Are You Anxious?

A 2021 American Psychological Association (APA) survey found that 79% of employees had experienced work-related stress in the past month. I doubt its gotten better since then! Personally, I have struggled with anxiety for years, and I am grateful for the support I get from friends and professionals. Here’s an exercise I found helpful.  

1. Think of a recent situation where you made a mistake that caused you self-doubt and anxiety

2. Now, write down your thoughts and how you talked to yourself. You are likely to hear a lot of negative self-talk.

3. Now, turn the ‘paper’ over and write down how a kind and loving friend would respond to what you just wrote…You’ll have to try it out, but I am pretty sure they will respond with understanding and support

4. Can you imagine what it would be like to speak to yourself with this kind of self-compassion consistently?

The great thing is that you don’t have to give up on life’s challenges. Quite the opposite, you will discover that you can be even more courageous as you become kinder to yourself—and to others.

 Speaking of being compassionate to others, it’s a theme I explore in my upcoming book, which I am excited to publish later this week!

Great Coaching

Great Coaching

We are all coaches, whether leading a work team, helping our kids through school, or coaching sports. Unfortunately, the guidance on how to be a great coach is confusing. 

On the one hand, we consider coaching to involve assessment and the development of the necessary skills through instruction. On the other hand, we are often told to avoid critical feedback and instruction for fear of irritating others and undermining their agency. Instead, it is preferable to follow the coachee’s interests and facilitate.

In truth, we need to do both, and this is a main topic in my upcoming book, Coaching Executive Teams. 

There is no better example than Mikaela Shiffrin, who took her 100th World Cup victory last month to become her sport’s greatest of all time (GOAT).  Her coaching program differs from others in:

1.     the amount of technical data analysis - including frame-by-frame video reviews of her skiing and non-stop bio-metric feedback

2.     She puts in the training hours—reportedly, she works out twice as hard as most—but she is also monitored closely for sustainability, backing off when needed. She also gets a lot of sleep.

3.     Her mental resilience comes back to feeling good when she is competing and finding the courage, which she distinguishes from confidence, to explore what she is capable of.

 I love this idea of exploring her potential rather than aiming for a particular result or beating her competitors. Given her GOAT achievements, there’s some irony or magic alchemy in this ;-)

Are You Being The Adult?

One challenge with being a team leader is that people treat you differently: 1. You throw out an idea, and folks are hesitant to comment. 2. You ask for feedback on your leadership, and you get nada. 3. You want the team to initiate their own ideas for improving things, but they always wait for your direction.  There’s a lot going on in the dynamic of boss and team interactions – not least that we have tremendous power over others.   

A helpful insight comes from psychologist, Eric Berne’s, observation in the 1970s that people always act, albeit unwittingly, as Parents, Children, or Adults. Dynamically, when we experience someone as the Parent, we are unconsciously drawn to behave like a Child. But we don’t want our team members to be Compliant…or Rebellious! We want them to act like Adults; to be responsible, to take initiative, and to bring their best thinking to the table.

The good news is that when we are experienced as the Adult, it brings out the Adult in others.  So, as team leaders, it’s up to us to relate to others as equals even though we are technically their boss. See if you can observe Parent, Child, and Adult interactions around you.  You might be surprised at how helpful this can be ;-)

Hopes and Fears

Have you noticed that your inner dialogue, that annoying non-stop mental chatter, always uses the language of hopes and fears?  We are constantly talking to ourselves about how things will turn out just the way we want, how others will be impressed, and how happy we will be; then moments later, we are imagining how everything is going to go wrong and how we will fail.  

It doesn’t matter the situation: whether we are presenting, in a sales conversation, planning a dinner party, or beginning a new relationship. It’s universal, it’s chaotic, and it’s unhelpful! 

What is helpful is to recognize that all those hopes and fears are just our anxious imaginations running wild and that those thoughts are not real. Despite our desperate egos trying to make sense of things, often we really don’t know how things will turn out. 

What is helpful is to courageously take the next step in spite of all these mental distractions. It can be difficult to act when we are unsure of the outcome, but we can take the next step in bringing a possibility to life. In fact, that is the only helpful thing we can do. 

Find Your Voice!

A friend of mine recently asked for my opinion after receiving advice to enhance their ‘Executive Presence.’ I told them that my initial reaction was that this reminded me of an old Dilbert cartoon—images of people in suits and ties delivering polished PowerPoint presentations in deep voices. I also considered how exceptional communicators like Steve Jobs must have broken that mold, yet here we are.

Beneath this outdated term lies something timeless: the power of discovering our Voice. On the surface, our voice is merely sound; below that finding our Voice is a deeply personal journey.

First, we have to believe we have something worth saying. This is hard for anyone dealing with self-doubt. Next, we have to step out from the psychological comfort of the background. This is hard for introverts and anyone who has been conditioned to take on a ‘supporting’ role in life. Finally, we have to be willing to open ourselves to the fear of not being well-received, and no one likes rejection.

I think real executive presence comes from the opposite of faking it with a suit and tie. It comes from valuing ourselves and our views and courageously speaking up.

Listen for the Overtones

Have you noticed how AI applications are genericizing what we say?  When we put text into ChatGPT or Grammarly or use Fathom to take notes, what we receive is really efficient, but it drops our particular word choices and often mistakes the meaning.

When it comes to music, I love the fact that when we listen to a single note, multiple layers of harmonics occur simultaneously - no matter the instrument. That’s right! When you hear one note, you are simultaneously hearing many notes as overtones. It’s a big part of how we can tell one instrument apart from another.  

The same is true when someone speaks.  There are the Particular words someone uses, not the similar words others might use.  There are Feelings associated with their expression.  There is a Meaning behind the words, and there is an Intention to their communication.   Beyond the Words, there are always the overtones of Feeling, Meaning, and Intention. 

Check this out next time you are chatting with someone, and let’s be sure to stay human out there!!

What If You Are The Problem?

Working relationships can be quite challenging at times, and we often spend a great deal of energy thinking about how the other person should change and how we can best coach them. However, the best advice I've received is to focus on my own growth rather than trying to change them.

When we are stressed, we display behaviors that hurt relationships and do nothing to improve things.   We are critical, transactional, controlling, rigid, aggressive, defensive, and bossy. Whereas when we feel good about ourselves, we warm to others and listen. We are encouraging, curious, flexible, composed, supportive…and relational.  

Of course, sometimes the other person really does need to change. But again, if you are stressed, the ‘learning’ conversation will be a waste of time because you will be experienced as an adversary.  Conversely, if you feel good about yourself, you will find you have more influence, and the relationship will improve. 

 As one of my coaches put it, this strange alchemy occurs such that when I feel fine about myself, the problem with the other person largely disappears

10x Impact From Executive Coaching

There are three reasons why Coaching the Team makes so much sense.

1.     Coaching individuals focuses on improving their personal effectiveness and leadership style. Coaching the leadership team focuses on elevating organization-wide performance.  That is a huge difference in impact.

2.     The leadership team is more coachable than an individual. While there is much we can do to help individuals grow, realistically, there are limits to how much people can learn or change. Whereas when coaching the team, we unite the organization around a common mission, clarify responsibilities, and improve cross-functional processes and working relationships. 

3.     Individuals learn better in the team context. We know that individual behavior is significantly shaped by social norms. The team’s aspirations for the business, and the kind of team they want to be, set these expected norms

c.     Gaining feedback against these expectations and sharing personal conclusions with the rest of the team creates behavioral change in a way that isolated work does not.

Setting Team Goals

As we set goals for 2025, it’s worth remembering that part of the leader’s role is to minimize distress.  And so much has been written about psychological safety that many leaders believe their role is to protect team members from any kind of stress. 

But that’s not what Google discovered in its research. Rather, what they found was that their highest-performing teams were more conversational, not less stressed. Sure enough, the feeling of psychological safety, of being valued and included, is what drove that behavioral norm.

Martin Seligman is the founder of Positive Psychology, and he named two kinds of stress: Distress, which is associated with fear, anxiety, and self-doubt, and EU stress, which is associated with goal orientation and finding the courage to embrace a challenge.

Getting people fired up to reach for extraordinary results has been the hallmark of great leaders throughout history.  So EU stress or positive stress is something to encourage.  And here is our opportunity as we set goals for 2025

Boost Your Team in 2025

As we approach the end of the year, it’s a great time to get together for some holiday cheer! It’s also a good time to start thinking about how we might give the team a boost in 2025. So how can we assess the opportunity for development?

One practical way is to ask the them about all 3-Dimensions of teamwork that are required for high performance:

1. Is the team clear about and inspired by their shared mission?

2. Does the team have effective processes for prioritization, collaboration, and innovation?

3. How strong are the members’ skills and their working relationships?  Especially the leader’s?

By answering these questions, you will have good indication of where to invest in becoming an even more effective and motivated team.

Is Executive Coaching Stuck in the 70s?

Many regard Tim Gallwey as the father of executive coaching. He is famous for highlighting the link between mental state and performance. His first book, published in 1974, explained that the coach should promote the right mental state so that performance, learning, and enjoyment follow. Instruction was strongly discouraged. 

50 years later, this is still how the main accrediting agencies teach executive coaching, and there is an opportunity for us to modernize.  

Noah Lyles, who won the 100-meter gold medal at this Summer’s Olympics in Paris, is brimming with a can-do attitude. However, a review of his final heat showed that he was slow out of the blocks and actually last at the 30-meter mark. His coach is now working with him, using video feedback and technical instruction to improve on this relative weakness. I am betting that we will see him beat Usain Bolt’s world record pretty soon and become the fastest man ever.

The lesson is that Assessment, instruction, and even working on our weaknesses are equally necessary for achieving the best performance.

How to Improve Executive Coaching

If you’re an organizational leader, executive coach, or HR professional, have you ever wondered whether you’re seeing the kind of change you expected from a coaching engagement? 

It’s not surprising, considering that coaching typically operates in a primarily private and confidential manner. But what if that didn’t have to be the case?

Over the years, I’ve found that while the coaching relationship must feel safe and supportive, it also benefits participants to take the risk of sharing what they’re working on. In fact, by sharing this with teammates, we often observe a reliable shift in behavior that “black box” interventions frequently miss. 

Even better, we witness an increase in social cohesion and motivation. It’s as though there’s suddenly more oxygen in the room; more permission to speak freely.

So, one key to enhancing our coaching process is to bring the conversation out of the black box and into the team dialogue.