Soul-Inspired-Leadership

Ego is a positive thing for people and yet it can be a negative too.

Too much of ego is arrogance and not enough ego means you are laid back.

Let's look at defining ego.

Inner ego is the inner belief or inner strength that is purpose-based and is looking at the self. Outer ego is actually arrogance where one is driving oneself to appear to be better than others in front of everyone else. It's to the world at large and not for any other benefit.

Another way to view ego is to have the understanding of who you are and what drives you and what makes you the person you are. To do this requires a bit of self-inquiry on what are your skills, traits, qualities, strengths, and weaknesses.

Following the self-belief or self-analysis route, it’s all about being true to yourself and not just doing things to look good against other people. Now, this happens in the business world a lot because you are competing against other executives to get promoted or are just playing an ego game of I am better than you!  So, there is a tendency to compare yourself to others but not with your inner self.

This causes a lot of stress and issues in the workplace. You have people who don't collaborate with others because they want to be on top of others and they will only collaborate when the purpose suits them.

From a coaching perspective, people who aren't aware of the impact their ego is having are easier to coach and influence, as once they are made aware it, it's like a revelation to them. But then there are people who are very aware of this and use ego as a power game. It is can be challenging to get them to recognise the stress they create.

How does ego present itself in the workplace?

In the workplace when we notice certain signs like lack of collaboration, or a siege mentality or less alignment and division of the corporate vision, these are potential signals of ego in play. Siege mentality is where the team leader feels the team is the best team and goes ahead to climb all over other teams to achieve. Such a team and its leader are quite often aligned and share the corporate vision within the immediate team members but are unable to help connect it for other teams. In most scenarios ego in the workplace is the outer ego given the competitive nature of business.

Then there exists a scenario of those with underdeveloped ego. Contrary to arrogance, this leads to making the individual feel highly inferior and this insecurity quite often leads to someone having to overcompensate when under stress.

The action of overcompensation results in the person either showing how much smarter he or she is, through lots of academic qualifications, or how much better he or she is, by trying to outdo others.

It is hard to reach such people and break down the layers they have created internally in their own self. Their beliefs about themselves make them feel insecure.

There are different ways how an imbalance can manifest and not necessarily by only through arrogance.

Ego also comes about through the emotion of jealousy. The tendency to envy someone else's success is a sign that one's ego is not really balanced because the emotion triggers an inferiority feeling.

The ability in recognising your own self-worth, that you have the ability to contribute to the company, to the team, to the world, is something that if it's in place, then arrogance and ego would not be present.

In the business world, better leaders believe in themselves and try to bring people along with their vision. They focus on results and people and how to balance the two. Good leaders balance it well. As a leader, by being balanced in knowing yourself allows you to accept people and their capabilities and raise them accordingly.

To summarise, you need inner ego and belief in your inner self. It's the outer ego that detracts from you qualities...

Ego is a positive thing for people and yet it can be a negative too.

Too much of ego is arrogance and not enough ego means you are laid back.

Let's look at defining ego.

Inner ego is the inner belief or inner strength that is purpose-based and is looking at the self. Outer ego is actually arrogance where one is driving oneself to appear to be better than others in front of everyone else. It's to the world at large and not for any other benefit.

Another way to view ego is to have the understanding of who you are and what drives you and what makes you the person you are. To do this requires a bit of self-inquiry on what are your skills, traits, qualities, strengths, and weaknesses.

Following the self-belief or self-analysis route, it’s all about being true to yourself and not just doing things to look good against other people. Now, this happens in the business world a lot because you are competing against other executives to get promoted or are just playing an ego game of I am better than you!  So, there is a tendency to compare yourself to others but not with your inner self.

This causes a lot of stress and issues in the workplace. You have people who don't collaborate with others because they want to be on top of others and they will only collaborate when the purpose suits them.

From a coaching perspective, people who aren't aware of the impact their ego is having are easier to coach and influence, as once they are made aware it, it's like a revelation to them. But then there are people who are very aware of this and use ego as a power game. It is can be challenging to get them to recognise the stress they create.

How does ego present itself in the workplace?

In the workplace when we notice certain signs like lack of collaboration, or a siege mentality or less alignment and division of the corporate vision, these are potential signals of ego in play. Siege mentality is where the team leader feels the team is the best team and goes ahead to climb all over other teams to achieve. Such a team and its leader are quite often aligned and share the corporate vision within the immediate team members but are unable to help connect it for other teams. In most scenarios ego in the workplace is the outer ego given the competitive nature of business.

Then there exists a scenario of those with underdeveloped ego. Contrary to arrogance, this leads to making the individual feel highly inferior and this insecurity quite often leads to someone having to overcompensate when under stress.

The action of overcompensation results in the person either showing how much smarter he or she is, through lots of academic qualifications, or how much better he or she is, by trying to outdo others.

It is hard to reach such people and break down the layers they have created internally in their own self. Their beliefs about themselves make them feel insecure.

There are different ways how an imbalance can manifest and not necessarily by only through arrogance.

Ego also comes about through the emotion of jealousy. The tendency to envy someone else's success is a sign that one's ego is not really balanced because the emotion triggers an inferiority feeling.

The ability in recognising your own self-worth, that you have the ability to contribute to the company, to the team, to the world, is something that if it's in place, then arrogance and ego would not be present.

In the business world, better leaders believe in themselves and try to bring people along with their vision. They focus on results and people and how to balance the two. Good leaders balance it well. As a leader, by being balanced in knowing yourself allows you to accept people and their capabilities and raise them accordingly.

To summarise, you need inner ego and belief in your inner self. It's the outer ego that detracts from you qualities...

The go-giver influencer tackles what you want by focusing on the other person's interest.

It's not self-sacrificial but rather in such a way that all parties benefit greatly. Such influence creates both medium and long-term success and is like servant leadership.

What is influence really?

Influence can be defined on a couple of levels.

Firstly, at a basic level influence is the ability to move a person or persons to a desired action usually within the context of a specific goal.

Secondly, that is its definition but that is not its essence. The essence of influence is 'Pull'.

Pull as opposed to push. Influence is an attraction. Genuine influencers attract people first to themselves and then, and only then, to their idea. They do this not through being pushy or pushing their will on others but rather by doing the opposite--pull.

Five Secrets of Genuine Influence:

1.Master Your Emotions: When we are in control of our emotions, in control of our self, that is when we can take a potentially negative situation or person and turn it into a win for everyone involved.

1. Step Into The Other Person's Shoes: This is easier said than done simply because most of us have different size feet! In other words, we come from different ways of seeing the world. Yet as human beings we tend to believe that most people see the world basically the same way we do which is not correct.
2. Set The Frame:A frame is a foundation from which everything evolves. What it does is it sets the context of the situation to go as you'd like it to go.
3. Communicate With Tact And Empathy: Tact is defined as the language of strength. It takes a strong person to be able to speak tactfully because to speak tactfully means you're not just saying the first thing that comes to your mind or you are not reacting to someone's comment instead you are taking into consideration what you say and how you say it and how it's going to affect the other person. This takes strength.

[spp-tweet tweet=""Tact and kindness should not be confused with compromise""]

5.Let Go Of Having To Be Right: This may sound to be counter-intuitive in the sense that you don't care to be right. It's not that at all. You prefer to be right and you want to be right, you are going to prepare to be right. What it means is that you are not going to be emotionally attached to having to be right. Rather than making you less influential it does the reverse and makes you much more influential.

[spp-tweet tweet=""As human beings we want to be able to put a cause to certain things.""]

Based on everything you said Bob I’m sceptical about one thing—you mentioned about one motivating factor shared by every single person on earth. What is it?

This is from Harry Brown, who was a student of human nature. He didn’t try to change human nature. He worked with it and he was very successful. According to Harry the one motivating factor shared by all every single person on earth is every single person seeks happiness.

[spp-tweet tweet="“Every single person seeks happiness”"]

The second part of Harry's quote is--Happiness is relative.

In every other way as individuals we are different and we all understand happiness differently. Thus, we place different values on different things. So, what would bring happiness to one person would be meaningless to another.

This is where good leadership connects with influencing. Good leaders aren't just running around trying to keep people happy all day, but they want people to be content and have fun at work and at the same time be happy with what

Authenticity and being an authentic leader are expressions that leaders oft come across.

What really does being an authentic leader mean?

In this podcast we have an example that provides a scientific perspective to the need to be true to yourself.

There is a reason behind that.

It all started in a discussion about Einstein’s kinetic energy formula of

mass X velocity²/ 2.  For this equation let us take the individual as a specific energetic mass that includes all believes, shadows and perceptions that one carries around and which influences the weight in life. This is not the physical weight but the energy weight.

When we shine light on to these shadows and believes we come to realise that some of them are outdated. We can then shed these and be lighter in our energy weight.

This process starts to help one develop a different level of quality of consciousness and of awareness about self and the surrounding environment. It leads to being more focussed, authentic and more directive in one’s journey enabling to use less energy to create what is needed and also use less time to do activities.

Most of us can relate to this as we often feel like the eternal hamster in the wheel!

We just keep doing and doing. Working for eight hours, having issues that spike the adrenalin, creates so much adrenalin in our body that our body doesn't get time to restore itself to a balanced state.

This creates stress.

A lot of companies are looking at corporate wellness programs, work-life balance, and reduced work hours as means of combating stress because stress is harmful.

Whilst wellness programs are helpful it is leaders who often forget about themselves and the need for them to have a work-life balance.

[spp-tweet tweet=""This is because they are not being true to themselves due to the external influence on their ego of being a leader.”"]

We can call this emotional-data. This is the self-perception of the leader about how he or she thinks she is seen by others. This emotional-data is the mass in the kinetic energy equation.

By de-stressing it helps relax and remove perceptions created by the external influences. For some meditation does not work simply because of the immense amount of hormonal imbalance created by high adrenalin. The body is simply not able to relax to start getting back to being in a balanced state.

In a scenario like this the first thing is to try and do an activity that grounds one by doing something that really gives joy.

Doing this gets one to be more in touch with self, makes one more reflective and become true to oneself.

The emotional data, created through research of taking counsel or advice of people that you know to make a decision, is there but with a difference. It is not making that decision based on some emotional thought of what is it that others want or think you should be doing. It is more of connecting with oneself and reading one's gut and heart.

This provides a much clearer directive and less baggage and, therefore, you become more agile and are able to make decisions faster and in less time.

This is what coaches and counsellors do. They talk with people. At times just expressing the issue leaves the speaker feeling much lighter.

For those who do not have a coach or counsellor one needs to find ways, which are applicable and helpful, to de-stress and make decisions easier.

That makes it less is more by being able to reflect, balance oneself and take decisions effectively based on one's heart and gut.

Imagine that you’re walking down the road, and 200 meters in front, you see someone who you don’t really want to meet. It could be someone you had a bad disagreement with or simply can’t relate to. So, as you are on your walk you spot this person.

What are the physical changes you notice immediately?

You feel your shoulders going forward, like drooping down, and you have a sinking feeling in your stomach. What is happening is that your body is reacting immediately to your thoughts and emotions in your mind.

Imagine the opposite. You're walking down the road and you see someone who you haven’t seen for a while and who is your best friend.

What happens to the energy in your body?

It goes up significantly because you feel excited and energised.

What this shows is how you can use your body to check if what the mind is thinking is true or not.

Our minds, often, try to steer us in a direction of self-deception or makes us lie to ourselves.

How do we even begin to recognise this?

Let me illustrate with a personal example:

Every morning my partner and I are out for our morning walk. There is a bus driver who greets my partner but not I. Initially I was thinking it doesn't matter he doesn't greet me. That way I don't have to greet him either. At that moment the mind created a reaction of "Oh it doesn't really matter".

But then I realised that I’m lying to myself! The fact that I don’t get greeted and I don’t greet the bus driver back and I am okay with that is a lie that I’m telling myself.

The fact is it does matter to me that he doesn't greet me! And the reaction is the lie I am telling myself. That's where you lie to yourself!

What my mind did was to try and cover it up and make an excuse for it. This happens to us all so often.

When you take this scenario into a leadership context it amounts to stealing your own authenticity.

A lot of leaders are affected by outside influences. By what they think they should be doing rather than what they really want to do themselves internally. This is the point that ends up creating political games.

This is where the authenticity comes in. Being true to self, keeps you balanced and not in need to play any political games. Authenticity helps you lead your team the way you feel they should be lead. This creates a balance within and results in one being more healthy because of the alignment between what you feel, what you think and what you say.

There is harmony between mind, body, and soul. By connecting internally to yourself you connect with your soul and do what is needed to be done.

By not connecting internally you create a situation where you allow yourself to be influenced by the lies the mind creates. This makes it harder for other people to trust you because the body language shows and others pick it up.

Our physical bodies have an energy field. When we are near each other the energy fields intermingle and through this, our subconscious picks up opposite person’s energy and the resultant lack of trust comes about.

There are people in leadership roles who are designated leaders but who don’t want to be there. And it takes a lot of coaching to be able to get the person to realise that all he is doing is lying to himself and making himself unhappy.

When you realise this it’s a great feeling!

"This feeling within yourself, that recognition of your own truth and finally saying it and expressing it is such a great feeling! It helps you to have the courage to be true to yourself."

In our previous podcast on perception, we had highlighted how bias plays a role in shaping our perception and how we can avoid it. We continue that conversation into looking at Servant Leadership in today’s podcast.

Good leaders are leaders who have a very broad view of the world and can clearly see the big picture.

In leadership circles, there is a lot of talk about servant leadership. Servant leadership is a leadership approach where a leader has a facilitating and serving people mindset. It’s an approach where the leader sees his or her role as serving the team and not the position.

Such a mindset creates high energy levels within a team who, usually, have a collaborative vision or bigger picture and move towards achieving that. This enables a more effective performance.

Twitter Quote “ #servantleadership means you are on the same page, same level, you're helping people along the journey”

Historically leadership provided leaders with an aura of authority. The rise of servant leadership has come about as leadership has evolved in keeping with business needs.

Let’s take the service element a bit broader. Some of the things that help you become more of a servant leader is seeing how other people live and be more appreciative. A way to do this is through voluntary work.

The moment we step into voluntary work we start realising that there are many people who are far worse off than us. At the same time, the activities help us get in touch with parts of ourselves that we may not have yet faced and tend to humble us and put us in a mindset of serving. As we learn more about the information, we were not aware off, we tend to get a better understanding of ourselves. This awareness impacts our perspective and changes our perception. It helps a lot to see how you see your own life and the lives of others.

Serving the community creates a mindset of helping people and you see the rewards and value of doing so.

In the workplace, there’s no difference when you're leading a team. You get rewards and value by serving them as the team will respond because they are being recognised and appreciated for who they are and for their struggles and not just as an employee.

As in doing voluntary service, the servant leadership behaviour at work is the same because you are looking from the perspective of I'm here to serve the people and learn from them even if their circumstances are not good, I'm still learning from them and it's adding to my self-development. (Twitter quote)

The designated leader provides the vision and goes ahead in clearing the way and moves to the back, as a team member, collaborating and helping in the daily functions and by stepping back allows team members to be recognised. That is the servant leader mindset which is based on the function of being a leader and not on the function of being a positional leader.

Good leaders are able to merge these to be great servant leaders.

Bias is everywhere. In daily life and in the workplace.

Instead of judging people, from a preconceived set of ideas or perception, one should assess people with the view of learning something that one is not aware of.

Leaders assess their employees. Such assessment can have filters of being biased which is a result of perceptions.

Perceptions are built very much based upon the experiences we have had in life. Our upbringing, our programming, our culture in which we have been brought up or we live in and our values all feed into how we see ourselves, how we see others and how we see the world.

So, the question is how do I prevent myself from judging or seeing the world through my filters?

It has to do with awareness.

The idea would be to question oneself. Is what I am seeing or what I am perceiving really the truth?

The truth is we all have our own perceptions.

In a workplace conversation, the first thing would really be to accept that we all have our own perceptions. Therefore, our perception of a situation or someone’s achievements or their skills may be completely different from that of another person.

How does one bridge this and work through it?

Perceptions form with a lot of activity and input which then gets narrowed down as one makes assumptions and experiences add on different things over the years. It forms the bias we carry.

We are biased in the areas of hearsay, people saying something about someone else and somebody has this opinion and you haven’t met the person yet and you form an opinion. This is bias as its someone else’s perspective you are displaying by judging and putting them into a specific frame where they don’t really belong.

For leaders, it’s a challenge. A simple bias causes all sorts of problems in the workplace.

For example, take a simple bias that often occurs against physically attractive males or females. Because they are attractive people deliberately go out of their way to show they are not biased by either treating them harsher or they treat them in reverse that they think they are the greatest thing since sliced bread! Either way there is a bias. And all of it comes from perceptions.

People put facades up as a protective mechanism for insecurities for all sorts of things.

The key is to get under that guard and talk to the real person and good leaders can do that because they are trying to get the value out of their people and to grow those people.

In working through bias, one needs to take a step back and try to look at the bigger picture.

Try to see people for who they are in a bigger way than the obvious way. It's also important to broaden our view and see the world or see a certain situation for more than it is rather than just through our own little lens.

Whilst it’s easier said than done good leaders ask good questions because questions are the sign of an enquiring mind and it communicates that they value the person’s opinion.

Good leaders look for value in people.

Everyone has value. Good leaders bring out the best in people. They are always looking for how they can grow people and how they can bring that person out to be the best person they can be.

The key is awareness and being open to self-reflection and asking yourself so what else can I learn from wherever I am because everything in our lives is really an invitation to learn more about ourselves.

It’s a matter of having the patience and being brave to go against other people's perceptions and discover your own percept. Discover your own assessment of the person.

In today’s life, we are continuously bombarded with information. Our brain not only has to take in the data but also sort it so that it makes sense to us. Add to this the monkey mind, and we are heading towards stress, brain fog, indecision, and energy depletion.

Therefore, it is crucial to develop the capacity to allow the brain to relax, not to fire so that we can be here and present.

Being present, it is also easier to discern which information is relevant to us. This discernment isn’t possible being IN the mind, but definitively more natural to achieve by being aware of the mind.

Jane, “Wisdom and purity (of the mind) are accessible if we can get out of our way.”

A couple of minutes of reflection a few times a day for leaders are the go-to solution to find those needed answers – putting all the clutter aside, being open and receptive to insights and information from the subconscious.

"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."

Albert Einstein

Challenges in life can be an essential step for transformation and growth if we can resist rehashing the incident in the same old loops of our mind.

Taking a step aside to assess quietly, with neutrality, will help gain different perspectives and new insights. We can then incorporate old learnings with new ideas to climb up life’s ladder.

Jane explains, “When things aren’t going so well we default to the mind to solve them.”

When things go wrong, a solution needs to be found to prevent the same mistake from happening again. Ideally, these rules and regulations are then combined with awareness in the present moment in case a similar error occurs to be able to react out of the box.

Rather than following the rules blindly, presence in crisis enables one to access a different stream of consciousness and therefore offer creative solutions for the better.

While the conscious mind can process 7 bits of information consciously, the subconscious mind has access to 7 million bits of information. Being able to still your mind, achieving clarity, is definitively a skill to have to access the subconscious.

One “easy” way of getting into this state of a clear mind is regularly taking the time to sit still and observe one’s breath.

You need to breathe anyway – you may as well do that mindfully.

Antoinette

Today Ross and Antoinette met with Jane Grafton….

Jane is a certified coach (ICF) and senior trainer with the Potential Project, a leading global corporate-based mindfulness training company.

Jane shares the central insight she gained through her work with the Potential Project: the distinction between the talkative and the observing mind. The wandering, narrative mind goes off in all sorts of directions, and we have hardly any control over it, whereas that other part of us observes the wandering mind, and is a best described as a space of clarity and awareness.

Ross agreed, “Mindfulness is an important aspect of connecting with yourself, to be more balanced so as to harness the right energies.”

How can we sit in awareness? Jane shares, “the more we observe the wandering mind, the quieter it becomes over time.”

The more we can withdraw from distractions and cultivate being present in the current moment, the more we can see things with clarity in ourselves and others and experience things around us thoroughly and without resistance. We then don’t draw upon the past or the future. To experience this space, we need to be here, now with a clear mind.

To connect meaningfully with each other having a clear mind is essential, as otherwise our perception is tainted by judgment, thoughts, preconceived ideas and we don’t see the other for who she or he is.

Being present with what is at this exact moment; to accept and feel what is happening, and to be present with family members, co-workers, a crisis, my fear or my energy.

Jane, “We can’t develop this capacity to be present without some serious pausing practice.”

In this state of presence, valuable information is more likely to come to us compared to being in a hectic, panicky mode.

“Slowing down, reflecting on what is happening around you and taking in the situation for what it is, keeps the mind free of assumptions,” says Ross.

Please listen to this podcast to hear all about the “IT” and how it is essential in our life.

Book recommendation of Jane: ‘The Mind of The Leader’ by Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter

https://www.potentialproject.com/books/the-mind-of-the-leader/

Further links:

Jane Grafton: https://www.simplytorealise.com/new-gallery/

Potential Project: https://www.potentialproject.com

Mindfulness Professionals Network Singapore https://business.smu.edu.sg/mindfulness/Programmes/Mindfulness-Professionals-Network-Singapore

In our podcast, https://soul-inspired-leadership.com/episodes/ Janice Kobelsky defined “strength as high levels of energy, where we feel engaged and can create value.” We also briefly mentioned the fact that we face energy draining situations on a daily basis, often without being aware of it.

The things you do either give you energy or drain you. Choose wisely.

Anonymous

Ross: “It is your choice how you react to things.” Apart from reacting wisely the idea here is to become increasingly aware how people, situations or thoughts drain our life energy on a continuous basis without us even realizing.

Antoinette uses the metaphor of a bathtub, where apart from the tub drain there are small holes or cracks in the bottom of the tub, representing the thoughts, situations or people mentioned above. For example, the primary energy drain might be caused by a crisis at work, in that case, the energy drain is noticeable. The little holes are related to the things going on in the subconscious, slowly and unknowingly draining our energy day by day.

To preserve energy these holes and drains they need to be sealed. For this, Antoinette recommends becoming present several times during the day to do a check-in. This is to assess whether what you are engaged in either depleting or revitalizing your energy.

Ross explains that it is essential to allow time during the day to “reflect on how you are going today? What are your challenges? How do I feel at this moment?” This helps to control what happens during the cause of the day, so you can be proactive, rather than constantly reactive to the stimuli around you.

This daily check-in balances, and saves, a good percentage of your internal energy.

The more you engage in things that you are good at, and like, the better you become, the more your energy will increase and vice versa.

A great leader can identify this dynamic in themselves and within individual employees. They then are in a position to do the needful to help them turn any downward spiraling energy around. Once the employee recognizes their energy drains and can “plug” them, their energy and motivation will increase. This change will be systemic, in that, the whole team becomes so much stronger as well.

Our SIL Leadership Balancing Cards help plug these leaks by emitting balancing, as well as strengthening frequencies into the energy field of a person to boost their strengths and capabilities. Focusing on their strengths will also automatically increase their internal energy.

If you would like to find out quickly where your energy leaks are, contact us.

How do we identify these energy leaks? Being mindful and conscious of what is happening within you is the key. Jane Grafton, the guest in our next podcast, will share how mindfulness is an essential ability to gain insights and tap into one’s innate wisdom.