When many apparently un-connected things came together:

What could be the possible relationship between feedback skills for project managers, NLP meta programmes, self-leadership, parenting and managing?

So, I was in the fourth and last module of a customised session on feedback skills for project managers of a client yesterday when we had an interesting exchange.

I was helping them understand the concept of meta programmes from NLP to help in improving the effectiveness of feedback to team members when we were discussing one of the meta programme spectrum: Necessity - Possibility.

Necessity pattern people are the ones who would do just what needs to be done. Sometimes there might seem an element of compulsion in why people would do something from a space of necessity but they do it. Some may perceive them as people who stop at what is just about good enough and that they may not push themselves further into the realm of possibilities.

One of the participants was courageous enough to answer that he had more of the necessity pattern in him though the world generally would celebrate and appreciate if you have more of the possibility pattern.

After helping them understand that no meta programme per say is good or bad and that it depends on your overall pattern based on the other meta programmes you have in you, I asked how many of them thought they had more of a necessity meta programme in them.

Many hands went up on the Zoom platform.

I then shared with them one of the most amazing definitions of leadership which I thought people with a necessity pattern would relate to and love.

It was a definition of self-leadership I learnt back in 2008 from one of Mr. Jim Cathcart's speeches at the National Speakers Convention in the USA a couple of years before that.

He defined self-leadership as "The Ability to get yourself to do what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, whether you feel like it or not, and still do it well."

And I shared with them the outstanding example Mr. Cathcart gave back then to illustrate this definition: He said, you are a new parent and you realise that you need to change the baby's diapers, then you do it, when it needs to be done, not at a moment of your convenience; whether you feel like it or not and still do it well!!

I could sense many of the participants (who were also parents) nodding their heads in resonance with that definition of leadership.

One of the essential points of strengths based performance is that different people get the same outcomes using a variety of methods that are unique to them and that there is no one, exclusive, patented way of getting results.

We also had an interesting exchange on the similarities between parenting and being a manager. More on that some other time.

The interesting thing is that I would be re-invoking another thing I learnt from Mr. Cathcart's speech, next week in a forthcoming session on the accountability-ownership-responsibility spectrum for another client.

Coincidentally I had shared that lesson in the penultimate module with this batch of project managers.

Thank you so much Mr. Cathcart.

_/\_