Boost Presence, Tame Your Emotional Triggers, and Erase Self-Doubt

Sarah  00:04 

Hi everyone and welcome to today’s webinar on boost presents tame your emotional triggers and II race self doubt, hosted by HRDQ-U and presented by Carlene Ferguson. My name is Sarah and I will moderate today’s webinar. The webinar will last around one hour. If you have any questions or comments, please type them into the question area on your GoToWebinar control panel. We’ll actually be using that a lot throughout today’s session. And you can also download today’s handouts. You can find the handouts on your control panel as well under the handouts drop down. Today’s webinar is sponsored by HR DQ reproducible training library the RTL offers more than 85 half day soft skills training courses, including how to manage your emotions increasing your emotional intelligence, why we struggle with tough, tough decisions and more. Each course includes instructor led classroom and self study versions the RTL it’s downloadable and customizable training. Learn more at HR DQ store.com/r T L. And today’s webinar is presented by Carlin Ferguson Carlin is an executive coach, behavioral chain expert and owner of propel forward her guidance is based on coaching, training and selecting hundreds of executives across diverse companies and her own journey through the executive ranks. Carolyn has also honored to influence future executives as an adjunct instructor for Northwestern University’s Leadership Program, where she received Northwestern School of Professional Studies Distinguished Teaching Excellence Award. Carlin has been featured guests on ABC News Radio, were in Business Radio, the Mel Robbins show and iHeartRadio. She resides in Orlando, Florida with her husband who works for Disney, they shamelessly lower their children and grandchildren into family visits with free park tickets. Thank you for joining us today. CAROLANNE. 

01:54 

Thank you. I’m excited. You’re all here. Now I’m going to be talking as you know about boosts presents tame your emotional triggers and erase self doubt. And I want you to know, although it sounds like three separate topics, they all have the same root cause and that is what we’re going to dive into. So have any of you ever been told you need to work on your professional or executive presence? I have. It wasn’t said that bluntly. But it was still very painful. I was working as a first time manager, I was working for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. And I was also the speech writer for our head of our agency. And one day he pulled me aside he said Carl, and I don’t experience you this way. But other people see you as unfriendly. unfriendly. Are you kidding me? I was shocked. I was embarrassed. And he said to me, you know, I don’t know what’s causing it. But you need to figure out what it is and work on that. And I said, my goodness, certainly. And I grabbed my stuff. And I started walking at a very fast hyperventilated power walk pace back to my office going unfriendly. Are you kidding me? I have friends. Oh, my gosh, I’m one of the most friendly people I bring in stray dogs and cats. I take care of them. I find them good homes. I’m the person who opens the door for other people. I’m the person that if you’re in the deli counter, and they’ve jumped over you, I will say to the deli service person, look, excuse me, this person is waiting in line, I am friendly. So I’m walking back and I’m justifying and that whole day it keeps popping in my head is still justifying. I go home that night, and I convinced my husband how friendly I am. And I’m telling him I don’t even like your mother and I still am nice to her. Finally, I get all of this justification out. Finally, take a deep breath and go. What am I doing that creates this perception? Well, if you worked for me, you would know because on a weekend that Monday morning, I don’t come in and ask you how your weekend was I just go Hey, where are we on that project? When it’s time to celebrate a great accomplishment that we all have done? I’ll you know take everybody out to lunch but it’s gonna be Hey, great job guys. There’s no heartfelt pride or emotion in that. And if I see you in the hall and chances are I don’t see you. Because my mind I’m up in here solving problems figuring things out, and you may take it as intentional but it’s not intentional. It is not that I don’t like you. It’s just that I honestly haven’t seen you. 

04:55 

And the reason for that is because at a surface level it’s what I I think a leader needs to do that they should be all about task and action. Now as a coach, and I know a lot of you have to go to people like me and say, Look, I need to coach you. What about relationship, you need to balance task and relationship. And I might kind of keep that in my mind. But it’s not going to change who I am at the core of that piece. Because where this come from, is deeper than that. Where this comes from at the next level is about my self confidence. It’s about me second guessing myself of not feeling confident of worrying if you like me or not. And deeper than that. It is based on some survival beliefs that I have about, you need to always be strong, and you should never show emotion. Well, how can I be friendly? When I have this unconscious survival belief that I don’t even know that’s there that says, Whatever you do, don’t show emotion? Where is the emotional connection of relationships in that? So a lot of us get this kind of feedback that you’re not friendly enough, or you’re too much of something or you too little of something. So whether that feedback is hey, you need to speak up more? No, no, wait a minute, you need to be more succinct. You need to be more assertive, Oh, please, could you be less assertive, be more collaborative? Oh, my gosh, stop asking everyone for their opinion and just make a decision or be more direct, or, you know, what could you be a little less direct or coming across a little too harsh, regardless of where and what kind of feedback you are getting? The core is deeper than just a surface coaching. And the remedy is not about skills training. It’s not about another EQ course, it’s not about that traditional coaching, it’s not about mindful exercises, to find the source of what is creating these emotional triggers in our leaders, we have to go further, we have to go deep, and understand the seemingly never ending cycle of self doubt, and how it destroys executive presence, we have to understand how emotional triggers erode your confidence. And we need to discover what is lurking below the surface of your confidence, your emotional triggers and your presence. So let’s do that. Now, before we go into that, realize that when I talked about myself, I thought all these things about me, were great. I thought that my high task orientation, you know, orientation, my perfectionist Control Freak was a good thing. I thought it’s what got me noticed. I thought that being hyperventilated and pumped up and making certain that I didn’t drop a ball was a really good thing for the organization. You know, I was gonna equate all of that with success. I had been promoted very quickly. Obviously, there were wonderful things about this. So sometimes, as leader, we’re just a little too intense. And then we bring it home, we’re the same way at home, we just are hyped up as well. So that you know, our parenting, our partnering becomes this intensity, and by the weekend, we are exhausted. How many of you can relate to that? How many superheroes are on the call today? So we’re going to look at a poll 

Sarah  08:55 

that we have up and running. So you can submit your answer you can add to the survey there and vote. And then if all of these are applicable to you, you can type in the questions box there all of the above. And we have responses streaming in we’ll give you another 15 seconds before we share those results on the screen. 

09:22 

We have a lot of exhausted perfectionist. I can relate to that. 

Sarah  09:31 

Okay, great. Let’s see there. Let’s share those results that we have coming in. Awesome. All right, can you see those Carolyn 

09:41 

I can see them off to my right. Should they see them on the screen? Oh, there we go. Yep, we can see that. Great. Good. Good. So we’ve got 39% is perfectionist so common, right 30% of us are exhausted. Because we just have trying to keep everything not let the ball drop. making certain that we still look good that we have our reputation, whatever is going on in our head about that pumped up on adrenaline is only 9%. That’s pretty good. Type A drivers 13% control freaks 10%. So pretty good. We got a lot of superheroes on this call that can relate, relate to all of this. So let me take us into kind of what is going on with us, right? So Little did I realize that this pumped up version of myself made me prone to emotional triggers that emotional hijacking, and it would lead me to judging others and judging others harshly. And when I was judging others, I’m certainly not building relationships. Now I could see this in myself. But it really took me coaching another leader, to really understand that this is shared, right? This is a human experience. So I was asked to coach, an executive who was extremely bright, and the company wanted to keep him because he was so bright. And I’m sure a lot of you can relate to this story if you have to coach people, right. But he was creating a hostile work environment, he was humiliating his employees. And the first time I met with him, he spent 45 minutes, they don’t giving me a chance to say anything. But justifying why he didn’t need a coach and why he was such a great leader. Now, he didn’t think he was telling me a lot. But he was telling me a ton in those 45 minutes, and the anthem 46 minute mark, he finally stopped to catch a breath. And I took that on an opportunity to say to him, You know what? I can hear how much you care about this organization. I can hear about how much do you want to be a great leadership. And with that, a great leader. And with that, the balloon popped, he took in a deep breath, and exhaled all this stress and anxiety said yes, thank you. You are right. That’s exactly what I’m trying to do. And from that point, we were able to start to dive into these underlying causes of this emotional hijacking. And this actual lack of self confidence that went into it when he had all this bravado. And so we ended up with a leader who became very self aware, and then a thrilled company because they were able to keep this leader. Now I’m sure you’re curious as to how I went about that. So let’s dive into the seemingly never ending cycle of self doubt and how it destroys executive presence. First, executive presence, what is this elusive term? What is executive presence? And where does it come from? Well, like many of you, I oversaw succession planning. And so when I looked at those succession candidates, you notice that it’s not about competencies. They’re all really highly competent leaders, if they’re on the succession plan. What is the differentiator between these candidates is about behavior. 

13:28 

And it’s the thing that is either derailing them or pushing their readiness further out. So executive presence is really about a whole host of different behaviors. And here are some of those, we expect emotional intelligence, right? We expect confidence, we expect these leaders to role model even in the most difficult times, we expect them to use good judgment and be level headed. We expect them to hear others at a deep level that here’s not only the concerns, and their ideas, but also the emotions behind it. And we expect deep self awareness. Now there is more executive presence presence. And please go ahead and put that into the question area, if you can think of other things that come up for you. But it’s all behavioral, everything. What we’re looking for is those behaviors. When we are stressed, we can’t do those things. Even if at times were wonderful, Adam, we can’t access that when we get stressed. And that is because when we get stressed, we go into fight or flight. When we go into fight or flight. All of our higher thinking goes in goes out the window and we go into more of an attack mode. This is where we start judging other people. This is where we start blaming our direct reports. Our P Here’s our boss, the company, whoever it is, that is what’s happening. And so it starts with this negative mind chatter, this judgment that goes on. And what you will notice, because we really don’t notice yet, but will that we’re in fight or flight is that you start to notice some signs in your body changing. Most of us don’t notice that the hyperventilation, that shortened breath is happening, we might notice tense muscles, we might notice our shoulders rising, some people turn red, some people, their heart rate increases, we have flushing of the skin, perspiration, that gut feeling in your stomach that feels like there’s a pit there, whatever that is for you is what we first start noticing when we go into fight or flight. And then at that point, what happens is our higher thinking brain that want to problem solving, compassion, empathy, curiosity reasoning, is shut down. And we jump into our midbrain, our midbrain that has one job to do keep this body alive. And this goes right into what is safe, what is unsafe. And that is where all that judgment starts to come from, is we are looking quickly to assess what is around us. When we are in this fight or flight. We are prone to impulsive actions, things like judging others and acting on that judgment. So maybe we say something, and it’s rude, or we get angry, or we pound the fist or we stand up to intimidate the other person. Or maybe it isn’t a fighter behavior, it’s a flight behavior. And we back down, and we go silent. And we actually are trying to leave the situation. And these impulsive actions are misaligned to our values. As a leader, we want to be seen as that cool, confident leader, we want to be seen as somebody who can bring forth our thoughts in a very constructive way. We want to have that reputation of being friendly of being somebody who builds relationships. And when this misalignment to how we want to see ourself happens, then that leads to guilt and shame. We feel awful about it. And that reduces our self esteem and confidence even more. And then this outer loop just keeps going. So then we question ourselves, am I as good a leader as I thought I was? Well, now I’ve got more negative mind chatter, and that leads to more impulsive actions. And I tend to get into fight and flight more often. And I’m back in to this circle. 

18:03 

Now I’ll give you an example of myself. So I am talking to my manager. And it’s about a project that the executives are putting a lot of lot of pressure on us about. And it is supposed to be due next week. And we have to have our recommendations ready. And this manager has been out socializing this project with a lot of different executives. So I bring the person into my office and I say, Hey, where are we on this? Now this manager says to me, Well, I’ve been busy socializing. And I’ve got a lot of different opinions. But I’m going to tell you, Carl, and there is a lot of emotion around this. And everybody’s got different ideas. I say, okay, so what are your recommendations? Well, I’m just not comfortable with that. You know, I think there’s just too emotional, too much emotion about this thing. I think we should wait. I don’t think we should move forward. And I am like, oh, my gosh, you’re freaking kidding me. Right? You’ve got to be kidding. There’s always a motion under every project, you have to be able to move forward to make a decision. But right now, I’m not saying it. It’s all up here in this mind chatter. And I’m judging this leader as being weak as being incompetent because they can’t make a recommendation after they’ve spent all this time data gathering data. And then it happens that mind chatter takes over and I say to the person, this is unacceptable. I need you to come up with recommendations. You need to get a backbone, figure out what recommendations have to occur. We have known for three months the deadline on this and I don’t care about the emotions, there’s always emotions associated with it. I need you to make recommendations. And this manager becomes very quiet And then I start to see a terraforming in his eye. Well, now my mind chatter goes really crazy. Oh my god, are you kidding? He can’t take a little feedback. You’ve got to be kidding that he’s just so weak. He’s showing all this emotion. How the world does he expect to be promoted in the future if you can’t. Standard chatter, chatter, right. And then finally, what seems like a minute, but it’s only a few seconds, I take a deep breath on it. Just say, Okay, a little too sternly. All right, I need you to work on this. Now. Go back work on your recommendations. We’ll meet tomorrow, I want it finalized. It leaps. Now, could I have handled that better? Yes, definitely. But I was so emotionally triggered. And it wasn’t until later that day, that I went, Oh, my God, I am such a horrible manager. Why did I say that? Why did I do that? Why didn’t I do this? What is wrong with me? And we’ve all been there. Right? So when you think about one of the last times you got emotionally triggered? What were some of the things you did to yourself? Did you shame yourself by judging or blaming, you know that person? Right, so now you’re upset that you had done that? Did you feel horrid for justifying your position? Did you blame your response on the situation that you were placed on? Did you beat yourself up for not asserting yourself more? Because maybe you went the other way than I did? Right? And you went more into the flight? And you said something like, Hey, it’s okay. Don’t worry about it. And then later you get mad because I should have held him accountable. Why didn’t I just hold him accountable? Or use do? Did you really do nothing? Because you still believe that you were justified. All right, let’s take a minute for this ball. 

Sarah  21:58 

Right, we have the Poli, we have responses streaming in so you can submit your answer and then we’ll get those results up on the screen. Give you 20 more seconds here. Okay, great. I’ll share those results now. 

22:43 

Okay, so, yeah, beat yourself up for not asserting yourself more. So a lot of times we do get into that flight instead. Right. And I should have held the person more accountable, not in the way I did. Right, but still should have held that person accountable. And the poll, I think just went away. But it also says there’s 26%, that shame yourself for judging and blaming that other person. That’s common. That’s exactly what I did. And it feels horrible. You know, even if you’re just justifying or blaming, it’s feels awful. It doesn’t fit, how we see ourselves as a leader and who we want to be. And that’s where that mismatch to our values as a leader comes in. So let’s stop that horrible cycle. Let’s go even deeper. Okay, look, let’s look at how those emotional triggers erode your confidence. Now, when that happens to us, when we get in this cycle, it can be very devastating to our confidence over the time, because after all, this is not how we wanted to show up. So there are eight sources of self doubt that are very common. And I know that I had several of these back then. And I want you as I go through these to find figure out which one are yours. So the first one is imposter syndrome. You just don’t feel like you’ve earned a seat at the table. Even though you’ve already been invited to that table. People have already told you, you’re worthy of that. But you just feel that maybe somebody else is better than you. And so you just don’t feel comfortable. The second is self sacrificing. Oh my gosh, you’re so good at helping other people get your needs and you bend over backwards to make sure they have what they need. But you’re unfortunately and unintentionally not getting your own needs met. And what happens over time is that you can ask politely to get your needs met and ask politely and ask politely. But then when it doesn’t happen Then you’re prone to trigger, because then you just get angry. It’s like I’ve done so much for you. Why can’t you do this one thing for me? And that can erode our confidence as well. There’s second guessing. Right? So I second guess my opinions. I second guess why I did things. And I wonder, what are my the decisions I’ve even made going to stick? Or are they going to unravel after I make them? Not good enough. You just feel as if you can’t meet the expectations that you think somebody else has a view. No matter how hard you try, no matter what you do? invisible? Look, you don’t want to bring too much attention to yourself, because you’re not sure how people will respond to you. So you’d rather have your work speak for you. Somebody should notice how hard I work. Somebody else should notice how good I am at what I do. Perfectionism Now we already saw we had a lot of perfectionist in that here, right? So really, it is about making sure we get everything perfect. Don’t let a ball drop. And even if we get feedback later that says, hey, you over did we still beat ourselves up? Because dang it, I still didn’t get it perfect. Coming across too strong. Now, if this happens to you, you sometimes get seen as arrogant or egotistical. And it’s quite confusing, because you’re like, but I don’t feel that way. That’s not who I am. I still feel like I have to prove myself. And then eight being stuck in the past you renew marae about your past, you go back and it’s like watching old movies. But you’re playing out what if I had done this? What if I did that would things have ended up differently? And it’s not helpful, because you can’t change that past. And even though you know that you still go back there. So as I mentioned, I had quite a few of these, which ones are yours? So if you can go into questions for me and just put in there what you have as your forms of self doubt there might be what is just one or you have many. 

Sarah  27:33 

Let’s see here. So we had some responses come in. We had we have some imposter we have a lot of imposter syndrome syndromes there. It’s common. Yeah. All of the above and self sacrificing all eight. 

27:51 

Yeah. Yeah. Now what I want you to know about this, as you are not alone. When I do coaching on this work, these are people I’m working with from these companies, this is common, this is human, right. So don’t, don’t beat yourself up about this as well. Right? We don’t need to do that to ourselves. This is a human experience. In fact, if you’re successful, you’re dealing with the things that I’m talking about because those same things that create your triggers, also bring your greatest gifts that got you promoted that got you noticed. So it is a very human experience to have those self doubts. self doubt costs us a lot. It costs us a lot personally, it costs a lot financially. So when I think of what my self doubt costs me, I couldn’t even be in the moment I was so much of having to control everything being that perfectionist that it was hard for me to even sit still my husband just like couldn’t you just sit still read a magazine, oh, my god that last two seconds I’d be having to accomplish something else do something else. Right. So I wasn’t really truly present. And I lost joy at work. Because I’m always on edge. I’m always wondering what balls kind of drop. So where was the fun in that for me? You know, and then other people there’s some other losses are career advancement, because they’re just not coming across as confident as somebody else next to them that has either equal skills or even less skills than they do. At work, there’s a lot of costs involved too. You know, we have things like that. That manager I talked about that executive who was creating a hostile work environment, you have turnover, you have adverse working conditions. There’s potential legal costs associated than that. So self doubt can cost us a lot at work at home. in our personal lives, so what does self doubt cost you today? Again, go into the question area and answer that for me. 

Sarah  30:22 

Have now we have the responses coming in. We have trusted myself. Literally a smaller salary. Yeah. Productivity. Time, holds me back from being my best self join confidence, peace, self trust, reputation, peace of mind. Lack of confidence respect, not embracing my own gifts and talents. Oh, yes. Few more here advancement get things done on time recognition for my work, everything growth, professional success. And we’ve plenty more in here. But yeah, great comments coming through. Yeah, 

31:03 

exactly. Look how much this costs us. It’s crazy, right? Where we could end up figuring out where is this coming from. So let’s go deeper again. Right. So now we are going to be talking about what is lurking below the surface of your confidence, those emotional triggers in your professional or executive presence, we’re gonna go real deep here. Because when we are trying to fix ourselves at this level, this outer ring of all of this stuff, it doesn’t work. And we all know that to some extent, because we’ve tried different things, looking at yourself in the mirror, telling yourself, you’re great every day, oh my gosh, that doesn’t work. It seems to help for a couple of days. And then you’re back to that circle. Again, wearing designer clothes, I see people do this, they try to like pump themselves up, you know, the me I see the meal be whatever. So they start dressing a certain way. Or they drive a luxury car in order to pump themselves up. But it doesn’t work. It’s temporary solutions. I mentioned the skills training isn’t going to work because this isn’t skills base. Also, if you’ve ever heard of reframing, reframing and the skills help, right, and reframing can help, but it is not going to get to the source of this reframing as a cognitive behavioral therapy process where you re change your thinking to look at it differently. So if I have low confidence, let’s say I’m second guessing my decisions, I just remind myself that well, nobody has the right answer. No one has a crystal ball. And I’m just reframing my thinking. But I’m still having that feeling as if I should second guess all of my questions. It doesn’t help. Or like what I did, right with the unfriendliness. As okay, I’m so logical and analytical in my process, and Carlin, just insert a step where you look at people’s feelings hurt people’s feelings here. And you’ll be just fine. Well, great. So now I show up on Monday, I asked you how your weekend was, but as soon as you start giving me this long story about how you took your grandkids to the zoo, and it was so cute when they were feeding the giraffes, oh, my mind is going oh my god, how long is this gonna take, we need to get back to task. I have not changed who I am at the core. It’s like putting icing on a broken cake. From a distance, it might look fine. But when you get up close, you see it’s just a facade. And inside, there’s something that still needs fixing. So all of those types of things that we try are just working this outer loop, which is all symptoms, it’s not getting to the core. So we have to go below that surface to figure out where is this coming from. And where this is coming from is your subconscious fears, and your subconscious beliefs. And those fears and beliefs were set up from your early life experiences, your past experiences. And the crazy thing about this stuff is it’s under lock and key. It was created in that midbrain. And we found that it was so helpful to us that it was never to be questioned. And we shut it off with lock and key. And that’s why a lot of us aren’t even aware of what those are. And yet they are they are chipping away at our self esteem undermining our leadership and we just question Where the heck did that come from? Why did I go there? So in order to figure that out, we have to start looking at some of our patterns when Did we get emotionally triggered? And when we got emotionally triggered? What was going off on our head? What was that mind chatter that crazy little squirrel in our head that’s shaking his tail doing its warning system and going for me, you know, I was just going crazy. And all that mind chatter is in my head. And then those times when your mouth gets taken over, like some ventriloquist, has got their hand in there. And you say those regrettable cringe worthy things that you later regret. Now, in my story, could you hear my fear? Could you hear what my squirrel was talking about? 

35:45 

Weak, illogical? Could he be so we get a backbone, oh my gosh, deal with the emotions, right? All of that starts to see a pattern. Now when your squirrel went off, maybe it wasn’t weak or ears or illogical. Maybe it was about this person’s impractical. They’re irresponsible. They’re clueless, they’re manipulative, they’re stupid, they’re egotistical, whatever that is for you. Whatever that mind chatter is for you is a hint into where this is coming from. And then afterwards, of course, we all enter that, why did I do that? Why did I say that? What was I thinking? Now, I can realize you’re not alone on this. It doesn’t make a difference. If you’re a manager, you’re a professional, you’re a senior executive, you’re a CEO, tongues of CEOs, right? It is what made us successful as well. So you’re gonna find it across the whole group of successful leaders. Because what happens is, when we were children, so let’s get to where this was really formed, right? Because I said past experience, I said, when you were children, right, we didn’t have access to that frontal lobe, that whole higher thinking is not fully developed. Until our 20s, the brain has not fully myelinated until our 20s. And that myelination, that she thing that has to occur, make sure that these signal signals get to the parts of the brain that help us with that empathy, compassion, problem solving, deeper thinking logic. So as a kid, we had to store things in always, never terms. Always do this, never do that. It’s the way we were even taught as children never touch a hot stove, or you’ll get burned. Always look both ways before crossing the street. Or you could get killed. And there’s fear in each of those. Right? And so all of us have our personal story of what created this. But unfortunately, a lot of it’s at the unconscious and the subconscious until we bring it up. So for myself, when I had a look at why am I so unfriendly? Why am I so scared of the motion, I have to go back to my childhood and I had a dad who had mental health issues, and he was prone to rage attacks. And when he would do a rage attack his his goal seemed to be to get you to just not only cry, but wail, right. And then it would be like he’d suck all this power energy out of you. So one day, I stood there defiantly hands by my side. And I looked at him and I thought you will not break me. You will not break me and I did not shut a tear. Probably looked pretty nasty. But I did not shut it to her. I did not respond. And it worked. He didn’t get what he wanted. He didn’t get that power boost. And he walked away. And the next time I did the same thing, and it worked. So I created a survival for belief for myself have never let anyone see you cry. Don’t show your emotions. Never, ever let them see you weak. Now look what’s going to happen when I say don’t show your emotions. I only have one choice now always be logical. So that’s the flip of it. And so I had I created this and it kept me safe. It kept me safe through that childhood. But it no longer fits my adult experiences. being emotionally connected people is important to me. And yet here is this thing going off in my subconscious, my unconscious at the time that I’m not even aware of that’s undermining my leadership. Now, it can come from well meaning parents so sometimes you see a leader who was told you know you better be classy, Alex historian you have to really put the effort and you want to do 110% On your results, or you’re going to end up on the street 

40:08 

as a hobo, and you’re not going to have any money. And then life’s going to be really hard. And so they form a different survival belief. Or I had one leader, who allows me to share his story where his teacher, when he was just a little kid, they were doing one of these pageant plays. And the teacher took all of the roles and he folded them up, and she put them into a hat. And they all pick their roles. And he was such a shy kid. He said, Oh, please, please, please just let me be in the course. And he picks his role. And he finds out, he’s bullied. And he’s devastated. And it goes to the teacher. And he begs and pleads with her, please don’t make me the lead. Let me trade with somebody, there’s somebody else who wants to be the lead? And she says no. And so he goes home, and he pleads with his parents. And they tell him no, because they’re proud, he’s going to be the lead, he goes in the bathroom, he throws up, he’s just sick as a dog about this for days, then the date of the play, his mom and his teacher have to drag him onto the stage. Can you imagine what his survival beliefs became, never let them discount me with I have something important to say. And so in a meeting here is this mild mannered leader. But if he doesn’t feel he’s being heard, boom, you’re not listening to me. If somebody in the group he believes is not being heard, boom, he goes to fight for them as well. Because we’re such a zealot about our beliefs that they we think they not only apply to us, they apply to everyone. So my project manager should never ever cry, because that’s unsafe. That’s how much of a zealot we are about these beliefs. But we have to be able to get in there and unlock them to be able to become the leaders that we want to be. And that is the only way we’re going to catch and tame that crazy little squirrel that goes off in our heads. And that is the only way I’m going to be that friendly ostrich instead of the one who can’t allow emotional connection. So to do this, I used to do this with my and I still do with private coaching clients, but then I decided to create it as a group experience. And it’s small groups, I call them tribes. And there’s about you know, four, depending on what level they’re at, because they go in with a peer group, there can be four to about eight people in one of these journeys. And they go through this process of doing this work and uncovering all of this and two hour coaching sessions along the way on each on each of these. But you can see, we’re looking at first we use the Harrison assessment, figure out where you are you score wise and self esteem and power. And then we start looking into your thoughts about ego and motive and confidence. And are you the fighter or the pleaser? And and we’re challenging your unconscious fears and bringing those up, what’s your first level of fear, second level fears, right? What is causing some of us, then we get into what are your survival beliefs, and really identifying that revising those to fit who you want to be as that leader who you want to be as this adult, and then forgiving and appreciating your past because as I mentioned, it also brought you your greatest gifts. So we appreciate it. And we forgive ourselves for those outbursts we had, because we didn’t know what we know, at week nine, you know before in our life, and then we celebrate who we are, and the broader implications to our biases and diversity and everything else. And then we meet up again several weeks later. So that’s the journey that I take people through to get to this process of being able to uncover it. It has to be like slowly peeling back all of those layers so that it’s safe for people to move through that. And you can find some video testimonials if you’d like of the racing doubt.com. Now there’s lots of wonderful key advantages to this approach. And I’d like to know out of curiosity, what would you appreciate most of doing something like this with you know, your leaders or with yourself. What you know really kind of grabs your attention that it dresses root cause rather than symptoms that allows for deep self awareness and in a safe space, that it’s about permanent change. That I think that those therapists are wrong that you can’t change a person I’ve seen it. There’s tons of testimonials is how you can change that explores that unconscious bias the mindfulness, the diversity of thought And then it appreciates each individual’s journey and who they are and why they are who they are. 

Sarah  45:10 

And we have some responses streaming in, we’ll give you 20 more seconds here, before we share the results on screen. 

45:26 

This is great. So most people really are really resonating with the root cause rather than the symptoms, because we’ve all tried so many different techniques to try to address this. And they’re so temporary, right, so we’ve got 35% on the root cause, and then the creating permanent positive change, so you don’t have to keep going back to it. Well, thank you so much for for filling that out. Because that’s helpful for me to know as well. Now, what I’d like to do is to give you a couple of quick tips to start you on your journey. And then we’ll open it up to questions. So how can you just start down the path of this on your own first, remember, it’s all about fight or flight, when you go into that mind chatter and you’re getting ready to lose it. Notice that you are in fight or flight. And the way to do that is really start to learn what is your first noticeable sign that you’re getting into fight or flight for me, it’s my shoulders rising, they go up to my ear lobes. Now, why is that? Because it’s physiological, it goes back to ancient times, I am getting ready to punch somebody. So my arms have to come up to be able to do that. I’m not going to do that. But I’ll do it with my tongue instead of my fist, right. So if I can notice that, I can get those shoulders down, and I can start to go whoa, wait a minute, the next thing I want to do as soon as I learn this, so pay attention to your body, right and really figure this out for you. Then take three deep breaths. Now, this is not some guru thing. It’s brain science. When I take three deep breaths, I tell my midbrain, I am not being attacked, you can calm down, if I’m breathing deeply, it knows I’m not being attacked, it can move back up into this higher thinking brain where I can have empathy, compassion, reasoning, problem solving. And a perfect way to go is once I’m back up there is to switch my thought to curiosity. And even say, I’m curious. As soon as you say, I’m curious in the brain, you open yourself up, you’re not converging on a solution. You’re not in judgment. You’re I’m curious if I had stopped and said, Okay, I’m curious as to why you feel you can’t get a recommendation, and why all of these different emotions are keeping you from moving forward. I could have had a conversation with that manager, I wouldn’t have jumped to just get it done. So always use that. I’m curious, that’s extremely helpful. So I want to thank you all for joining me, please, please reach out to me on LinkedIn, or email me at Carlin at propel forward.com There’s two websites there, you can check out the work we do. And I really appreciate that. Did you want to open it up for questions? Or do you want to move to the next slide, 

Sarah  48:35 

we can open it up for questions. So we have about 10 minutes here. If you have any questions, drop them in the questions box. And we’ll have time to answer a few of those for you today. And our first question here comes from Alex. And Alex asks, Are there any traits you consider before determining if someone is ready to do this deeper work? 

48:59 

Yes, eggs? That’s a great, great question. If someone is extremely defensive, like the person I had mentioned earlier, it’s better to do some initial steps to help them deal with and become open to feedback. And you can do that by giving them maybe a highly valid self assessment like the Harrison or you might want to use a 360 for them to get feedback from you know, their direct reports, peers, key stakeholders, etc. I love true scores because they’re set to the different level. I don’t sell these so you can just reach out to them. But I love it because there’s one for executive there a couple for executives level manager level etc. But I always find doing those are really, really helpful because it’s going to open them up to accept the feedback and then they’re more open to looking at themselves. 

Sarah  49:59 

Right and it’s an Next question here comes from Amy. And Amy says this requires some deep sharing. How do you ensure confidentiality, 

50:07 

it does require some deep sharing. So there’s a lot of things done for with four ways come to mind. First, each participant before they participate is agreeing to confidentiality agreement, recognizing that everybody has their story. And it’s their personal story and not to share. They none of the people who are participating in the tribe come from the same company, unless it’s a huge fortune 500, where they’re never going to work together. So we make sure that that occurs. We have all the attendees only use their first name. We don’t have anybody, even in introductions mentioned where they work, or their job titles, of course, that’s done to to keep them from posturing with each other. Because they’re here, just as individuals sharing their stories and connecting at that much deeper level. So and then I don’t record any of the coaching sessions, because who you are in week one, I guarantee you is not who you are when you finish the journey. So we don’t need any records of anything. And all of that helps fill that confidentiality. Also, you see just people connect very quickly through this process. So they care a lot about the other people they go through. And they tend to keep those networks going afterwards. 

Sarah  51:27 

And this next question here is from Chris. And Chris asks, How do you handle a team member who is a star employee, but a dreadful team member, they’re consistently rewarded by senior leaders, but their direct supervisor has a horrible time keeping staff because of this individual? 

51:44 

Oh, okay. All right. So to get that initial feedback with that person, because they probably have no idea of how they’re even coming across, I would still do a 360 with them geared toward team members, right. So not just team members, but key stakeholders. So they can start to see also how different they are. The other thing is you could for the manager, they could start to have some of the conversations with them, if the managers willing to be a little bit more direct about what those perceptions are, if they don’t want to go down that 360 path, right. And I would start there because they need to understand there’s perception just like me being told, I was unfriendly. Nobody wants to hear it. But I tell you, I am a totally different person because of it. And I think that head of our agency all the time for being so honest with me, right? So if you can get your manager to be so honest, to see that they’re helping the individual not hurting the individual, by giving them that feedback and helping them find ways to start dealing with what’s causing that. 

Sarah  52:58 

Great. And then I think one more question for today, coming from John and John asks, Is it coaching each week? Or is there other work that is involved? 

53:10 

Yeah, there is other work that’s involved. So even though it looks like just you know, two hours of coaching each week, they are actually watching a video on the topic. And then doing some deep insight work, we actually recommend and most people do a short meditation before the Insight work, because we are unlocking that subconscious. So they do that. And then they come in with all that kind of insight work done. And then we also encourage people to keep a gratitude journal of the changes they are seeing in themselves. Most have never done that before. But it really shifts your energy, especially when we’re using it as a targeted thing to say, what have you seen change in you? Where have you seen that you didn’t respond? Were in the past you would have and some of those other incredible changes. So there are some work, it takes them about one to two hours a week before you come in to the coaching. 

Sarah  54:07 

And we actually have another question that slipped in here. I’d like to answer for you today, Megan. And the question is, as an individual of a team, how do I tell my manager I am working on my executive presence? And how can they help me progress in my career this advancement? 

54:24 

Yeah, so I would just use some of those behavioral things with your manager to say, look, I really want to work on my executive presence. What are some of the behaviors that you see in me that I can improve upon? And do you know any of the reputations that are out out there about me that are good and also on the negative side that I can work on? And then you know, come join us, right? Come and join us for the journey and do that deeper work on yourself? But I would start there, just get that open, honest feedback. If you’re willing to disclose first you You’ll get more information from your manager. So if I say, look, I think that my team is, you know, not responding well to me. And I’ve seen this tension in this room. And if you can start to label some of those things, like when I got up in my head, and I went, What am I doing that makes me unfriendly? Oh, my God, it was like a floodgate, right. I don’t say how was your weekend, I don’t notice people in the halls. If I share that with my boss, they’re going to be more open to giving me real, honest feedback. If I go in and I just say, hey, you know, I’d like some behavioral feedback. How am I doing? That leader has no idea how open you are to that. 

Sarah  55:47 

Great, and that does conclude our q&a portion of the webinar today. Thank you so much for your time today, Carolyn, and sharing some really great information with our audience. And thank you all for attending today’s webinar. You can get your certificate of completion by scanning that QR code there. And with that, that does bring us to the end of our webinar today. Thank you, Carolyn, and thank you all for participating in today’s webinar.