Unlocking Potential: NLP Tools for Leadership Success

I always say without really strong emotional intelligence skills, you cannot be an effective or successful leader.

Because emotional intelligence, for me, I pictured it being the very heart, the very centre of what leaders need in order to do what they need to do and engage with their teams in a particular way to be really effective and successful, not just as individuals, but how they then take their team on the journey to success or how they take their team on the journey through change effectively. So I always say emotional intelligence skills, they just, they can't be underestimated.

Welcome to the Executive Connect podcast, a show for the new generation of leaders. Join Melissa R. Scarg as she speaks to a wide variety of guests that bring new insights into leadership, prosperity, and personal growth. While no one has all the answers, by building a community of open-minded and engaged leaders, we hope to give you the tools you need to help you find your own path to success. Welcome to the Executive Connect podcast.

I'm so excited to have Kylie VanLin with us today to talk about NLP Fergie. Now Kylie, before this podcast today, I was doing some reading on NLP therapy and I read that 83% of people who use NLP therapy have a reduction in anxiety. Is that true? Well I can only speak from my experience going through as a master practitioner, but also my clients and that sounds accurate to me as far as client experience and my own as well because it is, it's a really powerful modality for psychotherapist.

So yeah, I think that's why it's gaining a lot of traction and popularity now. That's unbelievable numbers. So leadership is a big passion of mine and I've been reading recently on NLP. So from your perspective, can you explain how NLP can be leveraged to enhance leadership skills and decision making for people that work in high pressure environments?

Sure. So maybe if your audience, the best thing is for me, we throw acronyms around like NLP. For anybody listening that doesn't know what NLP is because I have consulting clients and coaching clients all the time saying, what is this NLP? So for those that don't know, it's neuro linguistic programming. That's what NLP stands for. The neuro in NLP refers to your brain like neurology or neuroscience because there's parts of neuroscience embedded in NLP practices and techniques.

The linguistic is the language that we use or the words that we use and then the programming is I'm sure what we'll talk about shortly, which relates to I guess how our brains are wired. I hate to use the word programs, but programs and how we frame and it can reframe through NLP a lot of those beliefs about ourselves and how we perceive the world, ourselves and also things like challenges. So that's just to let people know what NLP stands for.

But NLP itself is actually a psychological approach that involves analyzing strategies used by, I would say like you said, 83% of people are saying they have a reduction in anxiety. So it's typically used by people who are successful individuals and then they apply them to reach a personal or a professional goal.

So NLP provides insights into forming and changing habits, changing behaviors and like I was referring to before, reframing the way that we perceive challenges and situations that are critical to goal achievement and success. So when we get that awareness about us and we know there might be something we need to change, how we respond to a situation, particularly as leaders. That's where NLP can really help. I'm fascinated to talk about this subject.

So from techniques, I love tips and tricks to do things and when you're coaching people, what type of techniques do you use with your clients as it pertains to NLP?

Well there's a load of them, but when I was sort of, I think about this often and I go back through my clinical notes and there's probably for a fire that I typically use the most when it comes to executive or leadership coaching in particular. The first one, and this will make sense when I explain it, is called time-based therapy or timeline therapy. So you can call it either or.

And timeline therapy is a technique that we use in NLP to work with a person's internal timeline to release negative emotions that, you know, we all carry around with us and beliefs that we carry around with us all our lives. And we refer to those as limiting beliefs or their particularly negative emotions.

So timeline therapy can be really helpful in bringing leaders and executives back into his or her past to discover the situations that developed the limiting beliefs that they might be carrying around with them. And those are things that typically trigger unhealthy or unhelpful behaviors, responses to certain situations, how they perceive themselves and also how they perceive, you know, challenges and the world.

So timeline therapy is a big one because if you don't go back to the root cause, which is typically, it could be something that happened in child-wooled or adolescence, it's really difficult as a practitioner or a psychotherapist to support somebody to move forward and have sustained behavior change. You have to really take them back and, you know, sit with them and work with them and it takes some time, as you can imagine, to get them to understand that that actually isn't reality.

It's something that happened in the past and they can address that and move forward successfully as a grown adult now. So that would be my most favourite and probably the most powerful that I use. Then there's another technique called anchoring. Now anchoring is a technique in NLP that involves associating a specific stimulus, so a word, a gesture or an image with a particular emotional state or a resourceful state.

So anchoring, now I'm thinking about the best way to explain it, anchoring can be used to help executives or leaders access a state of confidence or a calmness or an emotion or motivation when they need it. So anchoring can be used, you know, with somebody's about to go on stage and do a big keynote or address the board or if they're going through a particular, particularly challenging time, disruptive time, you know, where they're going through a lot of change management in their organisation.

So that's another key one that we use for our executives. And then another big one would be reframing. So when I was talking about the definition of NLP earlier, that reframing is really what we need to do. After we identify, you know, the origin of certain behaviours and habits in timeline therapy, and we can't move forward and we think, okay, so we know why I behave and this way, why I have these beliefs or limiting beliefs, why I respond to certain things in a certain way.

But now how do we reframe and reprogram it and create what we call new neural pathways in the brain so that we don't continue the same behaviours and same cycles? So reframing involves changing the way that an individual perceives a situation and it could be a fear of public speaking. I do a lot of work in that space with leaders as well and looking at it from a different perspective.

So replacing things like fear and replacing it with, you know, look at this maybe as an exciting opportunity rather than something to be, you know, death scared of. Death, death, three of probably the ones, the key ones that I would use. And then there's others like meta-modeling outcome setting, which is quite self-explanatory.

It's just around the importance of setting clear, measurable, specific, smart goals essentially and helping executives and leaders really clarify their goals and develop a plan to achieve them through things like visualizing and attaching feelings and anchoring feelings to their ideal self or their ideal state. Those are great examples of ways to use NLP therapy.

I know I'm a big, I love biographies, I'm a big biography reader and so I always like to learn about success stories through, you know, people then the past or people that have businesses. So do you have any success stories that you can share with us about some of the executives that you have mentored and maybe some of the outcomes from some of those coaching sessions?

Yeah, absolutely. So the first one that springs to mind is one of my clients back in Australia. She was new to her executive role, her CEO said, "Look, she was very keen for some leadership coaching."

And that's really funny when people engage with the leadership coach because typically very quickly within the first, I would say 40 to 45 minutes, you go into a mindset coach because you can't coach successfully or develop effective leaders and successful leaders without first getting the mindset right. And so for me with her, she was a new executive, she was already very much walking into the coaching, we knew each other, we were familiar with each other.

So we already had established some degree of trust and rapport, but she was very open-minded, so I would say she was already in what we call the growth mindset. She wasn't shut off to the coaching experience, which was wonderful. But very quickly, not only were she aware of it, but I picked up on the fact that she's very much operating. Well, she was, she doesn't now, there's still twinters of it, very much operating as a perfectionist. She ran perfectionism like a pro, this lady.

And what she was doing is, as we know, with perfectionists, they tend to burn themselves out because they're usually perfectionism goes with people pleasing. And so she was, hand in hand, and she was not only trying to be a perfectionist, that was her natural behaviour and tendency, but she was really trying to prove her worth. So there was a whole bunch of things to play. And so very quickly, I said to her, where does this come from?

Like, we're all who we are because of something, and it's usually childhood upbringing, cultural beliefs and backgrounds. And she said to me, we did some timeline therapy together over a number of weeks. And what I found, and lots of tears, through lots of tears and emotion, was that she had a very controlling childhood in a very religious family upbringing. She was only accepted if she had, if she was a straight-A student, anything but an A, was you're not good enough.

I didn't usually try harder. So really difficult parental relationships as well. And so all her life she had lived trying to not only prove her worth, I think to her parents, but then everyone around her subsequently as she grew up. But also she had that perfectionism trait and that she wasn't even, it wasn't just that she was a hard worker. She was going like above and beyond to the point where her own health, more being, would suffer.

And before I met her, her previous role, she'd been an attorney or a lawyer. So this was a new industry, a new role. And after we did that timeline therapy, we did some meta-modeling together. We did a whole bunch of outcomes setting and a lot of reframing. What I started to understand was not only where that perfectionism and people pleasing originated from, but also what were the limiting beliefs that she was carrying along with that.

She wasn't aware of her limiting beliefs until we pointed it out because limiting beliefs typically we carry them around and that is to us our reality. That's the world we live in, that's the world we've created. And by the age of 30, who we are is typically not only our values are established, but our persona and our personality is established, it's really difficult after the age of 30 to identify that you need to pull it all apart and start again.

So through all of those sessions, she realised why she approached life and her work the way that she does with that perfectionism. She also realised that her inner critic is her own worst critic and that I guess the limiting belief she had that she wasn't good enough, it just wasn't reality. So she had a lot of feelings about her boss and her team that they didn't feel she was worthy of the role, the new role, but also that she wasn't good enough at what she was doing to be a leader.

And so what she came to realise, and hopefully helped her along the way, was that inner critic was not reality. She was doing a phenomenal job. Her boss was actually very, very happy with the job she was doing and it helped her manage up more effectively because she knew that she needed more feedback from her boss at the time to I guess continue to develop that confidence and I guess nurture herself as a new executive.

So she felt more confident, she really stepped into her greatness and the woman she is now compared to the woman she was then, which is almost two years ago. She's not unrecognisable but she's so, so different. She's just got this strength of character and she's able to handle the pressure in that high pressure environment much better. She's also able, which is really important for leaders and executives to establish those healthy boundaries.

She wasn't able to do that before because she didn't have the tools and the knowledge of that paper placing solidifying from that perfectionism. That's a great story. Thank you for sharing that. I think about, as you were talking, I was thinking about just how difficult being a leader is in the world today and how, you know, you have so many things besides that a lot of people are now working or remote. There's just a lot of new challenges these days.

So from your perspective as a leader, what are some of the top qualities that leaders today should possess? I've been asked this a lot and I always say, and this is my opinion, but I always say,

without really strong emotional intelligence skills, you cannot be an effective or successful leader because emotional intelligence, for me, I picture, I'm very visual, but I picture it being the very heart, the very center of what leaders need in order to do what they need to do and engage with their teams in a particular way to be really effective and successful, not just as individuals, but how they then take their team on the journey to success or how they

take their team on the journey through change effectively. So I always say emotional intelligence skills. They just, they can't be underestimated. I think the other reason I say that is that if you, and I'm sure you've encountered, I'm sure some of you, a lot of your listeners have encountered leaders who really lack emotional intelligence skills. Those leaders find it so difficult. We come across this in our coaching practice all the time.

They wonder why they can't connect with their team members, why they can't build trust and rapport, why people don't naturally gravitate to following them as a leader or they don't get by in and credibility, but they also are those leaders that are just so unaware of their own behaviors.

They actually, a lot of them that I meet, they're not aware that they need development in this area because they, they're not aware of their own behaviors, areas of improvement and skills that they need to build. So it's really interesting when we have to sit down and say, you're lacking a bit of emotional intelligence here. Let's work on that and see what improves and things do. They improve out of sight.

They also are the leaders that those that lack emotional intelligence skills really struggle to build inclusive, positive and psychologically safe workplaces. And without that, you, you're not going to succeed as a leader, but also as a team and, as an organisation. So that would be my first one, emotional intelligence for sure. The other things that I see and don't see in leaders are things like that visionary side of things.

So as a leader, particularly the higher up the leadership chain that you go, your team, you know, everybody wants to follow the leader. Everybody wants to feel the leader knows where we're going. They know they know where we're going. We're staff. We want to be directed and we want to feel that trust and confidence in our leader that they know where they're going and that they know the why behind it.

So not being a visionary leader and not being and they're not having the communication skills to communicate to your team, what the vision is and why they essentially need to follow you on this journey. That creates things like, you know, skepticism and lack of trust and it does impact things like culture and psychological safety.

So I'd say that's another key one as well is being a visionary or having a very clear vision and then also having the communication skills to execute the vision very clearly to people, especially during times of disruption and change. And then the other few that I would say is knowing how to empower your team and it comes back to emotional intelligence, but I've had a leader say, we hear the word in power and all the time, but how do I do that? Like what do I need to do?

And I would say empowerment is a big one, like the how behind, you know, empowering your team and showing them that you trust them and giving them ownership over their roles and trusting them to make decisions and fail and try new things. So they would be some of the key ones resilience would be another one as well. Absolutely I agree with all those and I also is I'm thinking change as well.

Like we're in such a world that is changing and adapting and evolving and I think a lot of times in roles not being comfortable with change makes it really hard to navigate whether you're in a small company or a big company. I think that's another really important one is change. You know I was thinking about you know mindset, your values, your purpose, you know how does all of that contribute to people's personal and professional lives?

Like how do you all line all of those to make sure you're living really your best life?

I'll use me as an example for this one because I before I started the firm three almost three years ago, I thought I need my core values and I thought I was very clear on my purpose. I was in the nonprofit sector in Australia for 15 years and as an executive and I got to the point where I hated who I was at work apart from the psychological safety that was really lacking in two workplaces in particular but and the overworked and the workload and the burnout putting that aside.

What I realized is I until I went through all of my NLP training and psych therapy training I'd never actually sat down and identified and deeply understood my own core values. And without doing that you can't identify or discover your purpose. So it's all interlinked right?

So for me it was sitting down and doing this exercises part of my training which took I'd say four hours and what came out of it was core values that I thought I knew were not my core values at all and my core values ended up being freedom, connection and purpose.

And when I knew those three top core values I thought that makes complete sense because freedom was the number one thing and connectedness that I'd been seeking but completely lacking in my previous roles as an executive which was causing that unhappiness and that those feelings of dissatisfaction and lack of fulfillment. And so then what I would say is then sit down and think okay I need to identify my purpose because I feel not completely fulfilled.

I feel like I'm not on the right track with my career and the way that I typically do that with people is say to them well what are your strengths? So what are the things that you do really well based on what you know of yourself but also based on what the feedback you might have received from others? The other thing is we spend so much time at work you have to enjoy what you do most of the time.

You know we can't hate our job and just turn up for a paycheck because you'll make yourself physically and psychologically ill at some point. And so I say to people what's the thing or things and if you've got an example of you know a time in your career or a time in a particular job when you've had those butterflies in you tummy when you felt like that thing you did really set your soul on fire. And I get people to answer that question. What are the things that sets your soul on fire?

What excites you? It could be working with animals. It could be for me. I have to be in the service of others. I have to help organizations or help individuals or whatever it might be, particularly those that are facing disadvantage. But what is that thing that sets your soul on fire? And I always say to people you need to do more of that. That's your purpose essentially.

And then when the mindset comes in is adopting, you can't be successful and I always dare people or challenge people to think of an extremely successful person that they know or celebrity. That's a really negative, closed off person. And that the answer usually is well I can't think of one and I'm like that's because they don't exist. Typically very successful people are very successful and effective leaders. They adopt a growth mindset and what that means is that they are open to opportunities.

They see challenges as opportunities to learn and grow. They've got a real willingness to tackle challenges with a positive mindset so they will go get us typically. But they also, they never stop learning. They're always those people reading and what you are saying about yourself, you're looking at NLP. The people that are always hungry to know more and keen to develop and themselves personally and professionally.

So those are, I guess the three things, values, purpose and mindset where they all fit together. Yeah, I want to focus in on something you said. Challenges, they happen to all of us. I don't think any of us, no matter our age, are going to get through life without a lot of challenges. And I think you explained it really well. That challenges are opportunities.

That's how you look at things that happen to you, whether you feel attacked or you feel this happened and now I'm going to make this other decision. So I love that you said that a growth mindset and look at things that happen as opportunities. And you might not know today, but just exploring those opportunities are really key. And I think that is exactly spot on with having a growth mindset. It makes you more positive, right?

And you're not blaming other people or you're just saying, hey, this thing happened. And now that I'm aware, you have more information to make other decisions. So that is such a good piece of advice. Pivoting a little bit and kind of talking about the negative side of things. But what are some challenges you think that we talked about positive qualities that leaders have today? We think some of the challenges leaders are going to have today leading these days.

And how, maybe how can they overcome? So what are the challenges and what can they do to overcome them? Oh, some of the challenges I think are time. That was, that was my biggest challenge is time, but because, and a lot of these interlinked right, because I was like, in time, I was working 16 hour days during COVID. And I just, I couldn't get on top of things.

And my husband said, it doesn't, it's not going to, the more you work, it doesn't make the work go away, the more you work, the more work comes, right? Because if you're a highly, highly productive, high performer, typically, we say that those people get loaded with more and more and more work because they're competent. So I think a lot of leaders that I work with and I hear from say, I just don't have the time. I know I'm not the leader. I should be. I'm not giving as much of myself to my team.

So they have a shame and guilt. And I'm like, those feelings are not going to be all those emotions that you're carrying around. They're not going to be useful for you as far as carrying that around. But I think time and lack of bandwidth to be able to properly engage with their team, but also for them to go off and do their own professional development and their own time to reflect on what's working for me as a leader. I used to take block time out in my diary for reflective practice.

I still do it now and think, what's working or what's worked this week? A lot of leaders sort of almost snort and laugh at me and go, "Pff, Kylie, I barely have time to get through my inbox." And that's me seeing in front of the computer and that's not even me engaging with my team or working on strategy or, you know, the bigger picture stuff that I should be as an executive. So definitely time would be a restraint and a challenge. The other thing would be the burnout that we're seeing.

And a lot of that, when we talk about mindset, that a lot of, you know, what I talk to my executive clients about, my coaching clients is when they're saying, "I'm so overwhelmed and you can feel the anxiety coming through the Zoom or in the face-to-face meeting often." And I just say to them, "Just take a deep breath and remember there's two things here."

One, you still have a, even when everything feels out of your control and chaotic and hectic, you still have control over how you choose to show up every day and the choices you get to choose, the behaviors and how you respond to what's going on in the workplace. You still get to choose that.

And so think carefully about the choices you're making and the reason we do that as coaches is because we want to come from a place of empowerment so people who feel completely unhinged feel like hold on, I still have control over something. The other thing that I typically say is, think about what's within your control and what's sitting outside of your control. As hard as it is that leaders, we typically try and fix and solve all the problems of the world in the workplace.

You have to funnel your energy, your time to and your mindset to only the things that are within your control. So forget the workplace politics, forget the, whatever else is going on around you, you can only focus on what's within your control. And again, that's just coming from a place of empowerment and trying to give them a little bit of calm within the chaos. But some of the other challenges that we typically see is a lack of skills with leaders.

We see people have been in organizations or companies for a long time and they've been subject matter experts or very good technically and that's the reason they're promoted into supervisory or managerial positions, but they don't necessarily have the people skills. And we get engaged by their bosses or by them directly saying, I'm having a real trouble leading this team of people.

And then very quickly what we find is that they're lacking either the leadership skills, but a lot of that is linked to, you know, emotionally intelligence and their own awareness about their behaviors and their areas for improvement. So there's some of the others. But I think, I think, gosh, there's so many. I mean AI, technology disruptions, skills and workforce shortages globally. We do a lot of work in that space. And so we see people saying, I can't attract and retain staff.

So my culture, I'm finding it hard to build the culture, but then nurture and sustain or maintain a positive culture because I can't, it's so difficult to attract the right people and then retain the talent. And so we do a lot of work. Again, it all comes back to emotional intelligence and how the leader shows up because you can fix all of those things if you've got really strong leaders. Yeah, and I think, you know, a time piece is so true.

We're such a world and culture that expects everything today right now. It should all be done. You know, here's your task, why isn't done? Just two points, I think, when I think about time, all of us, everybody is busy with things that they feel they're day with and really managing the day. It shifts so much, right?

We start the day with these 10 tasks and then you get into your meetings and then you have a, you know, a 9-1-1 at your work and you're 10 tasks that you were planning on getting done today. They might shift to tomorrow and that is part of build, like you mentioned, being a leader and making decisions and, you know, one other piece kind of to that is is when things are really stressful and you're really stressed out.

Getting up and walking away for a minute helps you regroup your thoughts, regroup, your self and resetting. So whether that's, you know, getting a drink of water or using the restroom or just getting up and resetting and stretching or moving your body and then, okay, sitting back down and really focusing on what you need to solve today instead of looking at the list. Okay, here's my list of 10. I got to get all 10 things done.

Depending on the 10, it could be a ton of pressure for you to get done one by one. What's the most important thing to get done? And then you have nine and look at those nine, what's top thing? And then if you only get three, the other seven moves to the next day, don't take that burden with you home or just moving on, right? I know that as an executive and leader very few days have I ever gotten all my to-do's done in a day and they've moved.

I've had to do sometimes that have been on my list for a month or more and a lot of times people will come back and say, hey, hey, what about that one thing? And I'll say, well, these other things took priority. Would you now like me to focus on this thing? And so I think it's also having dialogue with your leaders as well. So if they're expecting these 10 tasks and you think those 10 tasks are going to take a month, it's really up to you to communicate that to your leaders.

And I think the more that we have that, like you said, dialogue and communication, the less stress we're going to have on ourselves and pressure and the more clarity we're going to have in the workplace. Absolutely. I was giggling Melissa because when you said, you know, you had tasks that moved to the next day, I had one thing three, it would have been three and a half years ago. And I knew that I was procrastinating. It wasn't important and it wasn't urgent.

So I was like, well, I can go on the back burner and it wasn't like it didn't sit in my fire me up zone. But it was just a task cut to get done. And my team said to me, after two weeks, they said it at a team meeting, we've noticed you keep moving that thing on your diary because I used to put all my tasks unless they were confidential things and I'm like, yeah, I don't want to do it. It's not urgent.

It's not important and I used to teach them, you know, the the COVID model or whatever they call that matrix. If it's not urgent, it's not important. It can wait. But also I think they people appreciate your team or your leaders. They appreciate you being transparent. I'm not going to get this done today.

And I think once you communicate and establish those boundaries and expectations, like you said, you just feel like you can take a sigh of relief going, okay, they're not expecting all of this from me this week. Yeah. And sometimes it's the burden we put on ourselves, right? If maybe not your manager or your leaders that are putting all these things on you, it's you also putting the burden on you and not communicating when things are out of balance.

And you know, that word balance, I struggle with that word for many years. I don't know if I believe in the word balance. I think there's some days, you know, my personal life is is balance on there's some days it's unbalanced. It's kind of that scale that tips one way and the other way, but I think communication is a two way street and it takes time and progress. It doesn't just happen when you first meet someone.

You got to understand, you know, we all have different ways we learn different ways we communicate. And I think to your point, time is going to be a really important thing as we move quicker and faster and people want things sooner than later. So it's going to be really key to manage that with your peers and your leaders as you develop and grow within your organization. Yeah, absolutely.

So with that, I was just thinking like safety, you know, a lot of times I hear from people that they don't feel safe at their job or they're, you know, they're getting a lot of criticism. So, you know, in today's world, why do you think that, you know, why is it so important for critical feedback in today's work environment, giving positive or just dialogue with the people that you report to? Because it goes back to psychological safety.

So if you're not having, and I always say to leaders, are you having regular communication? And they go, yeah, we have a team meeting. Are you having regular one on one? Are you creating regular one on one opportunities for your team?

Because not everybody, and again, it goes back and I talk about psychological safety a lot, but not everybody because the diversity of those in our workplaces feels comfortable saying in a team open or open environment, hey, I've got a sick child or hey, I'm not going to get to this task today or hey, I've got something happening in my personal life that I know is going to or is impacting my performance at work, right?

So I always ask leaders that that one question when they say, my team's not working, it's not functioning right? I say, okay, we have to let's put the responsibility and ownership and accountability back onto the leader just for a minute. Are you creating opportunities for your teams to have regular, regular team and one on one conversations with you? A lot of leaders say, well, they know they can come to me. I'm like, do they? Have you told them that?

But if it's not in the diary, people typically, unless they're friendly or friends with the boss, they won't knock on the door and say, I need to talk to you about something. And it could be related to the leader or their leadership style. It could be something that they've got concerns about or even a grievance between before it turns into an informal, a formal grievance. So that's one of the first things I say is, are you giving your teams those, creating those opportunities?

The second thing is, if we're not communicating regularly or frequently and we're not providing open, honest, transparent feedback, whether it be positive feedback or constructive feedback, they're both the same. But if there's issues around performance, a lot of leaders shy away from having those conversations, because they're uncomfortable. And I always say to them, but if this continues and then you end up with a performance management issue, you haven't followed your process.

You need to give the person an opportunity to know where their shortfalls are or their areas of improvement, how you're going to support them as their leader, what they need to do as a team member or a staff member, training, whatever that might look like. And then you need to come together and you need to explain what your expectations are as far as that improvement timeline so that they can be fully functional and doing their job.

So often leaders shy away from what they call difficult conversations. And it comes back to what you were saying before Melissa, it's difficult because that's how you're perceiving it. And so you're projecting your opinion on maybe how you feel about a scenario onto the person that doesn't even know there's a problem yet.

So if leaders can get into this normal natural groove and routine of structuring one-on-ones, structuring regular team calls or team meetings, talking about the vision, linking back what the bigger picture and vision and goals are to every single person's individual role, they'll say that people buy into them as a leader, buy into their vision and mission, be very clear on what their roles are and what the performance expectations are and they will go on that journey.

It's typically when people have got no idea what's expected of them and they're confused that they either just turn up and get a paycheck and then not particularly productive. Morale seems starts to suffer and productivity starts to suffer and then it's only really the people that are very intrinsically motivated that are the ones performing and producing. Yeah, and I think about the, I've been managing people for 20 years so I've seen a good amount of these kind of some of this dialogue.

So taking it a little step further, so absolutely one-on-ones, super important. And sometimes on one-on-ones you'll hit one of your direct reports with a question and they might not feel comfortable answering you. And you might have heard from somebody else in the organization and you decide to ask the employee and they might not feel comfortable sharing things with you.

And so I think it's a place where you have to continually build rapport and then at some point if they're just, you know, if you ask them, "How's everything going?" And you know from other people that it's not going well and that they're very stressed out. You might have to hit it head on and it just asks them questions like, you know, do you feel like you have too much work? Are you overwhelmed with this project?

And you might have to actually hit it, hit it, hit it direct to that person because there may be times where you're like, I'm having my one-on-ones and, you know, everybody's telling me that things are fine, but their face tells me that things are not fine. And so I think, you know, when managing people, sometimes people don't feel comfortable sharing with you directly for whatever reason. So that's, you know, you need to spend more time building rapport and relationship with those people.

And then if you do and they are not answering you, then sometimes you might just have to hit it head on. And if they say everything's great, then that just also might be their personality and how they communicate within the organization. But I think there's so many great pieces that we've discussed and so many great ideas.

And I'm trying to think we, we covered so much ground, I want to just give you the opportunity and closing any other things we might have mastered top three takeaways for executives and leaders. For those of you that might be feeling, you know, that side, that overwhelm that we see, a lot of leaders like, I used to say leadership can be a really lonely place.

And one of my team members once during COVID said, we know the hours you're putting in and you're looking after all of us, but who's looking after you? And I thought, what a beautiful question. And so if there's no one looking after the leader, you really have to take that responsibility on yourself.

So what I can see because a lot of my clients burnt out when they get to me or they have been bullied or harassed or experienced workplaces that aren't psychologically safe, really you can't get your health back. You need to nurture that now. You need to make time for your health and yourself care now or you'll need to make time for illness later is what I say. So take care of yourself, try and recognize some of those things that might be happening.

But yeah, when we think about mindset and overwhelm, I always say calm happens in, and sorry, magic happens in calm knock hails. So when you're running around crazy hectic and we all have those days, just take a moment when you recognize that you're operating in that domain and think, this isn't serving me. It's not going to get me the outcomes I need. It's certainly not going to serve my team. Take a deep breath or go and meditate for 10 minutes if you need to.

Like you said, step away from the thing and just remember that magic happens in calm knock hails, just take it down a notch and you have fun just center and then you can get on with it. That's what I'd say. Yeah, I think you made me think of something. I always just tell myself, Kylie, I'm like, how you live your life in your 20s, 30s, and 40s is how you will enjoy your 50s, 60s and beyond.

And so if you're, you know, not eating, right, not sleeping, you know, drinking too much alcohol, harming your body, it's going to be really hard to unwrap. Unwind that as we get older. So you're spot on with really paying attention to your health. And if you're one of those people that can't do that, sometimes scheduling it, just scheduling it.

And if you schedule it and it changes, paying for it, like paying for a coach or paying for a massage or paying for things up front, you're more likely to go to it. If it's scheduled and paid versus, you know, if it's just kind of casually, I'm going to go to the gym in the mornings and the mornings happen and you make excuses why you can't do it. So I love that you mentioned that thank you so much, Kylie, for being here. I could talk to you forever and ever on this subject. I love it.

And all your great insights. Thank you so much. That's the Executive Connect podcast. You've been listening to the Executive Connect podcast. If you have questions or ideas on how to bring leadership to your next level, email us at Executive Connect podcast at gmail.com. And don't forget to subscribe so you can catch every new episode. Until next time. [MUSIC]