Happy Birthday Blog!

One year and 63 posts later - its the first birthday of this blog! Rather than talking about something that has happened this week in my travels around corporate life - my usual topic for a blog - I thought I'd take a look back at which blogs have proved most popular with you, my esteemed reader in 2011-12. So roll of drums, fanfare of trumpets I can reveal the top 3 most read blogs as:

1. The Elephant and the Rider

2. Abdication, delegation, interference
3. The 'imposter syndrome' - issues in coaching

What if anything does this tell me about organisational life and those of us who inhabit the corporate corridors? For me there is a theme here about 'worry'.  It worries me (!) that I meet a lot of people who worry about getting it wrong - as if there was some external standard that they have not been made privy to but will still be judged on. Organisational life strikes me as far more chaotic and messy than we give credence to, but instead we blame ourselves for our alleged inability to cope/be smart enough/be certain enough. On the odd occasion when teams get around to the subject of worry, they are usually relieved to find that others are struggling with similar issues and they are not the only one who feels like a fraud or a poor line manager.


So thanks for all the reads and comments - I still can't get my head around having a readership in Estonia, Australia and Peru but that is the global village we live in. Looking forward year two - keep the comments coming.

The ‘imposter syndrome’ – issues in coaching

If I had to name one single issue that appears time and again in coaching assignments it would have to be self-esteem and confidence issues. Whether people have too much or too little, it just seems to be an issue that keeps on coming up.

Take a recent client – a high-flying senior executive who by just about every possible measure could be considered successful - she even had the work/life balance thing licked. However she perpetually carried a lurking suspicion that the next role/ project was going to be the one that caught her out and she would be revealed for the 'imposter' she really thought she was. In her case mercifully this wasn’t debilitating - perhaps it was just her way of not getting complacent - but for others I’ve met and worked with this sort of lingering self-doubt can be crippling.

Nathaniel Brandon said that ‘self-esteem is the reputation we acquire with our self’, and that reputation can be surprisingly tough to shift even if it is a reputation that no longer serves us or has little basis in fact. Coaching is often about a fundamental reappraisal - a stock taking if you like - which leads to a more balanced and realistic sense of self. 
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