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# 1 – Expect More, Not Less – call them to greatness! Don’t accept a mediocre mindset.
# 2 – Play Against a Clock – establish stretch goals: teach them how to be comfortable with being stretched
# 3 – Clarify What You Are Paying For – create clarity about results & what it feels like when creating big outputs
Three New Ideas
In May, we dealt with the leadership challenge of how much to push or pull our teams. This month I would like to work on what controls us – our emotions…
# 1 – The ABC’s of Feeling the Way You Want to Feel
There is a ‘formula’ I used to teach in which A equals ‘antecedents’, B equals ‘beliefs’, and C equals ‘consequences’. The things that happen to us in life are antecedents. The way we interpret the things that happen to us are the beliefs. And the way that we feel about the things that happened to us are the consequences.
Most people think their feelings come from the things that occur to them. For instance: my wife once yelled: “You make me so angry.” The ‘C’s” consequences of life seemingly make you happy, sad, excited, anxious, peaceful, upset, etc. Does the experience of ‘overwhelm’ come from having too much to do or the way you think about all the things you have to do?
The key idea here is that your emotions are created in your amygdala. They are not given to you by external circumstances or other people. My wife should have said to me: “when you say stupid things like ____, I get so angry”. Once we are emotionally triggered, we may say things that are not 100% accurate. BTW – when I pointed this out to my wife she said that I just made things much worse… 😊 I guess timing is everything…
Ask Yourself: Do I consistently feel the way I want to feel? If not, why not?
# 2 – Leading Yourself
Many leadership courses leave out concepts about leading yourself – maybe because it’s not sexy to talk about leading yourself. You might be wondering why it’s important. This is very important: you cannot lead others without leading yourself first. Most of the worst leaders have tendencies, idiosyncratic behaviors, habits, and preferences that convey to their team that they are not leading themselves well and as a result don’t really care about the team.
Bad habits and strong emotions often combine to keep you from focusing on how you can help your team become more successful. The reason why you must first master leading yourself, is that if you don’t, you will spend most of your energy and focus on yourself and leadership is about being outwardly focused. If you spend too much time thinking of yourself, you may have a blind spot which prevents others from following you. Identifying and eliminating or at least minimizing those things that you do is a top priority for all leaders.
Ask Yourself: What are my blind spots? How can I validate my answer?
# 3 – Self-awareness Leads to Self-management and Better Relationships
Travis Bradberry wrote, “Only 36 percent of the people we tested are able to accurately identify their emotions as they happen. There are five core feelings: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and shame.” In Travis’s book Emotional Intelligence 2.0, he points out three different intensity levels of feelings – high, medium, and low. At every moment throughout your day, you feel one of these five core emotions at a different intensity level, creating over 30 different emotions.
You are an emotional being. It is hard to manage yourself if you don’t notice your emotions. How can you build better relationships if you can’t manage your emotions? Leadership is a relationship game; it is extremely difficult to become an extraordinary leader if you don’t build better relationships, so you need to be great at identifying and managing your emotions.
Ask Yourself: How can I increase my self-awareness and self-management?
Want to Know More?
1. Emotional Intelligence 2.0 – By Travis Bradberry – Wall Street Journal best seller!
2. The Focused Leader – How effective executives direct their own—and their organizations’—attention by Daniel Goleman, Harvard Business Review
3. Leading Yourself: A Guide to Increasing Self-Awareness, Self-Alertness, and Self-Leadership. by Zebulan Hundley Ph.D.
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