Progress-focused

This week I facilitated a progress-focused session of a team of professionals from the municipality of Rotterdam. Facilitating such an unknown team in advance is often a bit exciting. You don't know who you're dealing with and you have no idea what they'll say or how they'll behave. But usually my sense of curiosity is greater than my nervousness. The reason for this is that I usually hear interesting and informative things from such a group. That was also the case that morning. Several interesting things were said that also made me think again. I will highlight one as an example.

I had an interesting experience last week during an exercise in our training. A participant changed his attitude from authoritarian and sarcastic to progress-focused within a few minutes. During our progress-focused leadership training, I supervised an exercise in which we practiced progress-focused directing . During part of that exercise, one of the participants, Peter, wanted to practice a bit. Peter had said earlier during the training that he wanted to practice being non-authoritarian in the conversation. He saw this as a pitfall for himself. I stepped into the role of employee and he stepped into that of manager. We practiced that he would ask me directing question and I would respond complainingly.

Love is an almost universal phenomenon with a biological background. It is therefore certain that love occurs worldwide. But to what extent do culture and environmental factors influence the extent to which people express and experience love? To find out, a group of 91 researchers conducted a large-scale study of romantic relationships in 45 countries and territories. 

Around the holidays and the New Year, we often meet a lot of people and sometimes have conversations that we can't always have during the busy working weeks . I had a few conversations with a few people about big topics of our time. I quite often think about such conversations afterwards. Below, from my memory, I try to recall as best I can how those conversations went.

Recently I was musing about people, as I often do. You may know that. As I did that, I realized that the people I thought about might, in real life, be very different from what I think they are. Our mental versions of them can be very different from themselves. I thought about that for a while.