What a coach does

For new readers, you might not have realised that I have a coaching practice. I call it career coaching but it could well have been performance coaching, or work coaching, or whatever you might call it. I’m now working with an coach to help me with English for business but I’m essentially being coached to align my messages more with my communication objectives. At the heart of coaching, is the ability to help our clients identify and crystalize their objectives, and then focus their attention and resources on meeting them.

Meeting our objectives often require us to take a series of actions or adopt certain behaviours to maximize the chances of the outcomes we desire. We may not be too sure ourselves and so we hedge our bets; we prefer not trying than to try and fail. Coaches help to reduce incidence of that thought by helping us reframe and focus our attention on the work that needs to be done rather than fretting over the outcome that we cannot control directly.

So it is on my career coaching practice; I work with you to identify and crystallise your career objectives and then work out what actions or behaviours are necessary to get there. We then try to focus on developing those behaviours and undertake the actions that maximises the chances of you getting there. Even when you might think it could be a waste of time, or if you’re afraid the investment of effort would not pay off. It’s not about the immediate returns on your investment, but recognising that investment in yourself is a case where the returns come through from yourself rather than from the job you find. In fact the job or role you eventually take on, is merely a means by which you contribute your value to this world.

Incomes, and savings

When I was studying in London and the States, I always thought that working and earning an income in those countries beat being in Singapore and earning the low salaries that starting graduates were given. In fact, I was paid so much in my gross salary during my internship at a bank in London that on market exchange rate basis, I only got back to that same level of monthly salary in the 5th year of my scholarship bond. Even if my salary was stagnant for 6 years at the bank and I was paid like an intern, I would have earned more.

But would I have been able to earn more in terms of disposable income? How about disposable income minus the critical expenditures like rent and the premium for food that I didn’t have to pay in Singapore? How about the high level of taxes in those countries? Now, people may say that after doing the Math, they realised that as a percentage of the total income, the cost works out to be roughly the same, and so you save the same percentage of your income.

Yet that is not exactly the same. The same percentage of a higher income at market exchange rates implies that you do have a higher amount of absolute savings. And this is where it starts to matter because capital markets are largely global and the pricing is consistent across the world. This means that if you’re able to amass a higher absolute amount of savings at market exchange, you have greater purchasing power for public securities and other financial products. The advantage of being able to enjoy lower costs of living does not outstrip the disadvantage of a lower absolute savings.

Top Gun

Probably the last thing I imagine myself writing about on my blog is a movie I just watched but I’m going to do just that. Given my track record for reading movie synopses in lieu of watching them, it might be surprising that I actually enjoy movies very much. Perhaps it is precisely because I’m such a critic that I don’t want to waste my time on a movie that is not worth the while.

Which brings me to Top Gun: Maverick. Honestly, it was done so well. The script was well written, the words exchanged carefully thought out, and the emotional content was properly executed through the movie even as the fighter jet cockpit scenes created so much tension as you watch the fighter pilots move through simulated navigation across the landscape. It was one of those movies where the story honestly did not matter as much as the manner the situation and characters were portrayed.

Entertainment have become so much of a staple in our modern lives we sometimes get desensitized and forget the art behind it. Top Gun: Maverick reminds me of it very strongly. Those days when I actually studied film critique and consider various aspects of what a film is about.

Deficit thinking

Thomas Curran researches elements of psychological impact of our society’s perfectionism. While we tend to admire people who are perfectionists and pushing themselves up higher and higher standards. In his interview with Adam Grant in the WorkLife Podcast, he talks about the deficit thinking of us being inadequate is consuming us and damaging us.

In his talk at TED MED in 2018, he criticized the dangers of performance metrics which pushes people to do better but also foster that sense of inadequacy that characterises so many of out high potential youths today.

I think this problem plagues the Singapore society especially; the creation of insecurity, amplification of imperfection and continual emphasis on appearing perfect. Our search for mental wellness must address this obsession with perfectionism that we as a society has been nurturing, or it is doomed to fail.

Making things measurable

One of the most powerful ways for people to influence others to do something about certain causes is just to measure it. The most successful example being the creation of GDP as a concept to measure the economy. Suddenly, it displaced the more traditional metrics of population or military might (which involved more quantities than just number of troops involved).

There are always issues with measurements created. They do not perfectly measure the underlying thing we’re trying to quantify for two reasons:

  • The measurement is inaccurate due to poor instruments used (proxies, poor surveyors etc)
  • The measurement does not reflect the actual underlying concept we are trying to quantify.

The first point can be improved over time. The measurement accuracy would not be perfect but over time, as long as the measurement required is well-defined, we would be able to capture the quantity or at least get really close to it.

The second point is trickier and it is going to always be imperfect. And herein lies the danger of trying to make things measureable. The Goodhart law features an important observation we ought to be constantly reminded of as we’re bombarded with figures like GDP growth, inflation etc. It doesn’t mean they are false! But the key is to be able to distinguish the measure from the underlying concept of what the measure is supposed to imply.

Quick review

When was the last time you reviewed your life, your goals, activities or take stock of how you’re spending your time? I’ve been so busy most of this while, working on my coaching, consulting and also sharing ideas on my blog I haven’t really done a quick review even of how I’m allocating time across my activities.

One thing that becoming a consultant made me do is to really value my time and take proper stock of how I’m spending it. It forces me to consider if the activities I’m engaging in is really worth my time. I also started thinking about the marginal value of each hour outside my usual work time.

Given the value of the time I have outside work, I have to perform my work more efficiently in order to gain more space and engage really in the stuff that gives us life satisfaction and not just the ‘value’ as defined by work.

Dynamics of labour wages

Labour markets are very tight now and with the rate of job transitions that people have now, it should be more and more interesting for labour economists to start studying the markets and understanding if they are working efficiently, and if not, what are the distortions. While I may say distortions, they are not in and of themselves a bad thing. They actually often help us to achieve certain goals by triumphing over shortcomings in our culture. But it is important to understand their impacts anyways.

One of the distortions to labour markets is the fact that companies offer salaries to new hire based on the market rates but then give pay raises by performance. In other words, even if a staff is not performing well, typically if his experience and skills are becoming more and more scarce in the marketplace, his pay does not rise if he stays where he is. Therefore, he would switch to get a higher pay. The company which loses him has no one else to blame than their system.

At the same time, those people who performs well, but yet their skills are becoming more and more common in the marketplace, would enjoy pay raises while incoming labour supply gets lower starting wages without affecting this “top-performer”. The company justifies its decision that this person is tried and tested, have been delivering value to the company (never mind the fact actually they could have replaced him with someone cheaper and have equal skill). So he stays in the company and draws the higher pay.

In the first case, you observe that salary offered in the market tends to be higher than the prevailing salaries being paid to existing staff. As the recruiter only observes the information from newly offered salaries, the new offers tend to be higher than the actual salaries being paid out on average. In the second case, you’ll observe that people in their roles are paid pretty well while the new offers in the market tends to be quite low in comparison.

Such is a cultural distortion that may have to be corrected by increasing awareness, as well as improvements in HR.

Why like that?

In Singlish, there’s a question that typically stresses people out and has answers varying significantly based on the interpretation of the questioner’s purpose. But at the heart of the question “why like that?”, the questioner is questioning reality. And effectively trying to pit the answerer against the reality at hand.

In fact, implicit in the question is that the answerer should not be accepting reality as it is but to do something about it. That assumption is something worth some attention and awareness. For one on the receiving end of the question, bringing to attention is assumption takes a bit of courage but immediately resolves the internal tension and cast it back on the questioner.

So the answer becomes “why not?”, or “what did you expect?” Maybe just done a bit more politely.

Skipping steps

When I was in primary school, I have this problem of doing mental sums. Calculations done in my head that I didn’t write on paper in my answer scripts. When the teacher marks my script, she’d penalise me for “skipping steps”. Well, those steps were taken but just not on paper.

It is very different in the real world where we also get penalised for skipping steps:

  • Trying to submit an application without sufficient documentation
  • Rushing to give customer a proposal without first understanding what is truly needed by them
  • Booking your vacation without thoroughly checking your calendar for conflicting commitments

In all of these cases, steps were indeed skipped, intentionally or not. And there are going to be consequences to them. Often, the time or money saved may not be worth it to deal with the consequences.

However, if you are able to perform those steps through other means which is more efficient and brings other benefits, such as what I did in school with math problems, then you can still get to the results well and good. That’s actually useful in the real world. The nuance that we need to learn from this childhood lesson is that you can short-circuit a process only when you can address every step adequately.

Risk-taking culture

What do you find yourself risking?

  • Financial capital: either through passive investments or actively starting and reinvesting in a business
  • Knowledge: by pushing the boundaries of what you know and applying that towards your decisions (whether it is to challenge how things works or put your money on things you believe will work when others don’t).
  • Time & efforts: by spending time and effort to build something. Maybe it takes some money but mostly just your time and effort. And the value of what you build as a result is worth way more than the time and effort your put in. Or it may not be.
  • Reputation & connections: by selling or recommending people in your network and connection some product or services to earn some returns. The product or service might work out for them, it might not.

Whether you think of it this way or not, you are already taking risks in life. Being mindful of how and what you take risks on might be a useful skill you missed out in school.