Becoming your Ideal Self

I coached a young man who was finding the process of identifying his character and personality preferences, and integrating this with the behaviours (capabilities) he was choosing each day at work far too abstract. In an effort to make it concrete I related it back to his love of snow- skiing. He had skied from a very young age and in our sessions had often talked passionately about his skiing experiences. I suggested to him that integrating his personality preferences and character with his behaviour (capability) was like skiing ‘top to bottom’ down a black run (the black run is the most challenging run most of us can ski down in Australia.)

When your confidence and conviction in self mastery is well developed you stand at the top of the run, pick your line, bend your knees, lean forward in your boots, point your tips downhill and ‘go for it’ with an energy that is totally exhilarating. As you speed down the run you make corrections along the way but your belief in yourself sees you keep going until you get to the bottom. You are ‘in the zone’ – everything is aligned and everything is working together to support your choice of line and speed. You knew your skill was there but you did not need to focus on it – it was more about believing in yourself and wanting to experience the ‘high’ of picking the right line down the mountain. You are totally exhilarated and energised when you reach the bottom.

If your confidence is not well developed and you did not have this kind of integration of personality, character and capability you would ‘work your way’ down the black run – no ‘top to bottom’ for you. Standing at the top of the run you question your capability to get down and you talk to yourself about the capability level you need to bring so you can make it down – especially what kind of turns you need to make. You are highly aware of the terrain and the risks facing you. So you stand at the top of this slope and cautiously traverse across the top until you can pick the next few metres that appear ‘safe’. You continue this approach for the entire slope picking your way cautiously down and taking plenty of stops along the way to choose your next ‘path’. For most of the way down the slope you have doubts, feel fearful and even completely lost and out of control. You would feel relieved and exhausted when you made it to the bottom.

This story helped him to see and feel in a very concrete way what it meant to integrate his personality preferences, his character and his capability. It also helped him to understand why he was feeling so exhausted and out of control in the workplace because he had not yet managed to integrate his personality, character and capability. 

 

If you enjoyed reading this story there are plenty more in Mandy’s book – check out the information and order form on our website.

Finding your Sweetspot

The work of Martin Seligman and his colleague Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi have helped us to create a frame for finding your sweetspot. We acknowledge most of you have invested a significant amount of time developing capability – mostly intellectual skills – and you do not know enough about your personality preferences and character. 

For those who work feeling stressed, guilty or resentful it can so often be because they are operating counter to their personality preferences and character. Such leaders are finding their sweetspot very infrequently because they are defining who they are by their capability.

 

 As leaders decide to spend more time developing greater self mastery they create higher awareness of the personality preferences and character they bring to the way they use their intellectual capability . For those who want even further awareness they also explore ways to develop their emotional capability. When they do this they discover an enlarged sweetspot.
 
The ultimate sweetspot is where your capability is an integral ‘part’ of who you are but it is not what defines you. Your personality preferences and your character define how you interact and behave and you do this in a way that allows you to be at your best at all times. Feelings of guilt, resentment, anxiety are pushed away as you are ‘in the zone’ with how you choose to live with confidence, conviction and courage.

Don't let 'stuff' get in the way of a very real conversation

Relationships get bogged down in stuff and the stuff becomes more important than the relationship. A recent experience with a member of our Courageous Leaders Community highlighted this perfectly. Once we reaffirmed with each other that our relationship was strong, that the contextual issues we were facing were important and needed to be resolved however they were never going to be bigger and more important than our relationship - it freed us to have a number of brilliantly honest conversations where we each owned our stuff and shared it without fear of judgement or reprisal.

People need to find ways to do this with greater regularity in the workplace. Instead they fear what will happen when they raise the stuff and share their thoughts and feelings - so they don't have the conversation and the tension remains unresolved. This is why the Australian business culture is fraught with avoidance........we would rather say nothing and hope it all goes away and then we don't need to talk about it or hear it from the other person.

Courageous Leaders make the relationships more important than the stuff and so can courageously talk about the stuff, resolve it and not let it get in the way of a strengthened relationship.

Inspiring Courageous Leaders Book - First copies published and distributed - now come feelings of vulnerability!

Well here is another BLOG on my experience of writing a book and publishing it. We have started to distribute our first 100 copies of the book with another 5,000 copies arriving at the end of May and the feelings of vulnerability are pretty intense:

* what if no one wants to buy the book
* will it help to create the business impetus we had envisaged
* how will people react to the stories and experiences I share
* how will people react to the personal transparency I create
* what if book stores decide they don't what the book on their shelves.

Interesting how overpowering these feelings can become and then how exhilarating they can become when you release yourself from judgement - your own and that of others! What an incredible experience this has been and will continue to be.

Look out for the next BLOG when the books arrive at the end of May.

Avoiding mediocrity with Courage

This short video from Jared Leto got me thinking about how easily we fall into the path of least resistance, forego our dreams and end up living the mediocre life we told ourselves we never would...

 

It takes COURAGE, as Jared says, to follow our dreams, to do what we feel most inspired and compelled to do because we fear that.

We fear failure, we fear embarrassment, in some cases we fear for our livelihood. But don’t we have to do what we believe in?
 Note: for those with sensitive ears, there is some cursing in this video

Courageous Leaders Value Trust

As we draw close to the International Day of Trust, I’m inspired to revisit and expand one of the essential aspects of being a Courageous Leader:

Courageous leaders are deeply aware of the value of trust – in themselves, in the processes they set up and in the people around them - working with them in a work team or living with them as members of a family. Trust is a foundation value of a Courageous Leader. Without trust, it is virtually impossible to be courageous.

Courage always involves an element of trust; firstly you need to trust in yourself - to do what you believe to be right and stay true to the kind of leader you really want to be. Even when there is pressure from other sources, it is in those challenging times that courage comes to the fore and when you demonstrate that you are trustworthy. This is true of you as a leader in all aspects of your life – as a parent, a sister, a supervisor, a wife, a manger, a daughter or a board member and all your other roles.

Trusting in the processes set up and agreed to is essential. This shows you believe in the other people to follow the process and produce the results. We are often tempted to second guess or question the way something is being done, and while constructive input can be valuable it is important to let others work with agreed processes and systems without feeling that they have someone ‘looking over their shoulder’. This can be very challenging and I have probably learnt the most about this concept by being the mother of a teenage daughter!

Finally there is the trust you have in other people – facilitating opportunities and experiences that enable them to develop and learn, to sometimes fail and learn from that too. Twenty-first century organisations cannot afford to have robotic employees; it is important to attract and retain creative problem solvers who are inspired to courageously take the organisation to the next level. If you want people to work with passion and to unleash their true potential they need to feel trusted to deliver, not forced to comply.

Some of us have a natural propensity to trust and others of us are more skeptical and critical. No matter our natural propensity - trust in others is the true expression of our foundation value as a Courageous Leader. Developing our ‘trust muscles’ leads to enhanced teamwork, empowered individuals, reduced blame and greater accountability. I encourage you all to trust more in your journey of becoming a Courageous Leader.

As one of the co-authors to Vanessa Hall’s book The Truth About Trust it is a real honour to be part of the growing Entente Trust Community and to celebrate the International Day of Trust.

- Mandy Holloway

Influencing Decisions

When facilitating a workshop where we explored how middle managers could start influencing more decisions, it was rewarding to watch how people recognized what they could start doing differently. 

It is far too easy to blame the senior leaders for not inviting us to influence a decision. Don't point the finger of blame, instead take responsibility and use "the five tactics" to influence a decision. 

It all starts by building trust with the decision makers - because remember their organisational reputation could be on the line with this decision so before they encourage anyone to influence their decision they would need to really trust the person. 

Courageous Leaders take responsibility for building a personal brand that earns them a seat at the decision making table!