Apart from showing a genuine interest in the people in your team, and ensuring a values alignment, the next biggest thing you can do as a leader to develop a high performing team is …… to keep doing the work on yourself. I can remember when I started coaching, one of the comments that was consistently made was that as a coach, we need to keep working on ourselves so that our self-beliefs, perceptions and programs don’t get in the way of how we see our clients, and then ultimately how we coach them and therefore what outcomes they achieve. Perception is Projection! Or put another way, your inner world creates your outer world.
So take a look at how your team is functioning and then ask, “What am I projecting?” When we reframe the way we view things, and ask this question, this then becomes a great opportunity for self growth. I love the quote “When we change the way we look at things, the things we look at change.” I’m currently reading ‘Radical Forgiveness’ by Colin Tipping, where he actually talks about one of the approaches I mention in my book, Career Awakening, showing how we can reframe why challenges come into our life. He touches on a number of spiritual/metaphysical laws, and I’ll share some of them below:
1. “At the soul level, we get precisely what we need in our lives for our spiritual growth. We need others to mirror our misperceptions and our projections and to help us bring repressed material to our consciousness for healing.”
In other words, our world reflects back to us something that we need to develop or grow within ourselves. For example, when we have a team member who is challenging our leadership and direction, there is an opportunity for growth. It may be that on some level we are doubting our leadership, and this person has appeared to help us step back into our power, so we need to ask ourselves, where am I not empowered?
Another one of the laws/assumptions about life is:
2. “The world of humanity is a spiritual classroom, and life is the curriculum. Our lessons are the events that happen in life. The objective is to awaken to the truth of who we are.”
Ask yourself, how often do you stop and view your experiences and challenges from the perspective of being in a classroom, and searching for the lesson that the experience is trying to teach you? When we learn the lesson, the lesson disappears. So if you are grappling with an issue with a team member, or in fact your team, then this is the place to look, and ask “What is the lesson I need to learn from this?”
If you’re having trouble finding the lesson in the challenge, or reframing what is going on in your team, and what it’s trying to show you about your growth as a leader, book in for a session with me. It can help to have someone ask you the right questions to see what’s actually going on.
If you’d like to take some time out to take a deeper dive into your leadership DNA, then my retreat can provide a good environment for self reflection and growth.
