The People Skills Revolution is based on an approach I developed over 12 years ago when I noticed a number of things in relation to my executive coaching clients.
- They were often affected by negative beliefs about themselves, which adversely affected their performance, despite their seniority.
- Time and time again the problems they had in their interactions with people boiled down to a basic lack of assertiveness.
- Once they became more assertive they tended to make rapid progress in acquiring a wide range of people skills.
- Giving them a step-by-step approach to people skills kept them in control of the process and made them want to practice the skills
- Once they achieved successes in one area of skills they were keen to learn the next set of skills
- There appeared to be a logical order to the skills people were learning from assertiveness through to influencing, negotiating, conciliation.
- The skills from the levels below formed the cumulative underpinning skills for the next level of interpersonal skills
- Once I noticed a pattern it was easy to anticipate and develop the next level of skills they were ready to acquire
- Once people learnt to be more assertive and enjoy their interactions with others, they would then naturally start to acquire more people skills
- However good their people skills, they still came across people who tried to ‘rail road’ them into doing something they did not want to do and they had to learn specific skills to deal with them
- When I presented this incremental and systematic build of skills in a model called the continuum of interpersonal skills they quickly understood that the skills they saw in people they admired were not ‘god given’ but could be learned until they looked natural
Having developed the continuum of interpersonal skills approach and successfully tested it out, when coaching senior executives, I suspected that there were levels of interpersonal skills beyond conciliation. As a result of reading about highly influential peacemakers I decided to add taking a stand and making peace on to the continuum. I then observed a number of my long-term clients starting to behave in this way.
In my role as an executive coach I have been extremely lucky to have worked with my clients over a long period of time, in some cases many cases years. I could not have developed these approaches without their intelligent engagement, their willingness to try new things and step out of their comfort zone. The feedback that they give to me about the usefulness of the ideas and concepts has also been invaluable.
The People Skills Revolution is underpinned by the continuum of interpersonal skills approach, which suggests that interpersonal skills are cumulative and incremental. I propose that these skills can be learnt by anyone with a degree of insight and application in a step-by-step manner.
The hand book will help you to move from where you are now, to where you want to be and will give you tools to get you there.
I believe that what often stands in a our way is not having the skills – although that is certainly a necessary element to success – the factor which most undermines us is our lack of belief that we will be able to achieve what we want to achieve. Once we shift this belief we not only start to get our immediate needs met but we begin to have dreams and to believe that with the ‘wind behind us’ we might be able to achieve those dreams.
Having said that, having been someone whose whole mind was awash with negative beliefs and did not even realise that there was a different way to think, I do realise how hard it is to change a destructive belief system. Although the techniques in the book are effective, I am finding that people who read the People Skills Revolution often hesitate at the chapter on changing negative beliefs and do not feel able to go onto the skill building section because they just do not believe that the techniques would work for them.
I encourage you to be open minded about the possibility that these ideas work and allow yourself to believe that you can achieve significantly better outcomes in your working and personal life.
Once you believe it is possible to achieve better outcomes through your people skills, the People Skills Revolution Handbook will lead you through the skills of assertiveness, influencing, negotiation, conciliation, taking a stand and making peace in a step-by-step and cumulative manner.
Extract from the People Skills Revolution Handbook – Published by Global Professional Publishing 15th April 2013
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