Your company is growing and has gained recognition and success.  Your culture and employees are thriving and you are so proud of everyone’s accomplishments.

Yet …

you feel something is missing.  You can’t put your finger on what.  After all, it’s been a challenging journey.  In many ways, you and your organization have arrived at its desired destination.

How could something be missing?

Guess what?

You are not alone.

That gnawing feeling of something missing is a positive thing.  It’s a sign your soul is stirring …

To something greater than your role and your company.  To a grander purpose.

You are becoming an awakener.

In today’s ever increasing complexity and change, you are being called to operate at a new level of consciousness.  To transcend your mission statement, competition and engagement practices.

Are ready to make that leap?

What Is a Leadership Awakener?

I am not a teacher, but an awakener.

Robert Frost

Most leaders’ roles and identities evolve.  Let’s take a look at one natural progression of a leader’s role.  Every role is important.

1.   Coach

Traditional coaching focuses on behavior.  The goal of a leader as coach is to improve the behavior of his/her team.

When leaders assume the role of coach, they are observing and giving feedback.  For example – coaching someone how to communicate more respectfully to teammates.

2.   Teacher

Teaching focuses on cognitive skills and capabilities.

A leader wearing the hat of teacher focuses on building  competencies and thinking capabilities – such as how to read a P&L statement or presentation skills.

3.   Mentor

Coaches and teachers focus on the external aspects of performance.  Mentors, however, focus on the internal aspects – ie., employees’ beliefs and values.

A leader wearing the hat of mentor focuses on influencing a person’s beliefs and values in a positive way – such as, believing in him/herself.

4.   Awakener

While awakening is definitely not a common term within organizations, leaders who operate at a high level of consciousness and being are the awakeners in the business world.

A leader as an awakener operates at the level of spirit or Higher Self.   Such leaders have the capacity to transcend their own mental maps (beliefs, values, identity) and connect with a greater Force within themselves and others.

Leadership Awakeners are the Game Changers of the World.

Are you ready to make the leap?

Leadership awakeners think differently. Perceive differently.  Decide differently.  Here are 3 (among many) distinctions.

As an awakener …

You View the Organization as a Hologram

What the heck is a hologram?!

A hologram is a 3 dimensional representation created with the use of a laser using a process called holography.

The fascinating property of holograms is that you can cut it up in tiny pieces and actually create the whole from a single part.

Not only does the whole contain all the parts.  Every part contains information about the whole.

WOW!!  Isn’t that mind blowing?!

The implications to an organization are huge!   The concept of a hologram says that every function … every product/service … every employee contains within it information about your entire company.

Nelson Mandela used this principle in transforming South Africa. He knew that the greatest chance of unifying the country was not through a top-down approach of sweeping changes.

Rather, that unity (the whole) would come from his relentless support of the country’s all white rugby team (a part) in the World Cup.  He rightly assumed that victory would unify the country.  The rest is history.

Applying the holographic property can accelerate success within your company.  Let’s look at 2 examples.

If you are like most leaders, you use a top-down approach in planning or envisioning your future.  That is, you take the whole and you break it into parts.  That approach has merit in certain contexts.

What if … with your next strategic plan, you instead take a bottoms up approach, using the holographic principle?

What if … you were to improve the weakest link in your organization (eg., competencies or efficiencies) and made that the focus of your strategic plan?

How would that one small change impact the performance of the entire organization?

How about applying the holographic principle to problem-solving?

What if … the next time your team solves a customer service or process problem, you focus on solving the bigger organizational issue – such as lack of cohesive teams? 

What would that do to your profitability, productivity and quality?

You See Competition as an Illusion

In our Western culture, we obsess about beating our competition and becoming the best.

That obsession shows in our love for “Best ____” lists and awards.  Fortune’s Top 100 Companies, 50 Best Places to Work for, Inc. 500/5000 and Top 40 Under 40 to name a few.

While competition can be a blessing, fueling higher standards and innovation.   It can equally be a curse.

It conditions you to think in terms of winning and losing or a zero sum game.  Those leaders who operate from a win/lose paradigm can’t see another way.

The truth is …

Competition is an illusion.

You will never win long term with this paradigm.  However, there is a more optimal paradigm from which leaders can operate.

John Nash –- behavioral economist and Nobel Prize recipient – is best known for advancing game theory and the equilibrium principle.

In simple terms, his work showed that …

the best result comes when everyone in a group (team, market, etc.) does what’s best for themselves and for the group.

His findings say that when your company works TOGETHER with — not against – your “competitors,” you ALL will be better off than if you worked at cross-purposes with each other.

Example:  Toyota and BMW have collaborated to create an environmentally friendly luxury car.  They shared costs and knowledge for electric car battery research.  BMW supplied diesel engines to Toyota.  Everybody won, especially the customer.

How might collaborating with a competitor reduce delivery times and costs, open up new markets or strengthen your position rather than weaken it?

Below are additional resources and examples to delve further about collaborating with competitors.

Collaborate with Your Competitors … and Win, 

Friendly Competition:  Competitors Collaborate  (video)

You Know That Perceived Limitations Are Wake-Up Calls

Stop for a moment.  Take inventory of ways you and/or your organization …

·      Struggle or effort

·      Feel fear when your customers or the economy slow down

·      Have hit a ceiling in growth, profits or performance

·      Don’t have money or time for critical projects

Your perceived limitations are your own creation.  Not consciously though.  You are stuck in the limiting confines of your own thinking.

Attribution: Canstock.com

When you hit such limits, you tend to panic at the edge between the known and unknown.  You fight for certainty and control.  Yet more knowledge, analyses and busyness are NOT the answer.

To transcend these limitations, you must awaken to another reality.  The world of Potentiality.  The world of unbounded possibilities.

In this new awakened state, you tap into a greater Force within yourself and beyond yourself.  You fear no challenge.  You are immune to criticism.  Self-power – or knowledge of Self — becomes your true source of power.

The question is … how do you awaken that part?

Here are 2 ways:

1.  Practice “not knowing”

Exploring the unknown opens the door to unlimited creativity and possibilities.

Start with a question or concern.  Let go of all knowledge, assumptions and ready answers.  Adopt a beginner’s mind.  Openness, curiosity, inquiry, reflection and learning are essential.  Take time to explore what you don’t know.  What new possibilities emerge from “not knowing?”

When practicing “not knowing,” you transcend fear of the unknown and engage in new possibilities.  You are excited about opportunities the unknown presents.

2.  Transcend your own mental maps

Your mental map are unconscious filters – beliefs, values, identity, etc. – that drive focus and perception.  These maps ARE the boundary conditions of your thinking.

When I work with leaders, my first goal is to uncover their mental maps.  Then change them to expand possibilities within themselves and then within others.  Because there is no set procedure, there are no steps I can give you for that change.

However, even if it is for a few brief moments initially, you can learn to transcend your mental maps.

Get quiet.   Go to that place within yourself where there are no fears.   No limiting beliefs.  No internal conflicts.  Trust your higher Self to take you there.  You will know you are there because you feel a sense of peace and ultimately pure silence.  It’s from that place new possibilities emerge.

Summary

The ultimate calling of a leader is to awaken the grander purpose and possibilities within themselves and then their employees.

Becoming a leadership awakener is the highest level of consciousness from which you can lead.  You transcend the mental maps, knowledge and expertise that limit your potential.  You lead from a level of spirit that knows no boundaries.

Life and work take on new meaning.  Struggles become a thing of the past.  You are at peace even in the midst of turmoil.

The question is …

Are ready to make that leap?

The post Real Leaders Become Awakeners appeared first on The Empowered Business.

I learned growing up, however, that not lying is NOT the same thing as admitting and telling the truth.  The former prevents us from making false statements; the latter has the generative power to change individuals and organizations.

In my decades of working with business leaders, I have found that there is one trait — above all others – that transforms mediocre leaders to extraordinary ones.   That one trait is …

Rigorous truth-telling

Real leaders have backbone.  They admit the uncomfortable truth that others are not willing to even see.  They have a passion to want the truth and confront reality head-on.

It’s not just the responsibility of a leader to see and tell the truth.  It is part of their soul, their moral fiber.  Any compromise destroys trust, respect and credibility with themselves and from others.

The most important person to tell the truth is to Yourself.

We often think about the importance for leaders to tell the truth to others within their organizations.  Yet the most important, yet hardest, aspect of leadership truth telling is being rigorously honest with yourself.

Why?

It takes guts, personal awareness and humility to tell the truth about yourself to yourself.

When I work with leaders, my first goal is to help them get rigorously honest with themselves.  I have found that when leaders are willing to look at how they they avoid or deny the truth, that mirror of truth will liberate them to become the authentic, powerful leader they are meant to be.

Not sure how to uncover your truth as a leader?   Take inventory of the following 7 truths to get real about the present and to fuel your leadership changes in the future.

7 Real Truths That Fuel Real Leaders

Truth 1:  Either you are fighting for reasons or fighting for results. 

As a leader, there is no middle ground in what you stand for. You can stand for reasons or you can stand for results.  You CAN”T stand for both.

Real leaders fight for the results they want.  They are bold, committed and persistent about their desired outcomes.

Mediocre leaders fight for reasons why they don’t achieve them. When they say “yes” to reasons, they are essentially saying “no” to results.

Which are you fighting for right now?

Ask these questions to reveal your truth:

• Are you tolerating under-performance?
• When you lead a meeting, to what extent do team members give reasons why they did not keep their commitments or reach their goals?
• Have you created an organizational culture of strong accountability?

Truth 2:  Either you are creating your future or reacting to it. 

Real leaders are masters at creating their future because they are internally driven and decisive about what they want.   They take responsibility for all their outcomes and see themselves as the doers of the world.

Mediocre leaders are externally driven and at the effects of their environment.  They believe that they have little control over their outcomes and that things happen to them.

Ask these questions to reveal your truth:

• Does your organization find itself in perpetual crises?
• When a negative event happens – like loss of a major customer, do you find yourself in panic or do you seek new options to achieve your goals?
• Does your organization have a clear vision in which every employee knows how he/she contributes?

Truth 3:  Either you are playing to win or playing not to lose.

Underlying this truth, there is a pivotal assumption that realleaders get and mediocre leaders don’t.

What is that pivotal assumption?

It is that you have a clear understanding of what winning is.  Mediocre leaders never even ask themselves questions like … where do we want to win?  Where can we win?  What does winning look like?  

Once you have a clear concept of winning, how do you know if you are playing to win vs. playing not to lose?

The answer is: your identity.

Ask these questions to reveal your truth:

• Do you see yourself as a winner even when you fail?
• Does the thought of risking to win trigger fear in you?
• Do you have a winning strategy to reach your company’s goals?

Truth 4:  Either you are growing or you are stagnating.

For your company to grow, you must grow as a leader.  When you stagnate, so will your company.  It’s that simple.

Real leaders do the things that others think they cannot do.   They continuously “push the envelope” in what is possible.

Mediocre leaders avoid discomfort.  I mean really avoid it.  Discomfort for them triggers fear and threatens their sense of safety and survival.

Ask these questions to reveal your truth:

• Do you push yourself out of your comfort zone daily?
• Are you comfortable with discomfort?
• Do you thrive on challenges or shrink from them?

Truth 5:  Either you embrace conflict or you avoid it.

Conflict has become a dirty word in the business world.

Mediocre leaders avoid conflict at all costs.  It’s viewed as painful, scary and a win/lose situation at best.  As a result, their organizations become homogenous and filled with “yes” people.

As Jim Collins, author, Good to Great, concluded from his extensive research, the #1 difference between good and great companies is that the leaders of great companies fostered healthy conflict to set direction and create innovative solutions for the future.

Ask these questions to reveal your truth:

• Do your employees ever disagree with your decisions or viewpoints?
• Is there pseudo-harmony within your team?
• Do you tend to placate others whose viewpoints are different than yours?

Truth 6:  Either your actions are moving you “toward” or “away from” your goals. 

All behavior is self-motivated.  Your actions are motivated either to move toward something positive or away from something negative/painful.

Real leaders are “toward” motivated.  There is always the next horizon to reach.  Mediocre leaders tend to be “away from” motivated, driven by negative beliefs or secondary gains.  Their primary focus is on what they don’t want, rather than on what they want.

Ask these questions to reveal your truth:

• Are your actions mainly focused on reaching your goals or eliminating problems?
• Are any of your actions (such as, checking emails, going to certain meetings, etc.) really a distraction and taking you off-course?
• Are you focused more on what you want or what you don’t want?

Truth 7:  Either you are truly leading or merely following.

Real leaders understand that leadership is a way of thinking and a way of engaging with others.  They take bold steps into the future and hold themselves and others to high standards.    They see themselves as a leader of leaders and their job is to develop other leaders.

Mediocre leaders seek recognition from their team over respect, decide through consensus and deflect responsibility for results and problems to others.

Ask these questions to reveal your truth:

• Do you tend to focus on solutions or problems?
• To what extent are your employees “rowing the boat in the same direction?”
• Is most of your day spent on completing tasks or growing your people?
  

The Greatest Truth of All

The greatest truth of all … is that,

Truth is power.

I know that admitting the truth about yourself can sting in the moment.  And avoiding the truth may seem like the easier route.

In reality, hiding from the truth is like having a 10,000 lb. weight on your shoulders that drags you down.  It holds you and your organization back.  It keeps you in stress and struggle.

Are you ready to dump the baggage?

Start by using the above 7 truths to get honest with yourself:

Are you …

• fighting for results?
• focused on creating the future?
• playing to win?
• growing and getting out of your comfort zone?
• leveraging conflict to create innovative solutions?
• taking actions that move you “toward” our goals?
• truly leading?

Only when you admit reality can you seize your true leadership power and take charge of yours/your organization’s fate.

Which of these leadership truths is holding you back the most?  What support do you need to have a breakthrough?

The post Real Truths That Fuel Real Leaders appeared first on The Empowered Business.

Today’s companies have it all backwards.  Leaders have a thirst and drive for answers to their biggest challenges.

Thousands of leadership books are published yearly to feed that thirst.  Buying those books to find the right answers for your company is where leaders make their biggest mistake.

 

Leadership is NOT about having the right answers.  It’s about asking the right questions.

If you’ve read my article “12 Strategic Thinking Questions That Yield Big Results,” you know why questions are so powerful and how they can change organizational results … overnight.  If you have not,  click here.

The Make-or-Break Question Critical to Your Business Future

There is one question though, above all others, that smart leaders ask … not just once, but everyday.  This one question has the power to:

• Create sustainable company growth and profitability
• Rise above your competition
• Make you an innovative leader in your marketplace
• Accelerate organizational and culture change
• Increase employee engagement and performance

This one question has equal relevance to both your external and internal environments.   What is that one question?

Where can we win?

Why This One Question?

How many times …

• have you spent great effort and resources on goals and strategies that were never worth your time to begin with?
• has your company pursued markets and customers that actually took you further from your goals, not closer?
• has your company spread itself thin with too many organizational changes, initiatives or diverse priorities?

The truth is …

“There are many battles in business not worth winning.   Worst still is to LOSE such a battle you should have never fought to begin with.”     Denise Corcoran

 Know which strategies and plans will lead you to your goals and which will not.  Distinguish those that create gain and those that create loss.  As the saying goes,

“Measure twice, cut once.”

The Secret to Winning in Your Marketplace

To succeed in today’s rapidly changing marketplace, it is critical for leaders to ask daily …

Where can we win?

And equally important …

Where can we not win?

Where you are winning today is not where you can win tomorrow.  To best answer these questions more deeply requires three steps.

Step 1:  Pause and take a REALITY check.  Challenge every assumption about your current goals and plans.

Take a look at your revenue and profit goals and ask yourself:

• Will your current customers (or desired customers) really get you to your goals?
• What makes you think your plan and expected outcomes are reasonable?
• Did you make up those outcomes and hope that you would reach them?

Remember …

“Hope is not a strategy.”

Step 2:  Dig deeper.  The real truth about where you can win is below the surface.

Even if you think your goals and plans are reasonable, dig deeper.  You will find real answers to your revenue or profit challenges below the surface. 

For example, do you tend to target customers based on their ability to pay your price?  While that is a good start, there are deeper questions you need to ask.  Such as …

• Are they willing to pay you your price?
• Are there competitors driving price resistance?  Are those competitors lowering customer demand for your products/services?
• How do you adapt your plans to this new reality?

If you have hit a ceiling in revenues and/or profits, you need to dig deeper to get the truth about your company’s reality.

Step 3:  Utilize the power of peripheral vision to detect early (often subtle) warning signs that your business needs to shift. 

In today’s rapidly changing world, smart leaders have systems to detect early warning signs that the positioning of their business may need to change. Even if realistic today, your strategies and plans may not be valid tomorrow.

What are examples of early warning signs that your company may need to re-position itself?

• Pressure on profit margins
• Decline in customer satisfaction
• Appearance of new competitors
• Loss of market share in key segments
• Surprises by outside high impact events in the last few years

The key to detecting early warning signs that your environment is shifting is to develop your leadership peripheral vision.

In a literal sense, peripheral vision is an expansion of your normal attention to what’s happening at the edges – the periphery – of your field of vision. You are often in peripheral vision, for example, when driving on a highway, assuming you are not engaging in any distractions.  Your vision expands to see cars in all directions in order to respond in a moment’s notice, if needed.

In the business world, leaders are mostly engaged in their foveal vision — critical for focus on goals and critical tasks of the organization.  However, foveal vision also creates serious tunnel vision to big picture strategic issues and the ever-changing environment in which it operates.

Leaders must train their minds to continually monitor the periphery or edges of their environment for subtle and early shifts. Here’s why.

Peripheral vision …

• Helps you detect emerging opportunities in your marketplace before your competitors
• Gives you early signals regarding outside threats to your growth – such as, new alternative substitutes that can satisfy your customers’ needs
• Helps you anticipate and respond to future unmet customer needs not even their radar screen today
• Slows down your negative internal dialogue that drives ineffective leadership decisions and actions 

NOTE:  To learn about how to develop your peripheral vision as a leader, fill out my contact form and I am happy to pass on resources.

Bottomline:  If your company has hit a growth ceiling … has been on a vicious profit rollercoaster ride … or in perpetual crisis mode, then STOP.

Pause and ask yourself the ONE question that determines the extent your company survives vs. thrive in the future.

Where can we win?

And, if you are feeling bold and confident,

Where will we win?

Ready to get off the profitability and/or revenue roller coaster ride?   Click here to sign up for our 90 minute, complimentary Leadership Edge Strategy Session to develop a leadership strategy to achieve your goals and desired breakthroughs.

Other Related Links

12 StrategicThinking Questions That Yield Big Results.  

How Great Strategic Thinkers Think. 

___________________________________

Denise Corcoran – CEO, The Empowered Business^TM – helps growth-seeking companies develop game-changing leadership teams and organizations that drive and sustain profitable growth by design.   Denise can be reached at denise@empoweredbusiness.com or www.empoweredbusiness.com.

The post The ONE Question Every Leader Needs To Ask appeared first on The Empowered Business.

Willpower Exhaustion

Because of my exertion-exhaustion approach,  my world came crashing down with life threatening illnesses that cost me everything in my life.  While I wished I had learned the lesson in a less traumatic way, there was a gift in that experience.

It catalyzed me to seek mindset tools and technologies to create results with ease and less effort.  It motivated me to learn how the brain works and its impact on our thoughts, emotions and behaviors.  It taught me how to live and realize inspiring work and life.

While my details may be different than yours, how many times as a leader have you:

• Used brute force and over-efforting to achieve goals?
• Mustered every ounce of your being to power through what needed to be done?
• Berated yourself for not making the changes and vowed to try harder?

Willpower is one of the least understood concepts, especially in the world of leadership.  To make tough decisions, manage never-ending changes and handle the demands of their roles, leaders rely heavily on willpower to make things happen.

Leaders also often pay a heavy price when they hit the willpower wall and spiral downward on both personal and company levels.  Let’s take a look at why.

Myths & Realities:  What Willpower Is and Is Not

Psychologists now understand that willpower is defined by 5 specific characteristics:

• Delaying gratification and resisting short-term temptations to meet long-term goals
• Overriding an unwanted thought, feeling or impulse
• Employing a “cool” cognitive system of behavior rather than a “hot” emotional system
•  Effortful regulating of self by the self
• Limited resource capable of being depleted

According to Kelly McGonigal PhD, author of The Willpower Instinct, willpower is an instinct that comes from both the brain and body.

The prefrontal cortex houses our decision making and behavioral control functions.  Self control, or willpower, is directed by this part of the brain.

Brain science tells us also that the prefrontal cortex can be easily depleted from cognitive and emotional tasks (such as, regulating our emotions).  The same tasks that leaders are required to perform non-stop in their roles.

The fact that we have just so much willpower before it runs out is a critical, yet seldom addressed issue in the world of leadership.  Willpower-depleted leaders have a tendency to push the envelope even harder until they crash and burn.  The ultimate risk for leaders is suffering from serious willpower exhaustion.

When leaders hit this danger point, the company pays a high price in irrational decision making, addictions, low productivity, out of control emotions, a toll on personal lives and the list goes on.

The key is for leaders to learn the right use of willpower to lead their company to higher levels of success and growth.  In my experience in working with leaders, below are examples when willpower is used for the right reasons:

• Delaying immediate gratification in your decision making

Doing so builds a leader’s strategic thinking capacity – ie., focusing on long term company gains, rather than reacting to “short-termitis” or immediate gratification.

• Living your purpose, vision and values

Living your company’s purpose and values takes daily leadership discipline and self-control. This right use of willpower requires leaders to respond to unexpected events through the lens of  purpose, vision and values, rather than go into crisis mode.

• Pacing change and growth

Most leaders have high initiative.   This quality is typically a leadership asset.  However, when it comes to change and growth, leaders must learn to utilize willpower to pace both at a rate their organization can handle.  A leader’s urge to go full force will cost the company the very outcomes it seeks.

How Do Leaders Exhaust Their Willpower?

The factors below are just the tip of the iceberg.

• Inability to Right-Size Stress

Under high levels of stress, the fight-or-flight response floods a leader’s body with energy to act instinctively rather than being utilized by the prefrontal cortex for effective decision-making.  High stress drives a leader to focus on short term survival outcomes, rather than the big picture, due to depleted willpower.

•  Trap of Excellence

Striving for excellence can be a trap for perfectionism.  Perfectionistic leaders have a mindset … “if I am not perfect in performing this task, then I am a failure.”  Expecting a perfect outcome takes its toll on a leader’s willpower and puts him/her into over-drive.  Such perfectionistic tendencies show up in  micro-managing, “analysis paralysis” or unwillingness to delegate, thus further depleting a leader’s energy reserves.

•  “Away From” Motivated Goals

“Away from” motivated goals are stated in terms of what you don’t want —  eg., “I don’t want to procrastinate anymore.”  “Away from” goals actually reinforce the outcome you don’t want.  They also take enormous willpower to overcome and, doing so, depletes that scarce resource.

•  Deficient Brain Fuel

Given the on-going demands on time and energy, leaders often neglect exercise, diet and sleep to cope with their workload.  Yet ignoring these basic necessities for brain functioning further depletes a leader’s blood sugar needed to fuel willpower, resulting in decreased performance.

The key is to recognize your willpower’s limitations – in quantity and effectiveness.  The next step is to learn how to strengthen your willpower for when you need it most in your  role.

7  Simple Strategies to Strengthen & Conserve Your Leadership Willpower

According to Kathleen Martin Ginis, assistant professor of kinesiology at McMaster University, willpower is like a muscle and needs to be challenged to build itself.  At the other end, just as an over-trained athlete needs rest and recovery, balancing the active use of willpower with downtime is a must.

Below are my 7 favorite strategies for conserving and strengthening leadership willpower.

1.     Empty Your Mind

Quiet Mind

Today’s leaders find themselves driven by a fast paced agenda, often denying themselves critical downtime to replenish their minds and bodies to be effective.  A daily 5-10 minute meditation is your best strategy for reducing stress, improving emotional and physical wellbeing, as well as tapping into your intuition for your next right actions and decisions.

2.     Leverage the Power of Oxytocin

Peer support helps strengthen a leader’s willpower. Doing so makes reaching goals easier, while using less willpower to do so.  A bonus benefit of peer support is an increase in your bonding neurohormone — oxytocin — that lowers stress, increases relaxation and amplifies trust among the team.

3.     Increase Willpower with the Right Fuel

Willpower is not all in the mind.  It is critical to supply your body with the high quality fuel it needs.  Reduce sugar and carbs to avoid energy dips, which can further deplete your willpower supply.

4.     Anticipate Problems

“What if” strategies are critical for both strengthening and conserving your leadership willpower.  Such strategies require you to figure in advance how you will deal with obstacles and make a plan for dealing with such obstacles.

5.     Ask Bigger Questions to Unleash Motivation

Rather than depend on willpower to reach your goals, ask yourself bigger questions to unleash motivation such as … “Who do I want to become as a leader?” … “WHY are these goals important to me?”  Tapping into your deepest  motivations fuels an energy source that pulls you toward your goal, rather than pushing through willpower.

6.     Frame Challenges as Pleasure

Recently I asked a leader to write a one year vision of what he wanted to achieve.  He originally wrote what a struggle it was to overcome his challenges around organization.  I asked him to reframe the challenge as a learning process and a series of small wins that he celebrated, rather than a struggle.

How you speak to yourself can determine success or failure.  The key is to reframe challenges by describing the resourceful state, not the disempowering one, you want to experience to achieve your desired outcome.

7.     Chunk Down to the “Critical Few”

Conserve your willpower for what really matters.  Set priorities and stop doing the things outside the critical few   Schedule time in the morning while you have a full tank of willpower to progress on your critical few.  Then give yourself a break to rebuild your willpower reserve.

The Most Important Point … Are you really ready to change?

Are you really ready to let go of your exertion – exhaustion cycle and experience an easier, more rewarding leadership path, starting TODAY? 

Your challenge with this change is rarely an issue of not knowing “how to’s.”  In fact, seeking out more knowledge can be a trap.

The truth is … change can happen in an instant … almost appear magical to the outside world.

The secret is to ask yourself  3 simple questions: 

What’s the greater motivator right now regarding making this change … to avoid pain or seek pleasure?  Ie., Do you perceive making this change as painful or pleasurable?

What will you gain if you keep using the “white knuckle” approach?

What will you lose if you keep using the “white knuckle” approach?

When you can honestly say that making the above changes is the greater motivator than sticking with old behaviors, the change has already started.  Practicing the “how to’s” just reinforces that desire and you are on your way to a different leadership experience.

The post Brain Science Secrets to Increase Leadership Willpower appeared first on The Empowered Business.

I know this statement may sound harsh at first.  I ask you to hold your judgment until after you’ve finished the article to understand why.

For example, when a company is stuck or has plateaued, I often hear reasons like …

• Our company did not grow because of the economy.
• We need more knowledge or technology to beat our competition.
• We have to seize every revenue opportunity as it comes our way or we won’t survive.
• The marketplace is an unfriendly place.

Do any of these sound familiar in your company?

The GRAND illusion is … those outside factors are NEVER the reason.   As soon as you justify outside factors for lack of growth, profitability and/or performance, you are lying to yourself.  You are buying into your own story.

That is not to dismiss the importance of knowledge, systems, the timing of opportunities and other factors that leaders believe with all their hearts are the reasons for their success or failure.

The Real Problem Is Your Leadership “Map.”

I don’t mean the kind of map you stick in the glove box of your car or get from your GPS system.  I am talking about a different kind of map.

In the 1930’s, Alford Korzybski, in his book “Science and Sanity,” made a profound statement about human nature.  A statement still widely used in many contexts, including management.  That is …

The map is not the territory.

This statement says it all … how and why your mind plays “dirty” tricks on you.  That is, your perception of reality is never reality itself.  Rather it is your version or internal representation of reality (or mental map).

100% of your experience of the world is being generated by your mind, not outside events.

Due to your brain’s limited processing capabilities, your mental maps filter out over 99% of external information coming from your five senses.  Your mind attempts to fill in the massive information gap with its own “spin,” story or interpretation about what it perceives.

Not only is your conscious awareness limited.  You also filter every experience through your own learned behaviors, experiences, beliefs, values, interests and states.  As a result, this filtering process distorts, deletes and generalizes your sense of reality.

How Can Your Mental Maps Cause BIG Trouble to Your Organization?

The distortion in thinking and perceptions –based on mental maps – creates over 80% of the problems at a leadership and organizational level.  While your leadership mental maps can actually create many problems in your organization, let’s look at 2 common examples.

Mind Trick #1:  You rationalize away outside circumstances (or your perceptions of those circumstances) as the reason for your organizational failures or lack of results.

Projecting outside circumstances (eg., the economy) as the cause for companies’ lack of results is so rampant in today’s business world.  Yet this one mistake alone is costing companies billions in lost revenues, profits and new opportunities … and leaders don’t even realize it!

The truth is … you either fight for reasons OR you fight for results.  Your brain is not capable of holding two opposing thoughts at the same time.

You can’t fight for growth and fight for the reasons for lack of growth at the same time.  When you focus on the latter, you are reinforcing in your brain why you can’t have growth.

Doing so has a domino effect.  On your attitudes, you become a victim.  On your beliefs, you convince yourself again that “outside circumstances drive your fate.”  On your behaviors, you focus your actions on survival, and ultimately, all this drives results or more lack of growth

Do you see how your perceptions of reality (your mental maps) determine your outcomes?

How is it that at times you become prisoner to your own reasons (and don’t realize it)?  What are the telltale signs?

Level of believability:  Your reasons seem plausible. 

So much so, you perceive your reasons or beliefs as true … as facts.  Those reasons then drive your focus and preclude you from seeing other possibilities.

Because blaming the economy for company failures or lack of results is a common rationalization, let’s use that as an example. 

You speak that rationalization, think it, believe it, feel it, and act consistently with it and then have evidence to back it up that it’s true. You are so identified with your mental map or mind that to you it is not your mind at all, it is the unvarnished truth.  In this case, you believe that the economy is the reason.

Consensus:  Your team, industry peers, the media, etc. all validate your reason. 

They buy into the same reason.  “Of course, the economy is to blame.”   Consensus grows and resignation becomes contagious within your company and industry.  This meme  …. aka thought virus … becomes the norm and goes viral.  Your thinking is infected and you can’t see causes within your control or other possibilities for a different outcome.

That one thought (or mental map) is the real cause for lack of results, not the economy.

That’s not to negate that economic downturns exist and can impact how a company operates and grows.   Your response to a down economy is completely within your control however.

It’s within your control to look for market segments or industries still in a growth mode.  It’s within your control to identify new strategies for seizing opportunities. It’s within your control to focus on your most profitable offerings during downturns.

You get to choose.  Are you going to fight for reasons or fight for results?

Mind Trick  #2:  You believe/assume that your plans and strategies, as long as followed,  (“the map”) will take your company to its desired destination (“the territory”).

Developing strategies and plans is a healthy practice for leaders to do.

However …. and this is a BIG “however” … it is often assumed that if you follow your strategies and plans (“the map”), you will successfully navigate the path (“the territory”) to get to your company’s destination.

There’s something to be said about staying the course and sticking to your strategies.  Yet your strategies often create blind spots that underestimate the impact of external changes on your business.

The issue is not about the content of your strategies and plans.  The issue is the unconscious belief or assumption that you have the right roadmap.  That one belief will cause you to filter critical external information and cues that may be signaling you have the wrong roadmap or you need to change it.

Example: A common blind spot is to overestimate your company’s strengths and capabilities.  If you perceive customer service as a strength, you are apt to assume that “strength” as the basis of your strategy and your differentiator.  That blind spot, however, may cause you to miss other emerging competitors who are better able to service your customers and are threatening your business.

• Where are you missing critical external cues that your strategies (maps) need to be changed?  
• Where are you over-estimating your business capabilities and strengths?  
• To what extent are you attached to your own strategies as being correct that you cannot perceive better ways of reaching your destination?

The above are 2 manifestations of the grand leadership illusion that can sink organizations and performance.  Your mental maps are driving your outcomes, not external circumstances.  The more you understand as a leader how your mind works, the less trapped you will be by your own thoughts and mental paradigms.

Changing Your Leadership “Maps” Can Change Your Results & Performance … At Lightning Speed.

Let’s take a moment to summarize what you need to remember from this article.

Key Points Summary

• The map is not the territory.
• Your mental maps of reality are NOT 100% accurate.  Your mental maps distort reality through your brain processing and filtering systems.
• We react to our own mental maps, not reality. Our maps are affected by our own interpretation about what is happening.  Your negative interpretation of the same event can be another person’s optimism.
• Your territory is constantly changing, so don’t overlay today’s experiences with what happened yesterday. After all, the surroundings were different.  Just because sales slowed or profit margins declined last month does not mean your growth or profitability can’t be stellar this month.
• No two maps are the same. Everyone creates their own maps, each is unique and no two are the same. (Your map is not the same as other leaders on your team.  In fact your maps may be opposite of each other.)

The good news is … your mental maps can be changed.  New mental maps can catalyze your company to its next level of success, just as much as the old ones can keep you stuck in molasses.

The first step to change is to question everything.  Challenge every thought, assumption, belief (disguised as fact) and point of view with which you currently identify.  Especially the ones you believe are right :)).

In future articles, I will be addressing the concept of constrictive minds and their impact on your leadership and organizational performance.  To be notified of those and other articles, sign up for our monthly newsletter and free report at Wired to Win BIG.

The post The One GRAND Leadership Illusion That Sinks Organizations appeared first on The Empowered Business.

Fear is activated in the most primitive part of the brain – the reptilian brain. It signals danger. In life and death situations, fear is an important survival mechanism to act quickly, mobilizing strength, courage and power we never thought we had.

In most situations, however, fear is a serious liability. When fear runs you, you can’t see its control over you. It impairs thinking, paralyzes decision-making and drives reactionary behavior.

To shift from fear to fearlessness, you must first get rigorously honest about how fear may be running you right now.

• What fears about your business, the economy or the future dominate your thoughts right now?
• How might those fears be costing your business?
• Who would you be without those fears? How might your future be different when coming from that fearless place?

Getting rigorously honest about your fears will help you step up your inner game and cultivate a fearless mindset.

The post Get Rigorously Honest About Your Fears … appeared first on The Empowered Business.