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The shit that happens that is out of your control

I was at home recently rushing to try to get out of the house with my two little boys who are 2 and 3 years old  – you can imagine the chaos. I was upstairs packing our bags, when I hear my 3 year old crying downstairs saying his hands are sticky. I come downstairs to see what the commotion is about, to discover he had found the superglue and had glued his fingers together trying to fix his broken toy! Later that night when I was cooking dinner, my youngest boy managed to flood the bathroom by putting the plug in the basin and leaving the tap running.

These incidents (and many others) got me thinking about the hardest moments in life – the ones that you don’t plan for, that are unexpected, that get in the way of what you were trying to get done in that moment.

When exploring moments that matter with leaders, the common theme that always emerges is the gap between our intent and our impact is always the greatest in those moments that we don’t initiate or control. It’s easy to have a positive impact when you are in control of the interaction, when it’s something you initiate and something you’ve planned for. But when it comes at you unexpectedly and you’re busy doing something else, it’s much harder to respond in a way that has the impact you intend.

A reality to face is that the more senior you become, the more you are responding to situations that you do not initiate, don’t expect and are not in control of, every day.

Before you do anything, take a deep breath

I had the pleasure one evening of listening to Paul Taylor (Paul’s LinkedIn profile) talk about his experiences as an elite defence forces trainee. When preparing for his anti-capture training, he asked his training officer for his advice. His answer was, before you answer any question, take a deep breath and count to 3.

And it works.

I recently completed a coaching accreditation in neuroscience based leadership tool, Neurozone (www.neurozone.com). Doing this course, I learnt a lot of technical information about the functioning of the body and brain system and how to optimise the system to enable us to perform at our best. I’ll will continue to mention different aspects of the science throughout this blog. In fact, my next post will be specifically about optimising the foundational aspects of your body brain system. But for now, deep breathing…

Deep breathing is the foundation of all mediation, yoga and silencing the mind practices. The science of deep breathing has been extensively studied and proven to reduce stress and improve cognitive function. When you breathe deeply a number of important things happen to your brain and body system:

• When you breathe in deeply, you push the diaphragm down, which fills the abdominal cavity with blood.
• This effectively raises the pressure in the abdominal cavity and reduces the pressure in the thoracic cavity,
• Which then pushes the blood into the thoracic cavity, into the heart and then circulates to the rest of the organs
• The result is lots of available blood and oxygen, which reduces blood pressure and heart rate and ultimately shifts the body into a relaxed physiological state
• Deep breathing stimulates the vagus nerve, which can reduce the stress response by activating the relaxation response of your parasympathetic nervous system
• This shifting of the nervous system, reduction in the stress response and moving into a relaxed physiological state allows the problem solving area of your brain to remain in control, which means you think more clearly, make better decisions are able to respond more constructively in those stressful moments that you haven’t planned for
• So every time you think about it, just pause and take a deep breath

15 mins a day is all you need and you can break it up

In addition to taking the occasion deep breath, a powerful personal practise is to build in a daily routine of meditative breathing.

The recent science into deep breathing practice has shown that 15 mins day is all you need to do and you can choose to do it all at once or break it up into 2 or 3 chunks throughout the day. When I discovered this, I thought perfect. I can manage to do 3 x 5 mins deep breathing each day. In the morning when I first wake up, in the middle of the day in a quiet room at work or outside in the sunshine, and at the end of the day as the last thing before I go to sleep. To help me with this routine I recruited my partner to do it with me.

So for the last month or so, Danny and I have been doing 5 mins of deep breathing morning and evening and texting each other during the day to help keep each other on track. And the impact is noticeable. It helps me to wake up more effectively and I can feel it training my rhythms in the morning that when the alarm goes off I’m getting ready to breathe and then get out of bed – it’s cured me of the repetitive snooze button. During the day it’s definitely calming and energising, a quick reset in my natural low time around 3:00 pm. And in the evening it prepares us for rest, quietens our minds and helps us to fall asleep quickly.

An experiment to try now

Here’s an activity to try now. I run this activity with leaders and teams and it never fails to produce high impact results:

1. Think of a situation that you’re struggling with, something that’s not going as well as you’d like and that you need to find a better solution for. It can be work or personal.
2. Take out a piece of paper and write down everything you’re thinking and feeling about that situation
3. Now close your eyes and take 5 deeps breaths, in through your nose and out through your mouth. Exhale through slightly pursed lips so it’s a forceful exhale. Try to make each inhale and exhale 5 secs each (total 10 secs per cycle).
4. Now open your eyes and take out a fresh piece of paper and write down everything you’re thinking and feeling about the situation after doing the breathing
5. Now compare the two lists. What is the difference? What stands out for you?

Rather than tell you what the lists will look like, I’d love to hear from you – what do your two lists look like? What do you notice? What did you learn?

Coming next…

Continuing the theme of developing your personal routines to optimise your leadership capacity I’ll be discussing the importance of foundational daily practises to look after your own brain/body system…

The more I work with leaders the more that I understand a core skill of being a leader in an organisation (as distinct from a person holding a senior position) is to close the gap between your intent and your impact.

One meeting – two perspectives

One story in particular stands out for me. A young employee had an important meeting with a senior manager. This person wanted to discuss a challenge with their current project and needed to voice their concerns with the senior person. I spoke with the manager after the meeting, and their perspective was that it was a great conversation and went really well.  When I next saw the junior person a few days later, the story was very different. They had been made to feel not listened to and not cared about and found the whole experience upsetting and isolating. I could not have heard two more different versions of the same meeting. And stories like these are not hard to find. Why were these two experiences so different?

Busy managers make their people feel treated unfairly

Recent research conducted by Sherf, Venkataramani and Gajendran published in the Academy of Management Journal and highlighted in this article in HBR (When managers are overworked they treat employees less fairly) found that being busy as a manager can exacerbate employees feelings of being treated unfairly… and how often do we describe our days as ‘busy’. You don’t intend to make people feel treated unfairly, or excluded, or not cared about, but that’s the impact that we are having.

In the story above, the senior person thought the most important thing was to get to the core of the issue and find a solution quickly. What was overlooked was the need to pause and express some empathy, concern and care for the person raising the issue. (as a side note, I will explore compassion and kindness in a later blog post…)

To close the gap first you have to know how big the gap is

So how do you close the gap between your intent and impact? I will continue to explore the answer to this question throughout these posts as many of the practices and behaviours I will discuss contribute to closing this gap. For this post I want to talk about feedback…

The power of asking for feedback

Before you can close the gap between your intent and impact is to first know what gap there is (yes, I’m assuming that there will be one). And the way to find this out is to simply go and ask people… yes, that awful word – feedback… Ask people:

• How do they experience you at work?
• How are you perceived?
• What is the impact that you have?
• What does it look like when you are at your best, and when is that?
• What does it look like when you are at your worst and when is that?

You could set up a simple survey monkey so that people can respond anonymously, you could ask someone else to gather the feedback for you or you could just go and ask people. It depends on how you think people will feel most comfortable responding. This 2017 article provides some further thoughts on discovering how are you perceived at work.

Some of the most powerful moments I’ve had with leaders is when playing back feedback from others about what they see as their strengths and weaknesses – what they hope they can achieve and what they are most concerned about for them. This can lead to some very powerful insights and be a deep bonding moment that builds trust.

A bonus of asking for feedback is that it reduces the threat response system in the brain that is triggered when we receive feedback, and it puts the giver in a more relaxed state meaning that both parties are able to think more clearly and relate to each other more effectively throughout the process.

Research is also starting to show that when asking for feedback becomes a habit through the whole organisation it can lead to building a culture of continuous improvement, better decision making and more effective teams. A more detailed exploration of the neuroscience of asking for feedback can be found in this article by David Rock Using neuroscience to make feedback work and feel better

So, my invitation to you is to take a small first step into this world and identify someone who knows you well, who sees you often at work and whose opinion you trust. Ask them if they’d be comfortable giving you some feedback. If you’re not sure how comfortable they will be then you do a gentle introduction to the idea by email and give them an option of responding to you in person, by email or through someone else.

And let me know how you go. I’m really curious to hear your stories and what you learn about yourself and others.

Coming next…

In my next post, I’ll continue this theme and talk about how to manage your impact in the moments that matter the most… take a deep breath.