⭕️ You will never fully convince someone they are wrong, only reality can. Support them to expose their reality
⭕️ The place you most need to go is hidden where you least want to look. Get a coach, board, mentor and give them freedom to challenge you.
⭕️ There is no evolution without skin in the game. Evolution is often dependent upon facing your fears.
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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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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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.1. I loved school and was always incredibly excited to go although it was mostly about the people. I really didn’t understand why school was important so when it came to the work I just did enough to get by.
I wish I had realised sooner why learning, focus and skilful communication was important.
2. I went to church every Sunday from the age of 4 which remained a source of embarrassment for me right up until I stopped at 16. Despite this review I really loved the people and the conversations and laughs we used to have
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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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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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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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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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I absolutely LOVE working with leaders who are inspired to build something amazing while also uniting a group of people behind that cause. The truth is that they are highly competent individuals BUT in MOST cases the skills that got them to where they are are the exact same skills that are causing their struggles in health, energy, communication and relationship.
Through my REINVENTION programme I support them to adopt the skills of understanding and embracing their brain to use it more to their advantage. Using prediction and response to create calm in themselves and others and using curiosity to give themselves and others the clarity they need to become autonomous and happy.
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When you’re in leader mode you’re demonstrating the behaviours you want to see. You are looking after your health, protecting your boundaries so that you can get your work done, support others and have a life. You understand failure and support others to do their best and grow in their position.
When you’re in ‘boss mode’ you are as I teach my client, ‘out of your mind’ where you are expecting others to mind read, to sacrifice their lives for their job to help others at any time while also doing their own work and to never fail.
Business leaders tend to wear ‘hard work’ as a badge of honour. Arriving first, leaving last and then continuing to work into the evening often stay up til midnight and beyond.
They do this despite the fact that they aren’t being paid to work hard. They are being paid to keep the business in high performance mode and the best way to do that is to keep themselves in high performance mode. A tired and overwhelmed leader will soon start making decisions based on their own limited bandwidth and will quickly create a tired and overwhelm business. I help my clients to find and protect their own high performance mode so that they can better support the business to locate and maintain high performance mode.
Most leaders that struggle creating a balance harmonious life aren’t struggling because they aren’t intelligent knowledge people.
They are struggling being the systems and process that they currently have in place make it impossible for them to experience the harmony they desire.
They are struggling because they DON’T have simple systems are process in place that guard and protect those things that need protecting in order to move away from overwhelm and into balance and harmony.
Something that EVERY good leader knows is that it is PROCESS that leads to SUCCESS. You don’t WILLPOWER the market to want what you have.
Yet most leaders have a process that leads to overwhelm and overwork in their business and no process for success in their energy, mental and physical health and relationships.
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here is this really funny thing that happens when someone does their first triathlon.
They take their time to make sure they are well prepared.
They relentlessly practise their swimming, their cycling and running to the degree where they are MORE than competent at each.
Yet something quite unexpected happens.
Their recorded time is often DOUBLE what they expected.
The equation in their head during preparation was,
Swim + Cycle + run = triathlon
The reality, any hardened triathlete will tell you, is VERY different.
There are a million different ingredients that are hard to list even if you have experienced them.
Tasks so small as to seem irrelevant.
Like putting socks on with wet feet or trainers on to once wet now sweaty swollen feet to start the run.
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It notices hormonal, postural, tonal and pitch changes in others and then changes how we feel in order to guide us towards making decisions that might save ours or even our children’s lives all without us being consciously aware of it.
Again, I won’t go into detail here but the important question I think is,
Is it more likely that this incredible piece of equipment is broken in some way, that we somehow have to contend with a lazy, demotivated, angry, shy, anxious, overwhelmed, depressed or stressed model?
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