motivation

It’s inevitable that from time to time we may find ourselves disillusioned, maybe even feeling burnt out.  And there is a load of content out there that speaks to self-care, how to maintain balance through practices like yoga and meditation amid all the stress, and it’s all very wonderful.  I’m a big believer in all kinds of mindfulness practices.  But I’ve often said that a good self-care routine won’t do the job of an unhealthy mindset. I was reminded of this principle this week as I was working with a client.  She’s sleepwalking through each day of life – tired, lethargic, devoid of a sense of purpose, and it was the latter of these complaints we honed in on for our work.  A good self care routine won’t do the job of an unhealthy mindset “This project is painstaking work.  And the only thing that matters is whether I make a mistake.  It’s exhausting.” That would feel exhausting, right?  Her story reminded me of another client, an organization I spent quite a bit of time with a year back.  One of the high potential new recruits had been promoted to the supervisor of the loan processing department for a bank.  Her work as an individual contributor was excellent without a doubt – painstakingly perfect.  And when you think about it, that’s probably a good thing considering we’re talking about the practice of processing loans.  Money is riding on whether the documentation has been completed correctly.  One error can derail an entire process and create unnecessary delays.  This individual had performed well in the past, and then had been thrown into a leadership role without any training or development. When I met up with this client a year or so into her new role, it wasn’t the rosy story of success she’d wanted it to be.  The turnover in her department was sky high, and no one (and I mean no one) in the bank wanted to work in the loan processing group.  The group had a reputation for being difficult to work with interdepartmentally as well.  But it wasn’t for lack of trying on the supervisor’s part.  She was working her butt off and giving her best.  And yet, she couldn’t keep a good employee if her life depended on it. What we focus on drives the outcomes we get The solution to this conundrum lies not in how hard we work or try, but what we’re focused on.  This supervisor tended to be critical, and it showed up in what she focused on with her team.  Instead of focusing on the vibe she wanted to create for the department and what a high performing team could look like, she focused with laser precision on mistakes and the tiniest of errors.  And she found them, again and again and again.  Well intended folks would come to work day after day to be told again and again that they had made yet another mistake.  They were told to correct it.  And […]

I stopped making new year’s resolutions a while back.  I could never see the point, especially considering the statistics that surround them.  Just this morning the news was mentioning by the end of January, 43% of Americans will have already given up on whatever it was they resolved to do.  But if not a new year’s resolution, then what?  I think it’s human nature to gravitate towards the future.  To think about things like goals and plans.  I’ve been pondering this conundrum lately, as I’ve spent the last month taking a much needed and long breath.  And I use the word breath very intentionally, rather than break.  I closed my practice down over the holidays, something I’ve never done before.  I went hiking with my husband out in the southwest – we visited Zion, Bryce Canyon, White Sands and many other desert hot spots.  The breath gave me time to ask myself some questions, and to do some deeper reflection on what I really want.  But the questions I was asking myself were different than the ones I’ve often asked myself in the past.  In the past it tended to center around goal setting.  What goals do I want to set for myself this year?  What do I want to accomplish?  Then a logical jumping off point from that question is to then think about how to make those goals SMART – specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound.  We are starting with the wrong question. I tried asking myself these questions over my break this year, but no dice.  I really tried.  The answers just weren’t coming, and I did something that was hard to do – I resisted the urge to just come up with something and put it in a spreadsheet.  It was really tough because the feeling of restlessness came up.  I had a feeling it would come, and it was overwhelming.  It was pushing me to sign up for a million different things and to try to fill my schedule with a million different activities.  Restlessness is a feeling I’ll do anything to escape.  I decided to sit with it instead.  I looked deep into that feeling, and the patterns it can often create in my life.  I asked myself what was really going on, what was sitting under the restlessness.  I asked again and again, I resolved myself to feel it, and it eventually passed. And from the bottom of that well, a different kind of question emerged.  This year, I stopped asking myself, “What do I want to do?”  And I started asking myself instead a different question, “How do I want to be?”  Being versus the doing The answer was one single word that kept coming to me over and over and over again.  In conversations, in dreams, in everyday life interactions.  Depth.  It’s become my word now for 2024, an intention that I’ve set to define my year. Interestingly I’m feeling very differently about 2024 having gone through this reflection and […]

Developing a healthy sense of confidence, whether it’s in your leadership, or whether it pertains to your career direction, is important.  We often report feeling like we lack it.  But how to build confidence?  It’s intangible and fuzzy – it’s nice to say we need it, but what do we do about it?  There are three elements critical to building confidence in my experience as a coach.  As I describe these, think about for yourself which of the three you would rate as high, and which you would rate as low. How to Build Confidence – The Three C’s of Confidence Clarity – Direction is important, and to the extent we lack it, we can feel rudderless in our lives and in our leadership.  Do you have a vision for your career?  Do you know who you want to be as a leader and how you want others to experience you?  I remember when I was making my career change from accounting to leadership development back in 2012, I knew what I wanted, I had a direction.  I might have had no idea how I was going to get there, but the passion I felt for the vision I was cultivating kept me going.  Clarity is inspiring.  Once we have it, we can take steps to materialize our vision. I often have clients think about their values as a method of making a way out of the fog.  It can sometimes feel like an arbitrary exercise, but it’s not.  Our values guide the choices we make, and we all have values, whether we are conscious of them or not.  One of mine is autonomy.  It came into play recently when I was faced with a difficult business decision.  Tuning into my values helped to navigate this situation, knowing that I was tuning into my own True North.  Competency – Building skills builds confidence.  Every job has competencies associated with it.  Some are technical, and some are what folks often refer to as the softer skills.  Things like communication, presentation skills, time management.  Leadership does as well.  Good leadership is about two main things – building relationships while getting tasks accomplished.  We often sacrifice one for the other.  Maybe I over-focus on delivery and ignore important opportunities to coach and mentor my team.  Or maybe I focus too much on relationships at the expense of deliverables.  Good leadership requires balance between these two elements. How do you stack up on the competencies for the role you’re currently in?  Do you even know what they are?  What are you strong on?  What needs some work?  When we’re feeling less confident, we often try to hide our inadequacies.  We’re ashamed of them.  We may shy away from things that will challenge us because we’re afraid to fail.  The more willing we are to cultivate a growth mindset by leaning into our strengths and working to improve our weaknesses we better we will feel.  Movement in this direction generates energy and motivation.  Compassion – […]

There’s a common misconception floating around currently where passion and purpose is concerned and the whole decision of career path.  “When I find my passion, my job won’t feel like work.” “When I’m following my purpose, I’ll be fearless. I’ll know I’ve found the right career path.  The things that used to scare me just won’t anymore.” Don’t get me wrong, tapping into passion and purpose is great.  A lot of my career coaching and leadership coaching work is geared at helping folks recognize these things for themselves and connect to them in a meaningful way.  But as far as the above statements are concerned – I hate to burst your bubble, but they just aren’t true. I’ll give you an example.  I love teaching, I love facilitating.  It’s when I’ve had probably the most moments in actual flow – those moments you lose yourself, time passes and you’re not watching the clock.  These are magical moments, as you’re completely present, mindful and 100% engaged in what you’re doing.  I often suggest coaching clients think about times when they have entered this state as a way of connecting with activities and topics that bring joy.  The more you notice a correlation between flow moments and a certain activity, it may be a good career path option to explore. There is no career path that will deliver constant flow But that doesn’t mean shifting your focus to that activity or career path will automatically bring you into an instant state of flow 100% of the time.  The human experience is way more complicated than that.  I’ve also had a lot of scary moments as a trainer and a facilitator.  Difficult participants, difficult clients, difficult colleagues.  Logistical challenges where a room hasn’t been ready, the materials failed to show up or a flash flood was suddenly headed my way with a room full of participants and no idea what to do.  Add to this my personal favorite – incomplete or incoherent course content that’s only been delivered to me a day or so before a program and I’m expected to pull off a miracle with no time to prepare.  Before every delivery I’m a little bit nervous.  There are often insecurities that come up – What if I don’t know enough?  What if I get asked a question I don’t know the answer to and look stupid in front of participants?  What if I can’t handle the challenging dynamics in the room?  Things are often coming at a facilitator a million miles a minute.  What if I miss something?  What if the feedback is negative from the participants and they express it was a waste of their time?  What if this team or coachee doesn’t get the outcome they’re looking for? I can’t recall a single delivery where I haven’t felt at least a twinge of anxiety in the run up to a session starting.  And yet I do it anyway.  Day in and day out, over and over again.  I show […]

There’s often a disconnect between what we want and where we find ourselves in this journey called life.  Maybe you come up with an idea of something to try or to learn, but you find yourself quickly dismissing it or finding reasons to rationalize why it would never work.  We often mistakenly perceive these things as a lack of motivation.  “I guess I just didn’t want it enough.  But when I find the right thing, I’ll know it because I’ll suddenly be motivated and filled with an intense passion!” Wrong.  Motivation doesn’t just fly out of the air when you find the right thing.  There is no right thing by the way.  Cultivating motivation and passion has a lot more to do with what voices you’re letting speak inside that crazy thing called your head, rather than the specific thing that you’re focused on. In my experience as a coach, folks typically are stuck for one of two reasons.  The answer lies in the source of the stuckness, and whether it has to do with an outer block or an inner block.  What is an outer block? An outer block is an external constraint or barrier that gets in the way of a person achieving their goal.  It’s something that needs to be planned for, managed, and actively worked.  Let’s say I’m thinking of making a career transition, and I want to move into finance.  Education will obviously be a barrier to me achieving this goal if I know nothing about numbers.  So identifying a course or a program to enroll in, using time management skills to plan for this course, budgeting for this course will be key.  Outer blocks are relatively straightforward and easy to coach.  The problem is that most of us suffer from inner blocks when there is a disconnect from where we currently are to where we want to be, when we feel stuck or are lacking motivation. The sinister world of the inner block and the inner critic In my time as a coach, I’ve never met a client (including myself) who didn’t suffer from inner blocks and the curse of the inner critic.  An inner block is a deep-seated belief that who we are and what we are just isn’t good enough and will never be enough.  We all have an inner critic.  Mine’s name is Gertie.  Here she is: Gertie loves to fly around my head at warp speed and bump into things.  She squeals with glee as she yells, “You don’t work hard enough Shelley!”  Deep down Gertie knows that I’m lazy and I’ll never do what it takes to finish that new initiative or project.  That online leadership academy I’ve been thinking about building and piloting – What a silly pipe dream!  And then I start thinking to myself, “Well, maybe it wasn’t that important after all.  Maybe I just didn’t want it that bad.” Or maybe I do, and I just allowed myself to get derailed because the inner critic […]

In many of the leadership courses I teach, I talk a lot about the difference between the being and the doing of leadership.  The doing is the day-to-day stuff we get caught up in.  It’s the systems or process, tools or models that we look to for guidance.  And being the task and accomplishment-oriented humans that we are, we often focus more on the doing side rather than the being. As a leadership trainer I often hear this question:  “What do I do when I need to x?”  X could be giving difficult feedback, a tough performance conversation, realigning expectations, inspiring and empowering my team to deliver, the list goes on and on.  And there are several tools and techniques out there that give advice on what to do relative to these challenges.  Tools and techniques are helpful and I’m not underestimating the value they can add.  But a participant of mine summed it up very well the other day when she said: “There’s no checklist for leadership.  And people can see straight through you when you’re just going through the motions.” She’s right by the way.  People ultimately respond to who you are being in that moment versus what you are doing or saying.  We have this uncanny knack to sense when someone’s intentions aren’t aligned with their actions, or they’re saying the so called “right” thing to manipulate or control.  So the leadership coaching question for today is, Who do you want to be as a leader? Who do you want to be as a leader? I often have clients write a leadership purpose statement.  A lot of times folks struggle with this, and I accept the fact that it can feel awkward.  But I’ve often mused that a mindful life is an intentional life.  So why should your leadership be any different? Step 1: What’s my personal purpose? One way to go about this is to have a think about your own personal purpose first.  This includes questions like: Maybe there is something that ticks all these boxes for you, or maybe some of the above.  There may be several things that you love, but you may not necessarily be able to prosper at them.  Perhaps you honor that by pursuing a hobby or volunteering your time to a cause you are super passionate about.  There’s no right or wrong way of responding to these prompts.  The key is to have a think about them and see what comes up.  See where you may be able to find the intersections. Step 2: What goals do I have for my leadership? And then link this to the act of leading by asking yourself:  Once you’ve had a think, time to put pen to paper and create your leadership purpose statement. Maybe your statement looks something like this: “I’m excited to work on the challenges of climate change and that gives me a sense of personal purpose.  I want to lead my team to innovate and tackle this challenge […]