Earl R. Smith II's Blog, page 36

Mentor or Coach? What’s the difference and why is might be important to you.

Whether you are well on in life's journey or just starting out, my innovative mentoring programs will help you on your journey.

The step possible in the moment is always a new beginning. Take it with calm confidence.

This volume is written as a series of ‘thinking pieces’ that are to serve as points of meditation on important matters. Think of them as rocks leading to the shore. I’ll leave you to figure out what and where the shore is, what the canoe signifies and what’s the reason for the journey. All I intend to do is provide a general map of where the stones are. I wish you well on your journey and hope that my map is of some use to you.

The Consultant’s Disease

The core question is "how good are these consultants at taking their own advice". "Physician heal thyself!" I have found that asking this question divides the profession into two broad groups.

Surprising Abundance

“I have been taking these people for granted,” was the way she started. “I never really stopped to look at them carefully. To ask why they were my friends. To think about how they might help me in my journey. To think about how I might help them. You have brought me to a place where those questions are now center stage. And I can’t believe the abundance in my life. But, more than that, I can’t believe that it was there all the time and I missed it.”

Don’t waste your life living out other people’s visions of you

The key words are “who you are”. Professor Campbel is drawing on an ancient understanding that is found over and over again in human mythology; the idea of a second birth. In those societies, there was the idea that a human is born twice. The first birth is the biological one while the second is the birth of a human into the person that they have become. He is thinking of knowledge of yourself without the trappings of the vision that other people have laid upon you.

Crossing the Boundary – Surviving the Experience

Companies with cutting-edge technologies are regularly beaten by those with more conventional ones – organizations with first rate value propositions find themselves losing to others which do not meet their high standards. The world can seem patently unfair – until you look at the competition – and the competition with the competition - differently

The Cost of Anti-Humanism

The early mentoring sessions tend to focus on the dissatisfaction that underlies a feeling that what they are doing with their life is not what they should be doing with it. The goal is not to directly attack the dissatisfaction - it is to find the underlying cause.

Eleven Habits of Self-Sabotaging People

I’ve been a student of human behavior for at least five decades. During that time I’ve become fascinated by behaviors which people adopt and which are self-sabotaging. Over the years I have developed a list of these behaviors which I used to keep track of the tendencies of people that I met

Self-Sabotage as a Way of Life

A memory came creeping back. When I was at the Sloan School of Management in MIT I had the great fortune to study with Jay Forrester, the creator of the first computer memory core as well as a new way of looking at complex systems. Jay was fond of saying, “with complex systems, it’s the second order effects that will surprise you.” Second order effects are the unintended consequences of any action.

Some Unexpected Benefits of Mentoring

Many of my mentoring clients first approach me with a specific need. They want to mitigate a particular behavior, break through a barrier or make a change that has long been needed. We do focus our work on that need and initially meeting those needs takes up most of our energy. But very soon they come to realize that there are many, unanticipated benefits that flow from working with a first-rate mentor.