Blog — Ed Ley

3 Possible Things Stand Between You and Achieving Your Goals

👉 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?

The advice JUST be consistent would be laughable if it wasn’t so damaging

HEALTHEd Ley24 May 2022coach, coaching, life coach, neuroscience coach, ceo, leadership, leading, how to lead, how to hire a coach, stress, anxiety, consistent, how can i be more consistent

How to create employees who feel overworked and overwhelm

That’s cool and you’ll get better and better at that with practise too but when there is opportunity to refine NOW your best gets better NOW. You are literally missing an opportunity to get better every time you fail to do this (I added that last line on my second run through this).

You don’t need to wait for your 100th book to produce something you’re proud of.

This ISN’T about perfection at all.

It’s about EXCELLENCE.

Which means taking a step towards more closely fulfilling your pre-defined criteria every time the opportunity arises.

An email is not just an email, a social media post not just a social media post, a book not just a book and a conversation not just a conversation.

11 Questions Great Leaders Must Be Able to Answer in Order to Navigate the Ups and Downs of Business and Life

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.

The biggest error that leaders often make is to focus on the goal.

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.

8 skills you MUST master to be an effective Leader

The brain is a survival machine that creates survival mechanisms to protect itself.

Many of these protection mechanisms can inadvertently cause problems inside an organisation.

The leaders must master these 8 skills to not be taken over by these mechanisms.

That is in part, what it means to lead.

To own your own emotions and behaviours in response to what is happening around you.

Which of these 8 do you most need to place your attention on?

Are you stuck Micro-managing, instructing, motivativing, driving urgency and trying to control everything?

Contrary to popular belief this ISN’T because you are bad, wrong or because your team are.

In this video

* The belief that makes the need for motivation, willpower, urgency and control inevitable

* Why we actually struggle to achieve our goals and lead others to do the same

* The new understand that if we adopted will change everything from how you lead yourself to how you lead others

* The neuroscience understanding that will transform yours and your teams life

STRESSEd Ley29 April 2022micromanager, urgency, leadership, coach, neuroscience, organisation, transformation, meaning, ceo, founder, stress

The Totally Bizarre Reason that Startups Fail and How to Make Sure You Don’t

LEARNINGEd Ley28 April 2022startup fail, failure, ceo fail, founder fails, how not to lead, hire a coach, hire a leadership coach, coach, feelings in business, how to fail at start ups, failing, neuroscience coach

Why Start Up Stress is Not Only Inevitable but Desirable

My clients love this way of thinking about stress because it moves it from the abstract feeling that needs ‘managing’ to something concrete that’s both normal, not ‘bad’ and most importantly actually provides huge growth for you and the business when faced skilfully.

So putting my neuroscience hat on for a moment stress is one of two things;

It’s a lack of prediction and response in the current environment.

or

2. It’s an unskillful prediction and response in the current environment.

8 Questions that will Determine Your Success as a Leader

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.

Why founder teams fail (and how to make sure you don’t)

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.

ACTIONEd Ley7 April 2021founders, conflict, disagreement, connection, stress, overwhelm, ed ley, coach, coaching, strategy, ceo, coo, startup, scale up

Stop being an imposter!

You’re supposed to be yourself and say what you think which is the extreme opposite of the old advice, ‘fake it til you make it’.

I speak to leaders all the time who say words to the effect of,

“I know I know my stuff, I know I know my business, why can’t I shake this impostor feeling?”

HABITSEd Ley20 January 2021authentic, impostor, values, beliefs, coach, coaching, leader, clarity, Ed Ley, neuroscience

How to build a business that owns YOU

Whether you’re building to sell or building for profit or BOTH suffering your way to success is a process that has a lot of victims. You SUFFER because when you’re living a life you loath you experience the EXACT life you didn’t want for yourself along with your health, energy, mood, and relationships all suffering.

Your loved ones suffer as they get the worse of you as they get the tail end of your energy, the worst of your mood, the guilt of your suffering for them and the least of your time. Even your colleagues and the business suffer as the energy, enthusiasm and inspiration required to both operate and sell a business can’t be faked for long.

ACTIONEd Ley11 January 2021business, leadership, leader, lead, coach, coaching, copenhagen, stress, struggle, overwhelm

What if everything you’ve been told about creating incredible health and boundless energy turned out to be wrong?

The reason it is wrong is that the filter through which we must look at general health knowledge (YOUR LIFE) tends to renders what might be healthy for one unhealthy for another and ANOTHER today means most business leaders.

Long bouts of cardiovascular exercise (over 20 minutes) might be beneficial for someone but it also increases stress hormone release and reduces muscle mass.

So if you are already experiencing symptoms of stress such as constant worry, anxiety, stomach fat, low energy, alcohol dependence, excessive phone usages, poor sleep to name a few then cardiovascular exercise is likely ANOTHER coping mechanism that will ultimately if not immediately do more harm than good.

HEALTHEd Ley9 January 2021energy, health, diet, rest, fitness, nervous system, exercise, food, coach, coaching

Are you an Impostor?

Do you find yourself making things up on the fly trying to sound like you know what you’re taking about even when you aren’t sure?

Do you find yourself avoiding new approaches even when the current approach isn’t working so well?

Do you feel like you always have to be the smartest in the room?

Do you hate having your ideas challenged?

HABITSEd Ley6 January 2021impostor, imposter syndrome, fake, faking it, leader, ceo, coach, coaching, ed ley, Denmark, copenhagen, leadership coach

People Often Think that Coaching is About Giving Advice but the Truth is, Most Advice Sucks

Nobody says to themselves ‘TODAY I will overwork and negatively impact my health and relationships.’

Just like nobody saying to themselves ‘today I will under work and jeopardise the success of the business and my career.’

We all know this really.

It is BELIEF that drives action and ADVICE seldom changes belief.

So even with awareness of the particular case, actually seeing evidence of overwork or underwork the advice is ignorant at BEST.

This didn’t come to me in a moment of realisation.

HABITSEd Ley16 December 2020advice, trust, truth, coach, coaching, realisation

10 things that STOP people getting what they want that my clients don’t experience anymore

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.

STRESS, LEARNING, HABITSEd Ley12 December 2020learning, leadership, coach, copenhagen, Ed Ley, coaching, leader, leadership coach, ceo, c-suite

8 Myths about work life balance my clients don’t believe anymore...

Eventually every leader realises that you can have all the success in the world. But if you don’t have good quality time and energy left to spend with the people you love then it’s all for nothing. But when it was HUSTLE and HARD WORK that got you where you are it can be hard to believe there is any other way. Yet believe you MUST if you are to start taking steps towards creating it.

HABITSEd Ley7 December 2020huste, hustle, hardwork, focus, work life balance, productivity, neuroscience, coach, coaching, Ed Ley, ceo, leader, leadership, stress, overwhelmComment

Don't be the Boss, Be the Leader

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.

LEARNING, STRESSEd Ley4 December 2020boss mode, leader mode, coach, coaching, ceo, leadership, lead, overwhelm

14 things I’ve Learned In My 14 Years of Working with Business Leaders

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.

LEARNINGEd Ley3 December 2020ceo, cfo, cto, cro, leader, leadership, focus, coach, coaching, Ed LEy, leadership coach, business owner coach, ceo coach, stress, overwhelm, people pleasing