I thought I’d give you a little glimpse my journey to People Paradigm.
I’ve spent over 40 years in my working career, 35 working in a variety of roles and industries for other people and 5 years working in my own business in the personal development space.For 38 of those years I always believed in process.
There was a right way of doing things and if you did things the right way you would get results. I didn’t think of myself as particularly creative, but I could take a process and without much effort on my behalf I could shape and hone that process to deliver better results.
That worked pretty well on processes but as my responsibilities increased and I took on more managerial and leadership roles I found it worked less well on people. However successful I was and however much I tried to pass that methodology along to other people they seemed to find it more difficult to do things my way than theirs.
And then I started to encounter the same issue on my own personal development journey. I have followed the works of some great teachers from Napoleon Hill to Zig Ziglar, from Brian Tracy to Tony Robbins and many more too numerous to mention.I found that although I could copy their methodology it didn’t seem to be as effective for me as it had been for them.
I spent a few years beating myself up about what it was about me that prevented me from implementing their tools and techniques in my work and my life.
Then, a couple of years ago a colleague pointed me to a book called The Little Book of Clarity by Jamie Smart. I bought a copy and sat down to read it. To be honest the first time I read it I hated it. It seemed like a bunch of psychobabbel, an area that definitely wasn’t on my agenda. My mantra at the time was pragmatism and common sense, not a load of psychological BS. But something nagged at me and I saw there was something in it. About a month later I picked it up again and saw it more clearly for myself.
I began to see that where we think we live in a world where outside events and circumstances lead to our thinking and feelings that in fact, we create our own experience from the inside to out on a moment to moment basis. It’s kind of difficult to explain in a short post but I definitely recommend the book to you.
To cut a long story short I started to immerse myself in a study of people, why people do what they do and how, when they begin to see the reality of where their own experience comes from, it liberates them to be more present in everything they do. To deal more effectively with the challenges and opportunities that seem to come along unexpectedly and unbidden, to connect and communicate more effectively with other people, to access levels of creativity and innovation that they never thought possible and to do so effortlessly without stress and worry.
That got me to thinking about how could I use this new found understanding to help individuals and businesses to achieve more, perform better and do so with ease and grace. From that People Paradigm was born.