Context is everything - how to help people be who they can't help being.

One of the communication challenges we struggle with most is what to pay attention to when listening to someone speak. It is too easy to be hijacked by the content of what they say and go down a rabbit hole.

I struggled with this until during a Master Practitioner Neuro Linguistic Programming session, the trainer announced that the content of what people said was just noise — what was important was the context within which it was said. This puzzled me at the time, but now I know what he meant.

When we are faced with a challenge we are inclined to apply ourselves to the nuts and bolts of it. In the workplace, this tendency is amplified by the pressure from above to get results.

When I first meet a client they are usually preoccupied with solving a problem and if I’m not vigilant, I too can be drawn into this problem-solving. After all it’s pretty compelling…who doesn’t want to find immediate answers? But the solution doesn’t lie there.

The reality is that there isn’t just one answer. There are many and trying ever harder to access them from the problem-solving perspective doesn’t work well. Something completely different needs to happen; something that interrupts the problem-solving process and provides a whole new perspective.

For example, recently, when I was asked to work with a newly promoted director in an insurance company who had previously been a technical head. The CEO wasn’t sure if he had made the right decision inviting him to join the senior leadership team and my client had six months to prove himself. Needless to say, he was preoccupied by how to convince the CEO that he had made the right decision. He was very good at his job, but to perform effectively in his new role, he had to shift his perspective from that of trying to meet expectations to that of considering the bigger question of what he was bringing to the table.

Who was it that he couldn’t help being? What was needed at this moment?

At our first meeting, he told me that at the beginning of his career he had wanted to be an actor. That fact hinted at an imagination. I asked him to imagine that if he was the leader he would love to be, what two words would describe his leadership style?

With little hesitation he said, Galvanising Leader so I asked him to tell me what a galvanising leader would do. As he readily shared the actions he would feel compelled to take in his new role, his eyes lit up with excitement! I just listened as he continued to connect the leadership context with this current circumstances. I could see he was unable to help being this leader.

Now instead of looking at how to please the CEO, we were on the exciting journey of considering what a galvanising leader could offer the company. He was full of ideas about how to move forward with both immediate and long term plans; it was all there waiting to be tapped. Suddenly, he was someone with something to offer and somewhere to go with it.

This was the context in which his life and career occurred and this was what was informing his actions — not the immediate problem I had been hired to help him solve.

It doesn’t matter what the transition is that an individual wants to make — finding a new job, changing career, or transitioning into retirement — all require connecting back to the context of who you are and where you are going in your life. The rest is content.