IS YOUR BRAIN A LEADERSHIP BULLY?
Emerging leaders, whether solopreneurs or CEO's emerge from a variety of circumstances, challenges, ages, education, gender or even socio-economic backgrounds. Leaders come in all shapes, sizes and personalities! Emerging leaders of 2018 need to adapt to complexity, disruption, speed and chaos! That means that we need to develop certain competencies to meet the challenges that are going to happen! This will require more wisdom, agility, and above all, the resilience to reach our vision, goals, and action steps.
If we were not born with the natural attributes, how will we develop them?
We have the choice and ability to re-create ourselves at each and every moment to learn to develop our key leadership competencies. Leadership is not just for the young! It’s never too late to discover our unique leadership voice if we remain agile and resilient.
What stops us from EMERGING STRONG as leaders?
A BULLY brain that has created messages of fear and dis-regulation, resulting in leadership overwhelm and confusion. After considerable research and living with my own leadership brain, I believe the key secret to overcome this overwhelm is Intentional FOCUS! This requires you to be a lifelong learner, while being intentional about your "why", purpose, values, and be curious about how the brain can support you on your leadership journey!
To learn leadership, we must learn to make friends with our brains!
Leaders who flourish have a talent for continually learning and know that learning starts with themselves. Leaders need to love to learn and continually seek AHA moments of leadership discovery. The new emerging leader is on a highly personal journey into becoming a holistic and integrated human being. I believe the only valid path to genuine leadership is one that leads to self-awareness, soul-searching, and collaboration with partnerships who believe in what you believe!
If I focus on my brain, can I be a STRONG, RESILIENT, and AGILE leader?
Your neuroplasticity has molded and shaped your brain to favor certain behaviors and habits. For many of us, these habits and behaviors may not be helping us in leading parts of our lives! With focused attention on what we desire, like building resiliency, we can repeatedly practice new behaviors to redirect our brains' chemicals, hormones, and physical resources to create new pathways. These new pathway’s create new competencies and when practiced move to the basal ganglia (the identified areas located within the brain that account for habit formation) and become a new pathway to support our leadership success.
Without harnessing your superpower of self–awareness, your brain will be triggered by the amount of chaos and uncertainty inside yourself and your surrounding environment. It is important to slow down and get to know your Amygdala (the integrative center of your brain for emotions, behavior, and motivation), to overcome FEAR and the other emotions that can derail our leadership journey!
As leaders, let's start with radical self–awareness and become friends with our fearful and sometimes unruly brain. This will allow us to banish fear and stress and instead develop trust that our brain is there to support us. Training our brain to be agile and resilient is no different than going to the gym and building your muscles to win a power lifting contest! Something one of my clients just did using both mindset and physical strength!
As leaders, we can create and place ourselves in teams and environments that are mindful, focused, fun, encourage risk taking, continuous learning environments, and build a coaching culture of meaningful courageous conversations!
Research supports that leaders who combine coaching with the practice of mindfulness-(focusing on their bodies, breathing, and thoughts in the moment)-as a way to reduce leadership chaos have a well-developed executive functioning brain. Leaders will watch everyone flourish because they truly are a happy and friendly group of brains!