Ask Ms. Mindfulness

One of the practices I often have leadership trainees do at the beginning of a session is to check in with how they’re feeling.  I use a wheel of feelings that has 70-80 different emotions listed. And you may be wondering why – what would be the point of taking up valuable time to talk about feelings, especially when there is so much content to cover?  Just get on with it! We often ignore emotion The problem is just that.  We often ignore what we’re feeling, push it down, disregard it and just get on with it.  But the feeling still comes with us.  And what we don’t acknowledge often comes out sideways.  Let’s say the crap hits the fan because of a recurring problem with a customer.  A problem that you told them was fixed.  Now you’re in a bad mood because you’re going to have to eat crow with your stakeholder and then you find yourself in a difficult conversation with a direct report to address the issue. You get triggered and can’t maintain your cool.  Now you’ve alienated your direct report, and the customer is mad, and the problem still isn’t fixed.  Doh! Or perhaps the feeling isn’t anger but stress and pressure.  I’ll use myself as an example for this one.  Over the past few months, I’ve been sicker than I’ve been in ages.  It’s been extremely stressful coping with that while trying to keep all the plates in the air spinning, and I’ve been worried about my body’s ability to bounce back – something that has never troubled me in the past.  I’ve been carrying so much heaviness in my chest and feeling utterly exhausted.  I’ve found myself sighing out loud multiple times a day.  And I kept ignoring it because I had too many things to do.  Foolishly, I was ignoring my own advice.  I looked at the feelings wheel the other day and decided to finally lean into it, rather than push the stress and overwhelm to the side. We push stress aside at our peril I’ve often been told that I’m very good at maintaining a façade.  That I appear to have everything under control, I appear super calm on the surface, and I never need to ask for help.  But looks can be deceiving.  I started writing down a list of all the things that have been stressing me out over the last year – and it ended up being a very long list.  A lot of it related to work, some to family, some to friends.  And a lot of the work-related things were positive.  More clients than I could handle, different types of work, expanded scopes, more interdependencies, expanded projects.  But even the good stuff can bring stress.  And yet I didn’t allow myself to acknowledge it, because the mindset of a coach should be that this is all so wonderful, and I should be positive all the time.  I should see everything as an opportunity and never have […]

We tend to focus a lot on outcomes in our society.  Outcomes are how we evaluate success.  That project didn’t achieve the stated outcome, so we brand it as a failure.  The business is no longer a going concern, so it’s a bust.  Maybe we don’t get the promotion we were longing for, or a particular dream job, and we make ourselves miserable thinking about what could have been.  What should have been.  Focusing solely on outcomes is a recipe for misery I realize this headline may sound ironic coming from a woman who in a former career was responsible for pulling together performance dashboards and kpi updates, but I’ve found it to be true.  For many of us it would behoove us to embrace the Buddhist concept of non-attachment.  Which isn’t the same as not caring or becoming apathetic.  Let me share an example of what I mean by this. I love what I do as a career and leadership coach and facilitator.  In many ways I look at it as a vocation, rather than a job.  I’m deeply attached to the purpose of enabling and helping others to be effective and to develop clarity of purpose, compassion for self and others and confidence.  But my work in this space can feel like heaven, or it can also feel like hell.  And a lot of the difference has to do with how attached I am to certain outcomes. Any job can be heaven or hell Take career coaching for instance – there have been occasions when I’ve been sucked into my client’s outcome, that attachment to finding the perfect job or the perfect career (even though I emphatically assert there is no perfect job or career!).  I become aware of when that happens because I start noticing a few things.  I start worrying more than usual about my client interactions.  I worry they’re not getting enough out of the coaching process, or what they would say about me as their coach.  I start to worry about my reputation and whether I’ll get a bad review.  If it gets extreme, I start judging myself – maybe I should have suggested this or that.  I even start questioning my credibility as a coach.  And when that happens, I find myself violating my own rules as a coach, because I move from curiosity and inquiry into tell mode.  I lose sight of the fact that my role as a coach is to facilitate the process and instead try to drive the outcome.  In essence, I get overly attached to the client’s outcome and as a result make myself miserable and drive myself crazy. When I practice non-attachment that same interaction can look and feels very different.  The reason it feels so different is because I’m not attached to the outcome, and if I’m not attached to the outcome I can rest fully in the present moment. I’m not worrying about the question I just asked and whether it was good enough.  I’m […]

“My boss says all the time now, ‘I hear you,’ when I’m telling them something.  But the problem is, do they really?  It feels like they’ve been on a leadership course, and this is something that they’re trained to say.  Is this the case?  Is that what you’re teaching people these days?” I don’t blame her for being upset.  When I hear things like this, I want to bang my head against a wall.  It’s a perfect example of hearing something in a leadership class, and then applying it on autopilot as a box tick exercise.  People aren’t stupid, and they can always smell when someone isn’t being authentic and is just going through the motions.  I’ll just say the things they tell me to say.  And that will get the result I want. Wrong.  Leadership skills aren’t meant to be a crash course in manipulation.  And even though I often say leadership is more about who you are being than what you are doing, there are still so many folks who show up to a course looking for a quick tip or trick that will miraculously transform a relationship without putting in the hard work. The doing versus the being of listening Let me explain what I mean by doing and being. Doing – is about developing leadership skills and practising them until they form new habits. It takes persistence, practice, and hard work.  These could be skills pertaining to having feedback conversations, listening skills, performance conversations, delegating tasks, coaching, giving presentations, time management.  These are some of the skills related to successful leadership and we must practice them, as the more we practice the more leadership competency we build.  Practice makes better.  Being – is a journey of leadership self-exploration. When we are more self-aware and accessing our Learner Mindset we can manage our well-being, build stronger relationships, innovate, and deliver higher performance levels.  Being is about how you are showing up.  Are you just going through the motions, or do you really care about your employees, the team, and the work product?  If you value things like integrity, is that visible to others in our behaviour?  Would others describe you as a person with a high degree of integrity?  The question I often ask leaders to explore this aspect of beingness is “Why on earth would anyone follow you?”  It’s meant to be provocative, because there is often a disconnect between how we want to be perceived and how our beingness is landing with others. So back to my participant’s question.  One of the skills that I often illustrate is acknowledging and validating what you’re hearing another person say.  That goes way beyond parroting a phrase like, “I hear you.”  Here’s what I said to that participant:  “It sounds to me that you’re frustrated.  And it makes perfect sense that you would be because I’m hearing that authenticity is important to you.  You wonder whether your boss is paying attention, or just parroting something they’ve been told […]

When I think about my own journey, whether it pertains to life or leadership, boundaries are one of the things I’ve probably struggled with the most.  Boundaries with friends, boundaries with family, boundaries with colleagues.  The problem with human relationships is that they often trigger reactivity in ourselves, especially if we let our buttons get pushed.  And when our buttons get pushed we often lose control of our boundaries.  And we all have buttons.  The more aware of what they are, the better off we can be at managing them and our boundaries. There’s a lot of talk at the moment in popular culture about setting boundaries.  Telling people what’s up, how they need to show up with you, be with you, work with you.  There’s a lot of emphasis on having feedback conversations to clarify firm lines and if someone God forbid crosses the line, we’re encouraged to label this person as toxic and eject them from our lives.  That is one strategy.  And in certain situations, it could be the appropriate one.  But in my experience if you follow the above a bit too rigorously, you’re going to end up a very lonely person who has managed to alienate just about every single person from your life.  Setting boundaries doesn’t have to look so black and white.  I’ll give you an example of something that happened to me this week.  Silence Can Be a Boundary’s Best Friend A colleague asked for 45 minutes of my time to prepare for an upcoming delivery that we’re co-facilitating together.  I don’t know this individual very well and had never worked with her before.  I show up to the call on time, as I always do, given that being on time is something I value and something my clients know me for.  I login to the zoom and am let into the room, where I hear my colleague speaking on another call and hear other voices as well as hers.  She pops a message into the chat – “on another call, be with you in a bit.” Now, at this point I’m livid.  She didn’t even think to mute the call she’s already on, so I can hear what’s being discussed.  And she’s expecting me to just sit there and wait.  Rude and disrespectful are two descriptors that instantly popped into my head. I thought about what I wanted to do.  I decided to exit out of the zoom call.  I waited a few minutes, sent a few emails, and then popped back in.  She finished up quickly after I returned into the room and our call commenced about 8 minutes late.  “Apologies Shelley – but it was a call with a potential new client to facilitate something.  You’re freelance too, I’m sure you know how it goes.” Cue the awkward silence. I sat there and looked at her on the screen, and then I changed the subject.  I didn’t agree with her, I didn’t disagree with her.  And it shook her […]

As human beings we are masters at creating narratives.  We create colorful stories that have the capacity to stir up emotion.  And that can be very wonderful and inspiring.  I’ve often said that emotions are the elixir of life.  The problem with our innate gift for story telling is that we often tend to cling to the negative and painful narratives and replay them repeatedly in our minds.  If she just hadn’t said that.  If I just hadn’t done that.  Then the relationship wouldn’t have been ruined.  I wouldn’t be in such dire straits. We create headlines of negativity And off this rumination we create high level headlines, scripts that sound like:  I am always getting taken advantage of. I am estranged from this relative. I am always making bad choices. I am bad at leadership. I am horrible at relationships. I am not assertive enough. I am weak. I am not hardworking enough to pull that off. I am overweight. I am stupid. I am never going to get ahead in life. I am damaged. I am a victim. I am powerless to change anything. Just let it go, right? We’re often told by self help experts that we have to let go of these negative scripts.  Release the negative self talk, they exclaim!  But how?  Especially when they’re so ingrained.  Many of these stories have been kicking around in our brains for decades.  Maybe I’m crazy for saying this but “Let that sh%t go” sounds trite and condescending.  If it was that easy, I would have done it by now, is what I often think when I’m met with platitudes like that. I often speak about the power of language with folks I am coaching, and direct coaching clients to pay particular attention to anything that comes after the phrase “I am.” Why?  Because words are literally magic.  And they have the capacity to expand the possibilities in our lives or close them down for good.  Words, whether spoken out loud or spoken in our head, are incredibly powerful.  If you’ve ever read or heard of the book, The Four Agreements, Ruiz speaks to this when he addresses the first agreement – Be impeccable with your word, who says: “You can measure the impeccability of your word by your level of self-love.  How much you love yourself and how you feel about yourself are directly proportionate to the quality and integrity of your word.” Beware of the negativity bait and switch So what would impeccability of word look like as it pertains to releasing negative self-talk?  Would it be the converse?  Instead of I am not weak, perhaps the answer lies in the reverse – I am powerful.  That would be convenient, wouldn’t it?  Just a simple bait and switch should be enough to do the trick, right? In my experience it’s tough to go from one extreme to the other.  We as humans also have an animalistic ability to sniff out the falseness of a message.  If […]

The last few weeks have not been the easiest.  I’ve got a condition in my inner ear, that when it flares up, I have an on again off again low-grade fever and get dizzy, where every day I’m on a boat that is rocking in the wind as I try to do my best to coach, facilitate, or do whatever it is I’m tasked with.  Not fun.  And then things pile up, I get stressed, I try to exercise self-care and ask for what I need, reschedule where I can, show myself some much-needed compassion and empathy.  But as you know, these things aren’t easy, especially when you run a business. All this to say that some things fell off in the shuffle last week, which included this blog.  And at that time, I practiced compassion and told myself it was okay, that in every life a little rain must fall, and took the opportunity to congratulate myself on my fine efforts up to this point.  Which is all well and good.  Yay me. And this week I’m still muddling through as the dizziness isn’t gone yet and heard a pesky little voice ringing in my ear, the voice of the workhorse, full of type A authority – “Pull your head out of your rear Shelley, and just get the blog done!” And guess what happened?  Absolutely nothing.  I started looking for ways to procrastinate.  My mind was filled with anything else I could do, and I really do mean anything else.  Taking out the trash, scrubbing the toilets, making a grocery list.  I was really scraping the bottom of the barrel to be sure.  Why?  Because it felt like a grind. A soul destroying, sucking daily grind.  And who can easily muster energy for the daily grind? We unknowingly create our own daily grind And then I remembered the fundamental lesson on why it’s important to approach life more focused on the journey than it is the destination.  Or in other words, the being is just as (or even more important) in life than the doing.  So often in life and leadership we’re focused on the latter.  I’ve just got to get this deliverable out the door.  Make another phone call, send another email.  Complete another performance review.  Give another presentation. And then I can relax.  I’ll have more time later to think about things and enjoy things. But the problem is we never do.  This is how we fool ourselves.  And then we wonder why we feel so empty, and life just feels like an endless daily grind of one thing after another. I’m not saying reframing this is easy by the way, we live in a world that rewards output and productivity.  We set ambitious targets for revenue, we set stretch goals, we live in a VUCA – volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world where everything needed to be done yesterday.  And I’m also not saying that we shouldn’t get goals or visualize success.  As a coach […]