Good leaders are good at grinding out those difficult weeks that come with big decisions and many business critical things outside of their control. The trouble is that the grind creates survival habits and a survival environment that serves to make these weeks more stressful and the rest of the time recovery for leader and company.
Great leaders step back and find the perspective shift required to embrace what ever comes allowing them separate their choices from their current level of certainty about the future. Whether chaos or calm, it’s chop wood carry water.
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9. People will infer all possible meanings of the leaders communication. If the boss is being mis-interpreted it’s on them to get more skilful at communication.
10. If you interrupt people at their desk to ask for 5 minutes or for help NOW, task switching that is the culture you have chosen and it’s a stressful one to operate within.
11. When people don’t experience their own competence throughout the day their general state is anxious and overwhelmed. It’s on the leader to create that for everyone in the company.
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Guilt often seems to be the thing we’re talking about when we say work life balance
When we are at home we should be at work when at work we should be at home and that’s without considering fitness and friends.
Sometimes it seems like a pursuit of being good enough. Avoiding too much conflict or criticism.
Like we live to make other people happy.
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60% of first time CEOs report loneliness to the degree that it negatively impact performance.
Not surprisingly really
When polled public speaking comes out as # 1 of peoples greatest fears. That is to say, it ranks HIGHER than fear of death.
The Anterior Cingulate Cortex in the brain is on constant high alert to public failure and in particular INDIVIDUAL public failure.
Which is a thought that can make someone feel pretty alone and under the spot light.
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1. List all the stuff that prevents your from achieving your daily objectives and create a plan for dealing with each one.
2. Set realistic daily objectives.
3. List what you have a tendency to do when things get tough. (Do you distract yourself with a new shiny idea that’s fun to talk about and imagine? Write that down so you recognising it as the enemy when it walks in you’ll be far less likely to fall for its lies).
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These 9 things aren’t easy. They usually come as a set. If you can’t imagine doing one it’s probably because another one is not already in place that is making it seem impossible.
But if you want to be the calm, consistent and stable leader to your team you must operate yourself in a way that creates than calmness, consistency and clarity inside of you. You cannot fake it. The body, your words and your actions give off too many clues. You are the indicator that your team responds to. They will only change when you do.
Are you ready to start spreading calmness and clarity?
Or perhaps a better question, how much longer are you willing
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Every single cell in the body has a 24 hour clock inside of it. The eyes are actually brain, they grew out of it in order to help us navigate the outside world but also to help set this 24 hour clock.
The yellow blue light of the sun low in the sky both in the morning (most importantly) and in the evening is what sets this 24 hour clock.
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I should be helping more at home, I should be helping my team, I should be connecting with the customers and keeping them happy, the show ends if I don’t keep the board happy, I’m getting fat, unhealthy and my sleep is suffering I should be doing more for my health!
The first step I have my clients take is to let go of the should, the must, the have to, even if just for a while.
Focusing on what’s not being done only grows the feeling of hopelessness which grows that feeling of overwhelm and exhaustion.
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Getting defensive
Withdrawing from some people
Explaining to people how they’re wrong
Getting agree when people cancel on me
Basically being someone other than I wanted to be with others.
I was pretty relieved when I discovered everyone has their own version of this going on.
Although probably a far less sarcastic version.
The brain is always measuring our level of safety within the tribe
Via a part of the brain called the Anterior Cingulate Cortex (mostly) it constantly scans for risk of loss or opportunity to gain hierarchy and connection.
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They have always been people with a lot of responsibility. CxO’s, Partners, Doctors, Judges, Entrepreneurs etc
But back in my personal training days working with these folks I would be pulling my hair out trying to get them to create the habits necessary to achieve what they were paying me for.
Their lives were just so unpredictable.
They would get incredible results in 21,30 and even 60 day programs but eventually they would regress back to mean and back to the shape they were previously in.
That’s when I started exploring neuroscience and quickly discovered where I was going wrong.
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The guest on the show he listened to was explaining something about the brain.
As a client of mine he knew that this was my area and that I had a different perspective that he’d found useful and adopted himself.
He wanted to know why I didn’t jump in
and if I found it hard to not jump in.
I’m writing this because I think the answer is useful or at least it was to me.
I used to find it REALLY hard to not “correct”.
Something about just leaving it seem unsafe.
The thought is something like,
“He’s wrong, I must speak. What if he thinks I agree with him. I MUST correct him”.
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👉 You know what you want to achieve, and how to achieve it but you lack the particular skill required to achieve it.
😃 You know what you want to achieve but you are unclear on the ingredients required to produce the desired outcome.
🤷🏼♂️ You know exactly what to do and you are sometimes able to do it but you are unable to carry it out consistently enough to produce the desired outcome.
Usually it’s an overlap of these but objectively this is what’s happening.
It looks terrifyingly simple mapped out like this doesn’t it?
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Without this skill stagnation is GUARANTEED
When you think about it, incompetence really just means a skill at which you are not yet competent.
Which is all of us at most things right?
If I put together a list of the things that I am competent at and those at which I am incompetent my incompetence list would dwarf my competence list in a very big way.
That’s normal of course, we can’t master everything like we can’t know everything.
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Well I say must, it’s more if you want to be happy and health and have a fun life.
Answering these questions will REALLY help.
I am yet to meet a good leader who recommends chancing or hoping their way to success.
They want a predictable and repeatable process for success so that they can better predict the future while ensuring that things move smoothly in the present.
Often though I find that there are clear systems for the business but there are rarely clear system for maintain themselves as well as some of the most challenging human aspects of business and life.
This means that business often becomes the safe haven FROM life.
Those leaders who manage these things MOST skilfully have a clear answer for each of the following questions.
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He’s now in a worse position than when he started. He’s not happy with how he looks, feels and performs and on top of that he has a lower opinion of himself and his abilities at least in this area.
Fold this into a business context and you can apply these problems (and results) to both yourself as a leader but also to your team.
A goal focus leads to an unhappy process, constant stress and overwhelm, the feeling that you are always behind, that you and your staff and never quite good enough or that the client is too demanding.
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Advice from a qualified source is rarely bad. People tend to give the advice that they need to hear and if they have been or are in a similar situation to you then its likely good advice.
If it’s the advice that they need to hear though it probably means that a. It worked for them but b. They weren’t able to stick to it.
This is what neuroscience teaches us.
Most often we know what to do, we just can’t get ourselves to consistently do it.
What follows is 3 examples of Good Advice that we struggle to take and what to do about it.
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Your success as a leader will be determined by how you deal with people.
It won’t be defined by your ideas, problem solving, charisma, or brilliance but by how people feel in your organisation.
Do they love working with you and for you. Do they feel valued, inspired, fairly treated, well supported?
This is not just about your current project but will echo into your future.
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Throw your mind back to when you first got together, you were the dream team. You loved spending time with each other. You shared values, beliefs and ideals and you were going to change the world while constructing a utopia together. Something like that anyway.
You had a mutual admiration for each other's skills and you strongly believed that together you could go further and faster than you could alone. You complemented each other in the best way imaginable.
The business that you were going to create was going to be fun and seamless, because you could almost end each other's sentences. You were so excited to get started because you knew how much fun it was going to be, and the incredible things that you could accomplish together.
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