When It Makes You Cringe
Have you ever had a visceral reaction to a colleague where just to be around them made you cringe? Generally that discomfort is based in ego - your competitiveness gone haywire. We get triggered into fight-or-flight and our ego hates to lose.
Prepare before these encounters by anticipating the experience going well - where you shift from being defensive to being CURIOUS about HIS ego and need to be right or superior. Imagine if you could watch her arm wrestling her ego because that is exactly what is happening when people are mean - they are at war with themselves. Happy people do not hurt one another or seek attention.
Be the curious servant leader. “Jean, I sense that I’m not meeting your needs. I want to be helpful. If I were meeting your needs, what exactly would that look like?” She will likely not be able to be specific because she’s so tied up in attention seeking ego. If she is specific you’ll have great intel.
Your coach,
Mary Lee
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Dealing with Work Drama
Direct communication is the best way to go through life. But instead, people practice avoidance (ignoring the person or the problem) or triangulation (bringing in a third person to validate that your condemnation is correct).
Leadership expert Dr. Henry Cloud’s Law of Exposure says, “Life is better lived in the light — that is, things are better out in the open, even if these things are negative. Conflict or hard feelings cause a break in the connection between two people, and relationship can only be restored by communicating honestly.
One of the biggest traps that we all fall into at one time or another is getting stuck in the whirlpool of unnecessary drama.”
What I see is that avoidance of direct communication happens when we fear conflict. Rightly so. Everyone hates conflict. Except for those who thrive on drama - the most dangerously insecure people of all.
But what if we shifted the perspective from conflict to...
What do you do when someone is jealous of you at work?
Jealousy is a wicked emotion that will leave you feeling powerless and empty until you can be vulnerable enough to admit the root cause of it and accept yourself with all your imperfections no matter what anyone else thinks, does or has. Most of the time we are dealing with our own jealousy of people who have what we think we deserve – a better job, more authority, better executive presence, a better life. Self-acceptance without expectations is king.
Sometimes, however, we are bound by the jealousy of others. You can feel their resentment by the way they respond to you – ignoring, dismissing, dirty looks, excluding.
Six Thing to Do When Someone is Jealous of You
- Allow him his feelings. It’s his journey not yours. It is not your job to change his feelings. It is your job to get along with him in a productive manner.
- Be true to yourself and a servant leader to all, including her. Treat her as you would anyone else. Don’t vary...
How to Keep Your Cool When Someone Threatens You at a Meeting
Dear {{first_name}},
Have you ever been in a high stakes meeting or in a conversation where someone challenges your position and you immediately start to feel the world closing in on you? Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl describes that moment this way ~ “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
It’s important to have actionable strategies when our thoughts take over and rule our actions. You are not your thoughts.
The Pause Café
When you feel anxious or aggravated practice what my clients and I call “The Pause Café.” It starts with a deep breath where you ask yourself, “What is going on with me?” Invite in the tension by being curious to it, not turning away. What we run from chases us down until we deal with it. Identify where the tension sits in your body. You may...
The Seven Deadly Sins Leaders Commit That Hold Them Back
The Seven Deadly Sins is a group of vices within religious teachings that are known as excessive versions of one's natural faculties. Though identified by desert fathers in the third century as passions one needed to overcome, these shortcomings play out today in the workforce. And they can make you pretty scary to deal with.
- Pride that you are more capable than your employees. How gratifying is it to be dubbed ‘King Know-It-All’ when everybody hates your guts? When you make all the decisions and give continual directives it cuts off their independence and desire to take risks. Innovation suffers and disengagement grows. Hire good people and get out of their way.
- Sloth in your dedication to develop your personal growth and that of your team. You develop projects but how often do you develop your emotional intelligence? When was the last time you asked an employee, ‘Where do you see yourself three years from now? What project would you like to...