Towards a theory of personal change

At the core of my enterprise is the idea of personal change.

This is not about the neo-liberal doctrine that says, everything is changing around you and therefore, you must change and adapt. I accept that things change but refuse to accept that we are just passive participants, changing as our external circumstances change. At least, I would like to believe that it is an educated person's responsibility to find opportunities for change and influence its course.

How this change may happen is also a question mark. Those who know me know that I don't hold a high opinion about the coaches, those self-styled individuals who assume that some sort of certificate from somewhere gives them the right to tell another person to live their lives. No one has the right, or the ability, to tell another person what to do or how to live their lives, I believe. All we can do is to help people find their way and be that guide and friend at the moments of confusion which will invariably come. I know that is supposed to be the essence of coaching, as opposed to teaching, but I have come to believe that true coaching - non-invasive and yet impactful - demands a truly great coach and a perfectly ready subject. Less than that, I have seen the exercise degenerate quickly into self-affirmative lecturing by insecure individuals.

But the problem is bigger than just finding the right coaches. Even the right coaches can get it wrong without a coherent theory of personal change and instead fall back on assumptions that are plain wrong or only work within a certain cultural/ relational context. I have seen this first hand in one of my earlier ventures, where the coaching model was based on what happened in the workplace. There were two immediate problems which were overlooked in its implementation: First, what's expected of a coach-as-the-boss isn't the same as stranger-as-a-coach and indeed, the nuances of national and workplace cultures that we overlooked, and second, what happens within a given workplace or an industry - where the goal is professional advancement - can't be used either for students, who are yet to commit to a particular profession, or in the changing context of work, where breaking the norm may become more significant than meeting the expectations. 

Hence, as I work on the new venture and start looking at creating an international network of work-labs, I know I must start with the basics: How people change? This is a more fundamental question than asking people to set up goals and needs a far more nuanced approach than the usual SMART methods. In fact, I have started thinking that SMART - all that focus on Specificity, Measurability, Achievability, Realisability and Timeliness - is counter-productive in this context. Change requires courage, and all those factors are courage diffusers. Instead, the starting point may be - what would you do if you knew you can't fail - and then work out what would one do today if one dared to dream.

Change is hard and can't be achieved if one believes that everything will remain the same while their own prospects will get better. Without courage, there is no change. Without trade-offs, there is no change. This is a point missed in most of the work I have seen so far, and overturning all my past work and starting again - centred around this theory of radical change - is what interests me now.