Some weeks ago I had this video conversation about Self-Leadership with colleague and friend, Ian Berry. He wanted to talk with me about my ebook “Lead from Within -Be An Empowered Leader For An Unpredicable Future.” This is the book people receive when they sign up to my blog. I believe that the first responsibility of leaders today is to lead and manage themselves. If they cannot do that, they have no right to expect to lead and manage others. This means, as the late Jim Rohn said, “working as hard on yourself as you do on your job”. It means making a commitment to developing and enhancing their self-leadership. We discuss the 7 self-leadership skills that significantly enhance the leadership of those who commit to working on themselves with a mentor or coach.
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On R-U-O-K Day I wrote a post on LinkedIn, sharing an article, published in the Guardian, by clinical psychologist, Dr Sanah Ahsan, titled “I’m a Psychologist – and I believe we’ve been told devastating lies about mental health”. Because this post was so widely read, liked and shared, I have developed it out into a much longer article.
She gave us cause to pause and think on R-U-O-K Day when she said that “society’s understanding of mental health issues locates the problem inside the person – and ignores the politics of their distress”.
My own experience is consistent with this belief.
If you’re reading this blog post, then you are a professional woman, one of the hundreds out there, committed to advancing your career. I’m sure, however, that you have a variety of motivations for doing that. I asked two groups of women who did a workshop with me on “Advancing Your Career”, why they wanted to advance their careers. Here are 11 of the many responses I received. But what are the obstacles standing in the way of these women achieving them? I don’t necessarily agree with all of these realities and I have great respect for the women who challenge them wanting to make a difference. There are significant structural and cultural issues in society that are often all but impossible for professional women to surmount. But things are begining to change. I am inspired by professional women of all ages who are wanting to make a difference. I am privileged to support them in mentoring.
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What a last couple of years we have gone through? And while the powers that be have given us to believe, with their silence, that it is all over, we know it is not. It is not surprising that many people are running on empty. They have given their everything to surviving over the last few years. However all the strategies that typically helped no longer did given the duration of this unprecedented event and its intransigence about leaving. So what do you do when you know you are running on empty and need to fill up. Here are some suggestions.
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It was a privilege to be asked by a colleague and good friend of mine, Gary Ryan, to write and record the forward to his book “Disruption Leadership Matters – lessons for leaders from the pandemic”.
Gary’s book went on to become an Amazon Number #1 Best Seller on Kindle. I am sure many of the people in my People Empowered Community would be interesed in Gary’s book. I am forwarding you a copy of my Forward and the audio version of it. I hope it inspires you to buy Gary’s book in what ever version most resonates with you.
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Many organisations are not aware of the death of the annual performance appraisal. The main reason is that it no longer, if it ever did, produces the outcomes it sets for itself. There are still too many organisations using them to develop, enhance and assess the performance of their people. There is an alternative, moving from Performance Management to Performance Leadership. This is a move to on-going daily or weekly performance conversations that give feedback on the spot or certainly on a very regular basis, rather than the retrospective feedback that comes with an annual appraisal.
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How often do you look outside yourself for the reasons why you don’t achieve your goals and dreams? How often do you blame those external factors for obstructing your success, or for making it impossible?
It’s so much easier to do that than look inside yourself, to go down deep and discover what is crippling your spirit and your soul, what has stolen your drive to be fully who you can be. That takes you right outside your comfort zone. That is hard work.
You immortalise the story of your life and you hold on to it because it gives you a reason to stay stuck where you are. But it is only a story, to which you have given more weight and power than it actually has.Take your foot off the brake and create a new story for yourself.
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This was an article I wrote 5 years ago and having re-read it recently I was surpised at how relevant it still is. Its message is particularly relevant in this new normal COVID world. It was Steve Jobs who famously said: “We are here to put a dent in the Universe”. To make sure, that when we do, our dent has our our unique name on it is a challenge. It’s an even bigger challenge to know what we need to do to put the dent there in the first place. This is what being Difference Makers is about. There are 6 attributes that make Difference Makers.
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So many of the people that come to me are suppressing some part of themselves and letting their limiting beliefs sabotage their career development. As a fee for service mentor, the people I see are highly motivated and prepared to invest in themselves financially, and invest their time and energy. At the outset they don’t realise that they are the only thing holding back the best version of themselves. So stop and refelct. What is stopping you from achieving your career goals? What are your limiting beliefs that you either aren’t aware of, or if you are can’t find a way to way break through them?
Or should it be: Who is stopping you achieving your career goals? Who is standing in your way, giving you negative messages, or creating barriers that you are unable to break through? Mentors can help you breakthrough these roadblocks and have the career you want.
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There are some universal themes and issues that keep coming up over and over in the work I do. Mentoring the low performer is one of these. It creates anxiety and fear into the heart of every leader and manager who feels they need to do it. But it doesn’t have to be that way as Mike’s experience shows.
This was a mentoring experience I had a number of years ago and last week (and many times in between) I had almost the exact experience again so I recovered this post and revised it, knowing that it could be valuable for so many leaders and managers facing this situation.
In my workshops, I always offer the participants the opportunity to contact me after the workshop by email if they have any questions or want to discuss anything from the workshop.
This email I had from Mike was one of those situations. Both Mike (not his real name) and his employee have allowed me to tell this story and use it as a learning experience for others.
Rather than follow up by email, I actually phoned Mike to talk about this and made some suggestions for how he could handle it and about 12 months later when our paths crossed he gave me some feedback on what happened. I thought it was a good case study to present here.