It’s an unprecedented situation. Nobody prepared us for it. Nobody COULD HAVE prepared us for it. The strategies and skills that worked last year – and over the past decades – no longer apply. Since the situation is new, and unfamiliar, nobody can know how to handle it most effectively.
People with power and authority are dashing from one meeting to the next … making bold statements about what will and will not happen … and there’s a very strong chance the decisions they are making are deepening the crisis, as they slash staffing, cut production, and print more and more money. For every person that says the crisis will be long, there’s another saying it’ll be short: we can’t even agree about that. What can we do?
One very effective strategy is to learn from others. But who can we learn from when the current crisis is deeper than any in living memory? Do we really have to make it up ourselves?
Here’s a lifeline, a small one, but a small and legitimate one is much better than a guess.
Now, I rarely promote other websites and am very selective, but this post by Ari Galper has outdone all of his previous work: he found a person who experienced the depression, and interviewed her. Her comments are short, and very much to the point, with that unmistakeable ring of life experience. And it’s published with unrestricted access (I love the Internet Age!!) …
You can read it here, it’s quite short, and definitely merits reading more than once:-
Someone just wrote in with a question that’s so important it’s worth sharing, and having a wider debate around it:-
“Dear John,
I am wondering if you have any suggestions or ideas how to pass HA successfully. I mean, to have a way to get the best result in my HA evaluation.
My company uses HA results to promote employees.
Look forward to hearing from you soon.
xxxxx”
Here’s my answer:-
“Dear xxxxx,
actually yes, I do …
Have you been through the assessment yourself? It sounds a bit like you’ve either been assessed, or are afraid you might be about to be assessed and failed.
That’s normal by the way. I’ve done the HA questionnaire many times myself, about 6 times in 5 years just for my own interest, and I still have butterflies about the result every time I try it again!
Here’s the thing you need to know about Harrison Assessments:
it’s actually very good at predicting who is likely to be successful and who is likely to struggle … which is (of course) the reason companies choose it for screening promotions and new hires … but the accuracy of prediction can be very high, and is much much more accurate than a traditional process of interviews. Even assessment centers are usually less accurate than a single Harrison Assessments report.
Scary? Maybe, but maybe not. Look at it this way …
You see what THAT means is if Harrison Assessments says you would be better off doing a different job than the one you were assessed for, it is probably right about it. And while that might sound like a disappointment, I actually suggest it’s excellent news. Nothing is worse than having to do a job that you struggle at and end up disappointing yourself and the people who rely on you. Nothing is better than finding out the risks, in advance, before committing your time and reputation or risking damage to your successful track record.
So – worst case – IF you show up as being less suitable for a position you applied for what usually happens is
a) you can see exactly what needs to change in order to be more successful, e.g. next time, and
b) often you can see ways in which you can achieve more in your current job, or
c) you can change your current job just a little to make a big difference …
a big difference not just to your job performance (which your employer likes) but also to your personal job satisfaction. Of course, ultimately doing a better job always leads to more money, more time freedom, and more opportunities self-expression.
I’m being a bit long here. Here it is, simpler:-
I assume you’re genuine, and you don’t want a cheat-sheet. It’s certainly very hard to cheat – much harder than other assessments I’ve seen. I’ve seen a lot of people try, and have tried myself. The reality is even the inventor of HA says he can’t fake a perfect assessment result for a position he wouldn’t be good at … and he’s the guy who knows just exactly what it’s looking for! … he knows ALL the research and the calcualtions it does!! Certainly, I’ve studied HA extensively myself for 5 years – I teach it to experts including psychologists – and have completed the questionnaire 6 times, I still can’t make a perfect result for myself for my own job.
So I won’t say it can’t be cheated at all – in an infinite universe I guess anything’s possible – but frankly if anyone is going to try to cheat they would need to know the right answers in the first place. And that means becoming an expert in the requirements of the job you’re aiming to do … which in itself is a good thing, really … which means their performance in that job would improve. I’ve read a psychological research paper that proved people who learn the right answers to a test do better in the job! That research wasn’t about psychometric testing specifically, but the principle is reasonably general.
The good news (I hope) is that whatever the result is,
- it is likely to be useful to you
- you can learn from it and do better, not just at the assessment but in your job and your career
- it will help your employer recognise hidden talents in you that they may have missed.
Your question was “how can I have the best result in the HA evaluation?”.
My first answer: if you answer it truthfully it will actually tell you exactly what you should do to maximise your performance, accellerate your career success, and achieve your goals. In my mind – as a 40-something year old successful guy – that IS the best possible result to get, even if it means you don’t get the promotion you applied for today.
My second answer: you CAN improve your HA evaluation for a specific job that you want to get. The good news is if you do that your performance in that job will also improve.
You can do it with a course of coaching, which would give you the insight you need into how to succeed in that job and, obviously, in the assessment. Through coaching
- you would know just exactly what are your greatest strengths for the new role,
- you would know ahead of time what are your chances, and what contingency plans to make
- you would discover unexpected ways you can actually perform better in your current role
- you would know just exactly what to do, both short and long term, to increase your chances for promotion
Did any of that make sense? Hope it did – your question is an important one.
Would you like to improve your results?
Please do write to me directly at John.Bower@HumanPotentialGlobal.com with your questions – I promise your identity will be confidential! – and your question might just give an answer to someone else as well. So please do share!!
I’ve not made a post in a while, but this one is worth sharing as it affects us all. I just received the following question:-
“Do you have general wisdom on how to handle insecurities? I usually handle them with positive affirmations, but you are not so hot on those, so I was wondering. I’m fraught with them today.”
Here are my thoughts, which are part of an exchange of ideas I’ll be sharing here:-
Simple enough – insecurities are the mirror-image of confidence.
If you look at both sides of it you see that neither can exist without the other, and yes, that means that “confidence” cannot exist but for the presence of “insecurities”. If there’s nothing to worry about, there’s equally nothing at all to be confident about. From there you can see that insecurities are not just useful, but necessary. You only have them now because there is something that you are actually confident about, now. It may be something you’re not focusing on at this moment but sure as eggs is eggs it’s there somewhere.
In fact, insecurities are a big foundation for our experience of existence. If you didn’t exist there would be nothing to be insecure about, right? So as long as there is a “you” that is conscious of your existence, there are going to be things that “you” – or actually, just your mind – will worry about.
Which is all very well, but the question is not why they exist, but rather what’s an effective way to respond to them?
So here’s another take on it – have a look at the insecurities and see when they reside: Past? Present? Future?
I’ll bet the majority (80%, 90%, possibly more) are connected either with things that happened in the past, or things that have not happened yet. If so, this would be totally normal, as it’s much harder to be insecure about what’s happening right now than about imagined situations!
Sorry if that seems short and simple, hope you weren’t looking for a thesis. The issue is actually a huge one – it’s just that the solution needs to be simple. Simpler than thought.
The best place to start is right here and now. What’s happening now? Look around, and use all 5 of your senses. In particular, look for anything that you might need to be insecure about. To be sure, there might be something, like a bus heading straight at you or a nutcase with a weapon or something. If there is you need to stop reading this and handle it right now OK, you back now? Here’s the thing: even in a real live threatening situation you will find that by focussing more and more on what’s happening right now, there is less and less to worry about. It’s actually quite peaceful, right now. Anytime.
From that position of peace, if you feel like it you can look at your insecurities and sort them out. Memory? Or worry?
If you find a feeling that’s associated with a memory, you can just let it be. Whatever happened has already happened and is no longer happening now. You may be remembering a hurt that was very real at the time, but since it’s only in your memory it’s nothing to worry about, nobody ever died of a memory. BTW if you’re thinking about it happening again, that’s not a memory, it’s a worry! Let the memories be.
Likewise, worries have a life of their own. They exist in a space somewhere or other, but like clouds in the sky they can only actually impact us if something starts to happen here and now. Until it does happen, we’re still free to do whatever we’re doing … here, and now.
Of course if focussing on the present or accepting your insecurities is a challenge any time, you can break it down further into smaller and smaller steps, but it’s still basically the same principle. Regardless of whether it’s easy or challenging, it gets easier when you focus on breaking it down into what’s happening here and now and what’s not.
Practice makes perfect, and with practice it becomes automatic to face fears and difficulties by first focussing on what’s happening now and what you have now, and then working back out from there.
If you look behind the mental chatter about everything that might be going wrong, you can see an underlying belief that you deserve more … which comes from confidence in your own inner worth. You see how one creates the other?
Much more useful is just to notice the pattern. As soon as you’re conscious of a pattern that’s happening the pattern loses its grip on your actions. In that moment you are free to make a new choice, or to continue the pattern, but do so consciously.
Notice that our underlying human nature doesn’t change – we still have the hormones, we still have mental chatter, we’re still reactive to fear / pain / guilt much more strongly than we are to joy / peace / confidence – all of that is still very real and very much going on. But when we’re conscious of them doing the thing that they always do we have more chance of making a different choice. When we do something differently the outcome is sometimes different.
Of course you CAN use affirmations – just notice that you don’t NEED to. Affirmations are by definition out of balance. They may themselves be part of a pattern of swings. Nothing intrinsically wrong with that – you can ride the swings, and swings do tend to naturally follow each other. If they’re working, use them, but watch and notice both sides of the equation.
By the way, if you’ve read this far and have any thoughts, please do post a comment! Say whatever you are thinking of, the best thing to share is your own experience.
This one’s a good one – It’s one of the #1 keys to success – from Dan Kennedy. I’ll let him speak for himself:-
At a speaking engagement in Seattle a couple of years ago for doctors, a guy came up afterwards and said he wanted to become a speaker. And he said, “You know one of the things that mystifies me is that how do you know the first time you tell a joke to an audience the joke’s going to work?” I said, “You never tell it to an audience for the first time. You practice it on people that don’t count. And then it works a few time with those people, then when you get it right you practice it over and over again right.”
You practice it over and over again. You tell yourself that joke over and over again until you are sick of it then you tell it to an audience.
OK, you back now? Here’s the thing: even in a real live threatening situation you will find that by focussing more and more on what’s happening right now, there is less and less to worry about. It’s actually quite peaceful, right now. Anytime.