the things you’ll be able to remember in the heat of a difficult situation. You will revert to a new type that feels familiar because it’s developed from who you already are, not about becoming someone you’ll never be!

Real life, not make believe

Here’s one way that we do that: we use real-life, everyday situations that people encounter on the job or in their personal lives, rather than giving people made up, textbook scenarios they then have to ‘act out’. Working with real issues helps people recognise and understand their feelings rather than ignoring them or wishing they would go away.

We know that if you spend time learning and developing new skills on a course there needs to be a realistic bridge between the workshop room and real life.

We always ask people to bring in their own experiences – a challenging presenting situation, a recurring difficult person or problem, an upcoming meeting, etc. Within those real-life scenarios, we use some of the tools and techniques that the individual has practised during the training and has already found works for them.

By letting people work on their specific issues and then incorporating their favourite techniques into the re-enactments, they get to choose what they feel able to do, rather than ones they ought to do.

And if we could sum up our entire philosophy in one word it would be: choice.

When people feel they have choice, they feel more confident and better able to deal with the ordinary and the extraordinary of work and personal life.

And that’s how we make personal development personal as well!