Can the Way we Talk Change the Way we Work?

Wednesday March 12, 2014 I want to argue this point because it is about a book I am reading that I find fascinating. The book is based on this powerful question: Why is the gap so great between our hopes, our intentions, even our decisions and what we are actually able to bring about? Even when we are able to make important changes in our own lives or the groups we lead at work, why are the changes so frequently short-lived and soon we are back to business as usual? What can we do to transform this troubling reality? In this intensely practical book, "How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work" Harvard psychologists Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey take us on a carefully guided journey designed to help us answer these very questions. And not just generally, or in the abstract. They help each of us arrive at our own particular answers that can solve the puzzling gap between what we intend and what we are able to accomplish. This is a book to read with pen in hand. The authors invite you in—not as an observer but as an active participant—to help you make powerful, lasting change in your life and the lives of those you seek to help or lead. The authors argue that, for every unrealized commitment to change we genuinely hold and act out of, we also have a conflicting and harder-to-recognize commitment that prevents the very change we desire. They share a new "learning technology" comprising seven transformational languages, each permitting new kinds of thinking, feeling, and experiencing. Kegan and Lahey show us how we can use these languages ―in our conversations with colleagues, friends, and as importantly, in the way we talk to ourselves― to transform: • Complaints into commitments • Blaming and avoidance into responsibility • Our view of our own ineffectiveness into an understanding of its hidden genius • The assumptions we take as truths into changeable ways of understanding ourselves and the world • Our tendency to praise and prize into ongoing regard • Social regulation by rules and personnel policies into the power of public agreements • Destructive and even constructive criticism into the bigger possibility of "deconstructive criticism" Pick up the book and tell me if you like it. I did. Good luck!