Have you ever considered the immense influence that paradigms have on our thoughts, actions, and results? By understanding and working with the power of paradigms, we can make meaningful and lasting changes in our lives. In this captivating Side Mirror episode, we explore the ins and outs of paradigms, drawing inspiration from Stephen Covey's "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People," and discuss how to harness their power for personal and professional growth.
Listen in as we share examples of how paradigms have impacted our own lives and the lives of others, including adopting Richard Branson's belief that taking care of employees is good for business. We also delve into the concept of flow and how adopting paradigms from it can create a highly beneficial state of fulfillment and productivity. Don't miss this opportunity to learn how to identify, analyse, and utilize your own paradigms for a more successful and fulfilling life.
Thank you to our sponsors:
ASKE Consulting
Email: hello@askeconsulting.co.uk
Aquilae
Email: cvm@aquilae.co.uk
Episode Directory on Instagram @careerviewmirror
If you enjoy listening to our guests career stories, please follow CAREER-VIEW MIRROR in your podcast app.
Have you ever considered the immense influence that paradigms have on our thoughts, actions, and results? By understanding and working with the power of paradigms, we can make meaningful and lasting changes in our lives. In this captivating Side Mirror episode, we explore the ins and outs of paradigms, drawing inspiration from Stephen Covey's "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People," and discuss how to harness their power for personal and professional growth.
Listen in as we share examples of how paradigms have impacted our own lives and the lives of others, including adopting Richard Branson's belief that taking care of employees is good for business. We also delve into the concept of flow and how adopting paradigms from it can create a highly beneficial state of fulfillment and productivity. Don't miss this opportunity to learn how to identify, analyse, and utilize your own paradigms for a more successful and fulfilling life.
Thank you to our sponsors:
ASKE Consulting
Email: hello@askeconsulting.co.uk
Aquilae
Email: cvm@aquilae.co.uk
Episode Directory on Instagram @careerviewmirror
If you enjoy listening to our guests career stories, please follow CAREER-VIEW MIRROR in your podcast app.
I am sitting in lovely Siesta Key, florida. I'm coming from Bangkok in Thailand, prague in the Czech Republic, cairo in Egypt, auckland, new Zealand, london, england. Welcome to Career View Mirror, the automotive podcast that goes behind the scenes with key players in the industry looking back over their careers so far, showing insights to help you with your own journey. I'm your host, andy Follows. Hello listeners, and welcome to this Side Mirror Episode of Career View Mirror. If you're a regular listener, thank you. You'll be aware that most of our episodes feature interviews with people with a link to the automotive industry who kindly share their life and career journeys with us. We celebrate their careers, listen to their stories and learn from their experiences. From time to time, we also publish the Side Mirror episodes, which are usually an opportunity for me to share some content with you related to careers or developing ourselves or people we lead parent or mentor that I hope you'll find valuable.
Speaker 1:In this Side Mirror, i want to talk about a concept that you'll probably be aware of, but that is so fundamentally important to the results that we get that I want to encourage you to spend these next few minutes giving it some attention and then reflecting on it. I'm calling this Side Mirror, the power of paradigms. I first came face to face with them when I read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. Once I'd taken on board how they work, i continued to notice their effect and gradually realised that I could gain a lot by being able to identify my own paradigms and those of people I'm trying to help. In this episode, i'm going to say a bit more about what I mean by paradigms. I'll give you some examples, i'll share some ideas on how to operate at the level of paradigms when we're trying to make changes for ourselves and others, and I'll finish up by telling you what you absolutely must not do when cooking potatoes.
Speaker 1:Let me take a moment to tell you about our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Ask Consulting, who are experts in executive search, resourcing solutions and talent management across all sectors of the automotive industry in the UK and Europe. I've known them for almost 20 years and I can think of no more fitting sponsor for CareerView Mirror. They're the business we go to at Aqualye when we're looking for talent for our clients and for projects that we're working on. Ask was founded by Andrew McMillan, whose own automotive career includes board-level positions with car brands and leasing companies. All Ask consultants have extensive client-side experience, which means they bring valuable insight and perspective for both their employer and candidate customers. My earliest experience of working with Andrew was back in 2004 when he helped me hire regional managers for my leasing sales team at Alphabet. More recently, when Aqualye was helping a US client to establish a car subscription business, ask Consulting was alongside us, helping us to develop our people strategy and to identify and bring on board suitable talent. Clients we've referred to Ask have had an equally positive experience. Andrew and the team at Ask are genuinely interested in the long-term outcomes for you and the people they place with you. They even offer the reassurance of a two-year performance guarantee, which means they have skin in the game when working with you. If you're keen to secure the most talented and high-potential people to accelerate your business and gain competitive advantage, do get in touch with them and let them know I sent you. You can email Andrew and the team at hello at askconsultingcouk or check out their website for more details and more client feedback. At wwwaskconsultingcouk, ask is spelled A-S-K-E. You'll find these contact details in the show notes for this episode. Ok, let's get back to our episode.
Speaker 1:I remember being in the science lab at school, with its long banks of woodenwork benches, completely sinks and gas taps for the Bunsen burners. At the front of the lab was a blackboard where the teacher would write explanations and homework assignments. To me, it seemed that the light was not quite right. The sun shining in through the window made it difficult to read and I'd asked my classmate next to me what it said. At that point it never occurred to me that I was short-sighted and needed glasses. When it came to my eyesight, it was what I was used to and I had nothing to compare it to. Not consciously, but subconsciously, i just assumed that other people saw the world literally as I did. It was over 40 years ago that I got my first pair of glasses, and I can still remember going out into the garden at home and just looking up at the trees. I was blown away by being able to see individual leaves where before I'd just seen a mass of green Paradigms are like the lenses through which we view the world.
Speaker 1:We adopt them as we go through life, often without realising it. We pick them up from our parents, our peers, our teachers and leadership figures or perceived sources of authority, and I say perceived sources of authority, because our view that certain authorities can be trusted is a paradigm in itself. Once we've adopted a paradigm, whether consciously or not, it tends to remain in our minds as the lens through which we view anything in its particular area of influence. For example, if someone's paradigm is that a plant-based diet is healthier and kinder to animals than the environment, every time they look at a restaurant menu or go food shopping or are offered something to eat, they'll filter out dishes containing meat and fish. Alternatively, if their paradigm is that without animal protein they cannot meet their nutritional requirements, they'll choose options that offer plenty of that. That particular example is unusual in that we've chosen to eat plant-based or to focus on building muscle. Those are both conscious choices. Many of our paradigms are less deliberately adopted and less overt.
Speaker 1:I like to think of paradigms like lines of code or scripts that have been uploaded to our brains, often without our active consent. We don't tick a box first, they just worm their way in and run quietly in the background, often unnoticed and yet having a significant effect on our thoughts, actions and outcomes. The reason their impact is so significant is that the way we see the world dictates the thoughts that we have the actions that we take and, consequently, the results that we get. I first became aware of this when reading the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Stephen Covey writes about paradigms and introduces his See-Do-Get model in the Foundation chapter. Before tackling anything else, covey says we see the world not as it is, but as we are. His See-Do-Get model illustrates how the way we see the world steers what we do, that is, the actions that we take and what we do. Those actions have a direct impact on the outcomes or results that we get.
Speaker 1:Paradigms that we have adopted carry on affecting our actions and results indefinitely, whether we are aware of them or not, unless something comes along that causes them to be replaced by an alternative paradigm. Again, that may not be a conscious decision on our part. We might be exposed to some new information that displaces our previous paradigm. Let me try and give you an example with the following two statements. When my wife and her siblings were growing up in the UK, they had a live-in nanny. The reason for this was that my wife's mother passed away when my wife was 17 and her siblings were 15, 8 and 9 months old, so her father needed full-time help with his children. A common paradigm in the UK might well be that having a nanny is a sign of relative affluence. That conjures up images of Mary Poppins. That particular paradigm can probably be backed up with statistics on the household wealth of families with nannies. It's not unreasonable to conclude from my first statement that my wife's family had a nanny because they were affluent. It's not unreasonable, but it would be entirely incorrect. Some people may experience a slight paradigm shift on hearing the second statement.
Speaker 1:If so, this is illustrative of paradigms at work in the background, influencing thoughts without us even noticing. Two aspects give paradigms incredible power over us. They're always running in the background, unnoticed until challenged, and they influence every thought, action and result that happens downstream. Let me give you an example of what I mean by influencing every thought, action and result downstream. So I'm your manager and I ask you to take a package over to my boss, who's based a couple of hours drive away, and I say it's important to get it there quickly. The paradigm I'm instilling in you by that statement is it's important to get it there quickly. How might that affect your downstream actions? You'll most likely leave as soon as possible. You may take a certain route based on speed rather than distance, you may be tempted to exceed the speed limit. You may take a little more risk overtaking or pulling out of junctions. Perhaps you won't stop for coffee or a break en route. As you can see, there are many downstream decisions that you'll make based on the paradigm that it's important to get it there quickly. Consider how many of your actions would be affected if, instead, i'd said it's important to get it there carefully.
Speaker 1:Cuffee says if we want to make deep, meaningful changes that endure, we need to be operating at the level of paradigms, rather than tell you to obey the speed limit and be careful, pulling out of junctions, and giving you hundreds of other action level instructions. If I help to instill in you the paradigm that this needs to be done carefully, you'll make all the appropriate decisions and act accordingly yourself, effortlessly and without me needing to be there. I say effortlessly because one of the beauties of working at the level of paradigms is that thoughts and actions resulting from viewing situations through our paradigms are effortless. They might still be wrong, but they're effortless. If I told someone from the UK that my wife grew up with a nanny, they wouldn't need to put any effort into coming to the incorrect conclusion that she had an affluent childhood and was probably a bit posh, as we say over here, their brain would serve up that conclusion immediately and with zero conscious effort, having viewed my statement through the lens of their paradigm about people who had nannies in the UK in the 1970s and 80s. The bit I want you to focus on here is nothing to do with nannies and affluence or otherwise. It's about the impact that paradigms have on countless downstream thoughts and actions, and therefore the power of working at the level of paradigms when it comes to changing our behaviours with the least effort. As humans, it's incredibly beneficial for us to be able to identify our paradigms and evaluate the extent to which they're serving us or holding us back. That way, we can then make a conscious effort to adopt effective paradigms. Let me give you some more examples of paradigms that I've adopted over the years and that have worked for me.
Speaker 1:One of my paradigms about being a father is that my role is to make sure that, by the time my children leave home, they're well equipped to tackle the challenges that they're likely to face as an adult. Anything I do for my children that they could do for themselves is robbing them of an opportunity to practice in a safe environment. It's not just about the opportunity to practice the task, it's the confidence that comes from having completed the task by themselves. If I get too involved, they won't gain confidence from having done it. By adopting that paradigm, i'm positioning myself to notice opportunities that arise from my children to practice skills that they're going to need to adopt when they're older and fending for themselves. Similarly, as a manager, anything I do that could, with a bit of intentional delegation, be done by one of my team and counts as a development opportunity for them is robbing them of that opportunity to grow in skill and confidence. It's also robbing my organization of time that I could have spent doing something that only I can do. One of my paradigms as the leader of a business is that I should be spending my time on tasks that only I can do. Everything else should be delegated to others. If I focus on developing my people, the list of tasks that only I can do will get shorter And I'll have more time to focus on each of those tasks where I am adding the most value to the business.
Speaker 1:I'm sure you can appreciate how, once you've embraced those paradigms, it's a lot easier to consistently make decisions that are aligned with developing your children and your people. You can't be around to oversee and manage the countless decisions and actions that our children and the people we manage take in a day. If we were, our lives and theirs would also be awful. If we can instill in them effective paradigms. Their thoughts, actions and results will be governed quite effortlessly by those paradigms. Get the paradigms right and the results will take care of themselves. Richard Branson shares a paradigm that if you look after the employees, they will look after your customers and your customers will look after your business. Once that's understood, any decision regarding employees will be influenced by that paradigm that looking after employees is good for business. This doesn't mean mollycoddling them. Looking after employees can mean delegating more appropriate work to them so that they learn new skills, remain engaged and continue to grow.
Speaker 1:I picked up two paradigms that have been helpful for raising children and developing leaders from reading about the concept of flow. I talk about flow in episode 99, flow purpose and growing people. The first paradigm that I've adopted about flow is that it's an absolutely wonderful state to find ourselves in that results in fulfillment as well as productivity. The second paradigm that I have adopted is that we're most likely to find ourselves in this highly beneficial state called flow when the level of challenge we're facing is appropriately matched to our capability. If the challenge exceeds our capability by too much, we'll feel overwhelmed, and if the challenges way below our capability, we're likely to feel bored With those two paradigms running in the background. If I want to help others to feel fulfilled and to be highly productive, i know what to do, so those are some examples of paradigms that I believe are contributing when I'm operating at my best as a parent or leader.
Speaker 1:When I get it wrong which I do it's often possible to identify that an alternative, less effective paradigm has been operating behind the scenes, causing me to have thoughts and take actions that lead to poorer outcomes. For example, if my child comes to me and appears to be suffering or overwhelmed by a situation I might struggle to operate, through the lens that my role is to let them practice whilst they're in a safe environment, an alternative paradigm might take over. In the moment, perhaps I also have a paradigm that's my responsibility to take care of my kids and protect them. With this paradigm in the driving seat, i might almost involuntarily grab the wheel, so to speak, and take charge of a situation because it serves me to do so. It makes me feel better For a moment. It makes me feel like I'm doing the right thing as a parent, when maybe I've overreacted And what was actually needed was some empathic listening, some gentle reassurance, some coaching and, if requested or appropriate, some helpful suggestions. The same applies to me as a manager or leader, when faced with an employee who seems to be struggling.
Speaker 1:Once I accepted that our thoughts, actions and results are so heavily influenced by our paradigms, it wasn't difficult for me to shift my focus from people's specific actions and results and onto trying to discover their underlying paradigms and bring those to the surface. I mentioned Covey's See-Do-Get model earlier in this side mirror, as paradigms are often hidden even from ourselves. The way I tend to use this model is in reverse. When we start to look at how this conceptual model can help us in reality, the most visible component is typically the result or the outcome.
Speaker 1:When I was 17, i went on holiday in France with a French friend, his sister and her friend. We were self-catering in an apartment. They asked me to cook the potatoes. What I served up, the result or outcome, were sort of mashed potatoes, but it was runnier than usual and pink, slash, purple in colour. When they not unreasonably questioned me on what I'd done to the mashed potatoes, i explained that I'd put some red wine in with them. My paradigm was that French people like cooking with wine. After all, didn't they give us coquovang? literally chicken with wine and boff-boguignon or burgundy beef.
Speaker 1:Now, when someone serves up a result that is the equivalent of my purple, runny potatoes, as long as the best version of myself is parenting or leading on that day, i'll suppress my dismay And, coming from a place of curiosity, calmly explore with that individual what might the underlying paradigm have been that caused them to have the thoughts they had and take the actions they took that led to their version of Chateau Potatoe. More often than not, the root cause is not stupidity or malice on their part, but a genuine misunderstanding, a lack of experience, poor communication or a lack of awareness of the bigger picture that meant they were operating from an ineffective paradigm. I'd like to invite you next time you're faced with an ineffective result, see this as an opportunity to use the See Do Get model in reverse Explore what actions you or someone else involved took to get this result and then go back further to identify, if you can, the underlying paradigm. If you can do this and replace it with a more effective paradigm, you'll be making a change that will affect all of the downstream thoughts, actions and outcomes going forward. By operating at the level of paradigms, you'll be able to facilitate deep and lasting change.
Speaker 1:You've been listening to Career View Mirror with me. Andy Follows. Our Career View Mirror episodes are filled with personal stories from the lives of my talented and hardworking guests about how they've navigated their own journeys, and we're proud to share all their insights with you to help you on your own journey. If you enjoy listening to our episodes, please could you do me a huge favour and share them with someone you lead parent or mentor or a friend you think will also appreciate them. Thank you to our sponsors for this episode Ask Consulting and Aqualye And thank you to the Career View Mirror team, without whom we would not be able to share our guest's life and career stories. And, above all, thank you to you for listening.
Speaker 1:No matter how hard you try, no matter how hardworking you are, you're never going to be able to do it on your own. It's just not possible. At the end of the day, you're steering your own destiny. So if it's not happening for you, you're not seeing what you want out there, then go out there and connect. Don't rely on others. You have to do it yourself. You have to take control. If you've got an idea, if you've got a thought about something that might be successful, if you've got a passion to do something yourself that you just haven't quite got there, do it. Take a risk. Take a chance, stick your neck out. What's the worst that can happen? You fall down. Okay, you pick yourself up and you try again.