Welcome to the new manager podcast. I'm your host, Kim nickel. Hello and welcome. I'm glad you're here. And I hope you're doing well or coming into the end of the year. It is definitely getting colder where I am. I'm wearing warmer things as I think I mentioned before and I've been thinking about something that I want to share with you but I can't give you all the details yet. I do want you to know that I have been thinking and planning Neighing and putting together a
new offer for you. And this entire year, the only way to work with me has been one-on-one. I've had some requests for group programs and so stay tuned. I will have more to share with you about that. The anticipated release date of when this new thing is going to be starting is in the new year. So just know. So that there's more to come and I'm really looking forward to offering a way for you to work with me, that lets us work together in a small group. So the topic I want to get into
today. I want to talk with you about mindset. I want to talk with you about commitment versus attachment and I want to talk with you about the mindset really required to do Hard things and to make change. And the reason I am thinking about this and I think it's a really great topic for us to revisit is because when you start managing people, what I tend to see most often is that we either continue to Simply Be the way we were successful before we manage people.
So if what made You good at what you did was keeping super focused and heads down on your work or kind of being a perfectionist or leaning into people-pleasing and kind of keeping a low profile and just try it. Like doing everything you can to make things really smooth. That might be a successful strategy when you are an
individual contributor. But when you become a manager, those same habits Can undermine your ability to do this new job because when we're in a manager responsibility, there's so much more communication that we have to do. We're now managing up in a different kind of way as well as managing direct reports. And so, the requirement of this thing that maybe you've never done before, which is to manage a team of people. It won't help. Up you to just do more of what you were doing before.
The way you'll sometimes, hear this described especially in the coaching world is, what got you here. Won't get you there and it's a combination of the skills that got you. Here are not the same skills that you will need in order to meet this new level of challenge. But it's also the mindset, though. That you're thinking won't be the same kind of effective will need to update that as well.
And in very simple terms that could look like as an individual contributor, your mindset might be, I will just do everything that is mine, I'll just do it all.
And then, as you start managing, people that mindset will get in the way of your ability and willingness to learn things like Like delegating or to learn things, you know, the mindset of what is our current process and who are our current people and what are the current skills we have and what are the skills we need in order to as a team, collectively work, better together to accomplish all these things.
One of the things I see is that when you care very much about doing a good job and you care about your team and you care about the clients and you care about the work that can turn. Into taking on more than is needed because the mindset is, if it's not getting done, I'll just do it.
And that creates both overworking overextending that also creates you becoming the bottleneck because you're kind of taking everything on and it is kind of a reactive way to address the problem rather than taking a different perspective, taking a different mindset to how you want to address, what's happening. Boundaries are also a skill that becomes even more important than More demands and requirements that are on you and boundaries. Simply mean, what is the
agreement you set with yourself? What are the agreements that you have created with other people and kind of following through on those? And we can do that from a place that is really effective and creates more trust and creates more safety. But so many of us didn't learn boundaries in a way that creates It's connection. A lot of us learned boundaries as a defensive tool when we feel
someone overstepping. Its if things go wrong then we need a boundary rather than the mindset of oh boundaries are just a really simple clear and effective way to make it easy for us to work better together that's it or thinking of oh boundaries are the way that I really protect my safe. My sense of safety and my time. And I don't have to do that in a combative way. I can actually do that in a very
useful and connective way. So very often there's the mindset that needs to shift and the skills that need to change as we grow into higher levels of responsibility, especially when there's more at stake, which of course, can then flare-up are, you know, uncertainty and our insecurities so things.
Get interesting. So, that's why we're here so talking about your mindset and how important it is to notice that the mindset the way that you're thinking about your role, your responsibility, the way that you're looking at, the problem or challenge will shape the actions, you take the choices you make and the decisions that you, you know,
communicate Related to that. I want to acknowledge that we can go through Growing Pains like change can be hard and what I've come to see over and over again in my own life and also with my clients it helps to remember, you know, there's kind of two kinds of hard. There's the hard of this is really new and uncomfortable. I don't like feeling that I'm clumsy at a new skill. I don't like feeling like, I don't know. What I'm doing.
There's that kind of hard the growing pain of learning something, new, and being in that stage, where you're not super good at it yet, but you continue to practice and continue to apply the learning so that you can become highly skillful at it. There's that kind of hard, there's also the kind of hard it's kind of related to that. It's the hard of letting go of a An old habit or an old pattern, right? Like, oh why is it difficult to
kick old habits? Even if we know that they don't serve us, well, because habits are easy and changing them can feel hard, right? So, we can put those two kinds of hard kind of on the same place when you think about change, and we think change is hard. It's because our habits have a kind of gravity, and it feels easy to be in there, and it can feel All to be learning
something new that is hard. Also on the other side, we have the other kind of hard, which is the heart of things, staying the same and not working or things, staying the same and being
stagnant and not growing. The pain of not changing, the pain of staying in a pattern, or a relationship or a habit that doesn't work anymore or that is Isn't useful in this context or the pain of continuing to use a tool, a system a process that no longer really fits the situation, or the people or the conditions that you're in. That is also really hard.
And so, when you think about how do you want to approach a challenge or a goal or a problem, there's a part of you that's going to think That's going to be hard, change is hard and I want you to remember that mindset of? Yes, it is, but it's also hard to try to stay the same or to not grow and change. And so, would you rather choose the challenge of growing pains? Or would you rather choose the pain of staying the same or staying still and stagnant?
The other addition I want to give to you As you think about this, when you reflect on those questions, please do that from a place. That is not being self judgy because when we get really judgmental or when we kind of try to bully ourselves into change by, you know, activating our shame are feeling of like uh, like I should have figured this out by now, that kind of self judgement and pressure. It doesn't help us move towards That which will help us if that
makes sense. That kind of self judgement and pressure actually makes it more difficult. It's like adding a heavy layer that you then have to carry and try to move through. So I really encourage you when you reflect on yourself and where you are now the kinds of challenges you're facing and whether you want to choose the discomfort of growth or the Discomfort of continuing to cope with things that you've outgrown better still staying in.
I want you to do that from this place of real kindness and real self compassion so that if you're making a change, you're not doing it. Because you're beating up on yourself, but you're doing it from this place of, you know, what? It's time, even though this will be uncomfortable. I'm going to choose it anyways because it's worth it for what's on the other side of that.
I really. I just want to say this again, come at it from a place of real self compassion and kindness because that inner critic, that inner perfectionist that really harsh. Sounding judge doesn't actually help. It just makes you feel bad and it's really hard to create sustainable positive change from a place that feels bad. Bad.
Okay, so when you are thinking about your current mindset, when you're thinking about, how you manage people, we often, you know, what I've seen is this other pattern that shows up. So if you've had a history of bad, managers, or as I like to think of it just very unskillful people. I think most managers when we think this is not a good manager, they're not necessarily bad people. They're just not skillful. Right.
They just haven't learned, they just start trying to figure it out too and maybe they're not doing it in a very effective way. But if you have had in your own work and life experience a bad manager or a bad experience with a manager, then what often happens is what then when you become a manager, you think I'm going to be exactly the opposite. And so you're really trying to Define yourself From being the opposite of what that person
was. The other thing that happens is we think, well, I'm going to manage people how I want to be managed, and we forget that people vary and are different and so we end up making choices for managing people that are really ideal, like, for us personally, but might not be effective or helpful for the people or the situation that were managing. And then the other thing is, as I sort of mentioned before we I think I'll just continue to do the things that have made me successful, so far.
And so we're just doing more of the same as how we were an individual contributors. And now we're just doing more of that. But now we have a different role and a different kind of set of responsibilities and it's not always a match. So instead of the mindset of I'll just do more of the same, I will do what I would personally like best. That's how Managed to fall or the mindset of all just do exactly the opposite of this not great experience that I had before.
Instead I want you to imagine you can put those aside and instead we want to think from this more of a clear blank page. What is the intention that you want to bring to yourself to your team to the situation now? Like, what's going on now?
And what will be in greatest service and most helpful and it helps to take a holistic picture to understand yourself as a human, as well as to realize you might have a variety of personalities on your team and I include both your manager, right, because you're managing up as well as managing your team. And so we want to take a holistic picture so that you can make decisions that aren't simply coming from a habit of doing, more of the same or From
a place that is reactive, right? Like we want to kind of update your your data set based on who you are and who you work with to help you make decisions about how you go forward and your mindset. The way you're thinking, will be really important to that having compassion for yourself. As you realize this might require, some change is going to
be important to that. Because the other thing is, when you are intentionally creating self compassion for yourself, that is a way that you create safety, I should do a whole other episode on how to, how do we create safety, but it's really hard to change when we feel unsafe, right? And so part of this idea of creating safety, creating the safety of, I'm not going to be perfect at this. Creating the safety of this might be difficult.
And it might, you know, I might feel uncomfortable with that and that's okay. I'm not supposed to be perfect right now. Maybe people will be a mad at me or disappointed and I'm going to create safety for myself. And also for them, it's going to be okay. We can actively create safety and it connects to the mindset that we're holding towards ourselves and towards our work and our situation. I wanted to give one more
example. This is something I see my best clients do a lot and I love it so much so I want to share it with you but it's this distinction between commitment versus attachment and these are mindsets, right? This is the perspective that you hold the way you think about a thing. So attachment is the thinking of things need to be this exact certain way and if they're not it's a problem. Whereas commitment sounds more like I'm committed to this result or to this outcome and
the path. There actually might change it might be easier and might be harder than might be unexpected things that happen. I'm open to how we get there but the commitment to the desired outcome, the commitment to the result, that is steady. So there's this really lovely Clarity and strength of it. Intention. But it includes this really nice. It's almost like you can breathe because it's not rigid and contracted and clenched. It has a sense of resilience.
A sense of movement, a sense of, you know, regardless of what happens. Here's where we're going, let's do this as effectively as we can, right? We're still were on the same team, you might not have all the answers up. And that's okay because you have that steadfast commitment. And what I found is that when we are holding this mindset of commitment, it allows us to be more generous of spirit, more forgiving, also more direct and
clear, right? But when we are holding the mindset of attachment, that's when we start to get very defensive, we can become controlling, we start taking things really personally and things. Start to feel more contracted and Tents and brittle, which is
really interesting to notice. So commitment versus attachment as an example of mindset and why that is so important to understand for yourself especially as we're moving into the end of the year and starting to think about the year to come, this is such a great time to pause and reflect and notice what is your mindset, how are you? Reading safety. What kind of hard are you choosing? What kind of hard do you want to
choose? As we move into the new year and noticing, where do you fall on the commitment side? And where might you get a little hooked on the attachment side? And you know, you're a human. So you're going to experience the full range of it, but as we can kind of raise that cell phone wareness, so you can be more intentional and what you're choosing and why creates a Better experience for you and
everyone you work with. Thank you so much for listening if you want to work with me one-on-one this is the perfect time. We're going to wind up this year. Get you set up for the new year, go into the show notes you can find the link to book a consult so that we can talk about what we'll do together. And again stay tuned because I have some things to share with you coming up in the new year. Thanks so much for listening.
I'll talk to you next time. Hey before you go if you like this podcast please leave a review. Tell me why you listen and what has helped you? Thanks so much. I'll see you next time.