Today’s Guest on the Winning Teams Podcast is Paula Clarke, Director of Clarke Griffin Associates.  Paula is a Potentialist, Motivational Speaker, Management Coach, Communications Consultant, and Master NLP Practitioner.

Clarke Griffin Associates is a leading training, development, coaching and facilitation organisation.  Paula’s strong background in business has positioned her to partner with some of Ireland’s leading organisations in developing, empowering and enabling their people to deliver on challenging business goals and targets.

Paula’s goal is to create positive change.  Paula’s style is high energy, high impact with strong linkage to individual responsibility in the context of delivering organisational and team goals.

In this interview Paula talks about her transition from corporate life to running her own business.  She explains how she amalgamated all her experience and knowledge from years of working with, coaching and training clients and then packaged this into something enjoyable, interactive and fun while helping people see that there are other more positive ways of doing things.  And, sometimes getting it wrong is where the learning curve can be.  She takes those learnings and crafts them into creative ways of connecting with people.

She goes on to discuss how every day is an opportunity to learn more, and how pausing and reflecting on a daily basis is key to implementing positive change.

We also discuss some practical tools required to make these changes and how to rewire your brain on a conscious and unconscious level. Organisations don’t change …. People Do!

Paula also explains how emotional intelligence (EI) is the foundation for a host of critical skills, it impacts everything you do.  Emotional Intelligence blends thinking and feelings to help you make better decisions.  Emotional Intelligence is the difference that makes the difference.  Emotions are data and once you get to the “why” of that and get off auto pilot and start consciously choosing you will make better decisions.  Nurturing Emotional Intelligence skills is key to high performance and creates happy people, teams and organisations.

She goes on to talk about;

Getting to the DNA of what makes you succeed

What you can do to help your team continuously better themselves

How to exercise emotional intelligence

Tapping into the desire to change

How to deal with people resistant to change

Using your inner dialogue to connect with others

Self-management and self-regulation

Social intelligence and its role within an organisation

Paula finishes off by talking about her passion for making positive change and how she measures it through performance, posture, accountability, hunger for knowledge, empathy, vulnerability and of course results, to name but a few.

One book that had a significant impact on Paula’s life is Victor Frankels book “Man’s search for meaning”, a poignant book chronicling his experiences as an Auschwitz concentration camp inmate during World War II, and describing his psychotherapeutic method, which involved identifying a purpose in life to feel positively about, and then immersively imagining that outcome.