Planting The Seeds Of Change

My guest is Puja Madan, an award-winning mindfulness and leadership consultant, author, and speaker. She is the founder of The Mindfulness Map, a consultancy dedicated to helping organizations improve their growth, teambuilding and social responsibility by incorporating evidence-based mindful leadership training.

Mindfulness Is Trending in Business

Like many of my guests, Puja moved to the United States from another country, and knows a great deal about making a smooth change or transition! When she lived in India, she worked for tech startups in a high-stress environment as a product manager: launching products, training others and staying current on tech. At the same time, in her personal life, she was an active seeker of meditation and mindfulness practices: seeking higher consciousness, traveling to learn from  meditation teachers, practicing meditation and studying holistic health.

She juggled those two separate worlds for a while, torn in half. At the time, over 12 years ago, nobody was talking about mindfulness in the workplace. Yet she felt a need to meld her two worlds—to integrate the qualities of living consciously with mindfulness and intention—into business systems. She wanted to see a union of planning and being playful; setting milestones and being mindful about them; implementing plans while honoring intuition; and both having frameworks and flowing within those structures.

Coaching in a New Country

The conflict was actually making her physically sick, so she quit and moved to America. Immigrating alone was a huge change. When she first arrived, she studied nutrition in a health coaching program because she was so sick. The program had a mindfulness component in which she learned to look at the food we eat (fruits, veggies, meat) as secondary food. Primary food was exercise, meditation, primary relationships and work.

Work! Here was the concept again: you can either live to work or work to live.

So Puja began her work on an executive coaching level, bringing to business leaders many mindfulness and meditation techniques that would help them better focus on growing and scaling their business. She helped them enhance performance while creating a deeper, more meaningful relationship with their work. (That’s huge: I know that finding the right balance between being and doing has been one of my biggest challenges in both my business and personal life.)

Puja combined her strong business background with her deep immersion in mindfulness practices and decided it was time to bring that combination to business leaders. It took a few years to reach companies and learn where she could help shift the consciousness for them.

Are We Too Busy to Be Effective?

In America, Puja notices, there is a glorification of busy-ness. Americans want to work to live instead of living to work. Yet because the world copies what America does, Puja hopes to change the consciousness of businesses in America, creating a ripple effect across the world.

She and I come from different parts of the world, but I too have seen how America believes busyness is what makes us productive and successful, when, actually, it’s the opposite: busy-ness is draining. Instead, it’s the spiritual aspect of life—meaning, mindfulness and presence—that really give life and work meaning for both ourselves and our team members.

The Mindfulness Map

Puja’s Mindfulness Map is a 10-month evidence-based framework with tools that equip leaders to make more conscious choices. The immersive framework includes individual training, executive coaching, and online video training. The framework is customized based on a thorough needs assessment with company leadership to sequence the trainings most needed first. For instance, If the leadership team struggles with conflict resolution, which can cost a company a ton of money, they will offer the communication framework first.

My guest is Patricia Brooks, an author and life coach who recently stepped up her game by moving to France and unexpectedly jumping into a coaching business. Almost a year ago, after training as a coach and writing a book, she left her corporate job with the idea that she would find a new job in France. But when a friend asked how the search was going there, she realized she really didn’t want a job. And that she’d resisted becoming an “entrepreneur” due to a limiting belief that entrepreneurs always struggled.

Today as “The Courage Catalyst,” she coaches business professionals who have lost their way and feel unfulfilled. While her clients have been successful in many ways in the past, they have hit a wall. She works with them to uncover their true passions and build a plan to do more of those things, whether making a career shift or taking on a hobby.

Redefine Your Stumbling Blocks

Patricia’s mother had always told her, “You don’t quit a job until you have another job in hand.” Thoughts that her mother would not approve of entrepreneurship held her back from working her coaching business for three years following her training.

Unemployed in France, however, Patricia had to do something. Knowing the value of coaching, Patricia hired an executive coach to get the encouragement and fresh viewpoint she needed—plus a reframe. The coach said “entrepreneur” was a French word that meant having ideas and implementing them. Patricia realized she has always had tons of ideas—and implements them. So she finally allowed herself to become excited about her business and dove into filling in her entrepreneurial blind spots with business and marketing courses.

Like Patricia, so many of us, in longing to make a smooth change or transition, find ourselves held back by “rules” we have internalized from our parents, our culture, our education or the environment we were raised in. Looking at words or situations in a new light can open the floodgates.

By redefining the word that hung her up, she was able to identify a known strength of hers and recall that she’d accomplished this sort of task before. Reframing is a powerful technique that reconciles the logical mind and the intuitive mind, which then work together. At that point, you can only be successful.

Have the Courage to Listen to Your Heart

Patricia knew as early as 2015 that she wanted to move to France. Because it wasn’t logical, however, she didn’t take any action. Resistance, Patricia says, is what we feel before we even realize we’re stuck in a limiting thought. She looks at resistance as a perfect trigger for asking yourself: why am I feeling this way? What are my thoughts about this situation? Then reframe.

While Patricia had relied on logic for most of her life, now she looks back and can see logical actions that went against her intuition and didn’t work out. Today she listens hard for her intuition (such as the pull to move to France) and acts on it, rather than rationalizing it away.

The word courage means “coming from the heart,” and after hiring a coach, Patricia did begin to listen to her heart. She stopped making decisions based on reasoning or on her mother’s values, and listened to what was resonating with her. That is a huge step! Of course, she follows up all intuition with research and logical actions.

Coaching Brings Accountability

Before hiring a coach, Patricia had been afraid to look at her finances to see whether moving would be possible. Unsurprisingly, her coach assigned her that task. Once she got past the fears, it was easy. And it was a “yes.”

The coach also helped Patricia sort out her many moving tasks, but Patricia says the main value of coaching was having someone to be accountable to. If she says she’s going to do something, she’s going to do it. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t need support along the way.

Finally, as she was preparing to go, her Uncle Bob said,

My guest in this podcast is Liiz Herrera, an inspiring coach who pushes herself to face her fears. Liiz is a career services professional in higher education and loves her 9-to-5. She will also share her story of “accidentally” becoming a full-fledged career coach to boot (LiizCareerCoaching.net).

An Accidental Entrepreneur

One of Liiz’s greatest challenges is that she never intended to be an entrepreneur, believing that path was only for people who didn’t like their day jobs. Yet her drive to help people put her firmly in this new territory, an experience that creates constant change.

It started when, to encourage her students, she put herself on LinkedIn as a career coach. Little by little, people started reaching out to her for career development issues. She’d always say yes to assisting with someone’s resume or coaching them on interviews—until it became an overwhelming workload. Yet when people told her, “You should start charging,” she resisted.

Like many of us, Liiz suffers from “imposter syndrome” and had a hard time believing that anyone would want to pay her for doing what she loves. After a couple years, someone on LinkedIn again asked how much she charged, and she finally made the leap.

Liiz started posting there consistently about career issues, which brought in more messages and requests for help. These requests grew her business organically, and as more clients trickled in, it became less scary. She felt exposed and vulnerable, but wonderful things kept happening.

Liiz’s takeaway was deciding that she can’t be afraid. She has a genuinely helpful skill and decided to adopt the attitude of “just exploring,” to remove the pressure. It’s worked!

The StrengthsFinder® Assessment

As a certified Strengths-CoachTM, Liiz believes we all know what we truly love but because they come so naturally, it’s easy to forget they are valuable. She always asks her students or clients, “Where do you thrive? When have you done something that makes you feel so energized that you can do it all day?” She knows you can and should base your career on this strength.

Liiz helps people identify and own their innate strengths. For anyone who says, “I’m not good at anything,” or “I don’t stand out from the crowd,” she recommends taking the StrengthsFinder® assessment. It’s not too expensive and identifies your top five strengths. Even people who feel like they don’t have anything to offer, always do, according to Liiz.

Do What You Are Afraid Of

At one point Liiz was asked to create a webinar, and she said “yes” though she was terrified. She prepared well, made it engaging, and put her own spin on it. Sitting in her living room as she hung up, she realized she felt that kind of energetic-and-happy she always asks people about. She realized she would not have discovered this joy if she hadn’t stepped out of her comfort zone. Her advice? “If there is something you are curious about or that sounds interesting to you, even if it scares you, do it.”

That’s been Liiz’s philosophy since she was 16: if you’re afraid of something, do it. For her birthday last year, Liiz told her husband she wanted to try the trapeze, even though she is afraid of heights—in fact, because she is. Though she fell on her first try and was shaking, she got back up, eventually nailing the routine. Looking back, she learned that she will be ok when she falls.

I love this. We forget how hard the first steps are. Everything that’s challenging or scary is helping us to grow and becomes a strength in hindsight.

How to Step Out when You’re Feeling Shy or Scared

For folks who are shy about sharing their core talents or unwilling to leave their day job, Liiz recommends taking baby steps. Consider joining a professional association or attend events with a friend or colleague. If you dream of doing a certain job, Liiz especially recommends reaching out and doing an informational interview...

My guest in today’s podcast is Rose-marie Fernandez, who has dubbed herself the Chief Influencing Officer of her company, Coaching Worx (CoachingWorx.ca). Rose-marie works with leaders and senior executives who want to influence and create greater impact for their teams within their greater organization. Influencers, to Rose-marie, are people who have a deep interest in their own self-development and who support it in the people around them as well.

I originally connected with Rose-marie through our mastermind group, which has been a great journey. Rose-marie is quite familiar with change, having moved continents five times, from the Indian subcontinent to Canada and back, and has lived in 41 different residences. She has changed jobs and even careers multiple times as well. But the one thing that is constant, she says, is that she keeps all her friends!

 

Today we spoke about change and the energy of money.

Build a New Paradigm of Money

Because she works as an energy coach, when Rose-marie discovered the book The Energy of Money: A Spiritual Guide to Financial and Personal Fulfillment, by Maria Nemeth PhD, it resonated. One big lessons she gleaned from the book is that if you are a victim of money, you’re never going to have enough.

We all struggle with the idea of money, she says, no matter how much we have. One of Rose-marie’s favorite quotes is from Buckminster Fuller: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

If you are leading your same old life, she wonders, how will you change? For instance, many of us think of money as something you need to pay the bills. If that’s true, you can simply forego expenses and have fewer bills to pay. That’s not really the problem we have with money.

You’ve been programmed from childhood about how to think about money, and you have to make that reality obsolete, she says. Let go of: “I can’t afford that” or “I can’t do that right now because I don’t have money.” Or “money doesn’t grow on trees” or “ money is the root of all evil.” These are all myths, based on beliefs that are not necessarily yours. You may simply be repeating the story of your parents, environment, education, background, or culture.

Our mastermind has been reading this book together. I found it interesting that the processes this author uses for cleaning up your money energy can be used for time and any other topic you struggle with. The book helps you become more aware of the story you are telling yourself, own it, and erase self-limitations.

Observe and Make Friends with the Monkey Mind

Before she read the book, Rose-marie would set a goal and make the money. It wasn’t magic. She’s been self-employed for many years and knew how to save. But she uncovered a fear of having a lot of money, including: “I will lose my friends because I will have a different lifestyle.”

The book showed her how the monkey mind can play havoc with your money energy. As long as you realize that it’s your friend and will never go away, she reports, then you can learn when to use it and when to tell it to get lost. In the end, she believes, when you ask the universe to help you go on a journey then success is inevitable; you just don’t know when.

The first step is to become self-aware of how you think about money and how you create negative (and positive) energy for yourself around finances. For me, I used to let bills sit on my desk. I would avoid paying them for months. Now I pay them right away and include a “thank you” because I’m grateful to be able to pay my bills! The same with my taxes. Many people struggle and delay doing their taxes. Observe your habits and your language, and those of the people around you as well, to catch yourself in limiting beliefs.

Clear Scarcity-of-Money Blocks

Rose-marie’s greatest awakening was seeing amount of baggage sh...

My guest, Dr. Laura Gallaher, is very familiar with change. She is an organizational psychologist turned executive coach who works with clients globally as she travels the world. (I talked to her while she was in Serbia.) Laura is the founder of Gallaher Insider Edge, a micro-learning site that teaches leadership and communication skills towards building positive corporate culture. All her clients are growing their companies, so change is constant for them and their teams.

As a coach, Laura helps her clients become self-aware, emotionally intelligent leaders. Self-concepts can get in the way of change, whether on an individual level or an organizational one. In understanding themselves, they can get out of their own way.

Devotion

Three major changes stand out for Laura in her life. The first was her choice to leave her NASA job and focus on her company, Gallaher Edge. It was a hard decision, eight years into her career as a permanent federal civil servant, making six figures, with so many reasons to stay.

In leaving, she learned there’s a difference between devotion and discipline. While a lot of hard work and discipline goes into running a company, when she’s devoted to it, all decisions become easier. It’s more like running towards something good instead of away from disaster.

Small Steps

Another factor that helped her make a smooth change or transition was making many small decisions that ultimately made the big decision easier. Starting her business in 2013 while working full-time, she slowly built it up over 10 months, on the side, taking on teaching engagements that exposed her to clients. At some point, it became more painful to not make the change than to change.

Most people resist change because they anticipate loss, which is painful. Change can seem like a huge mountain from the distance, but with many small steps, it’s easier when you reach the threshold.

Another huge change Laura made was leaving Orlando, Florida, to explore the world. Again, she made small decisions to position herself to make the leap to travel easier. In January 2017, she gave away most of her belongings and moved to southeast Asia for three months. It was a huge leap to give up her apartment, the region she knew, and move to almost exactly the other side of the planet. Clients who worked with her in person were mystified at the move and afraid for her (and said so). But she felt confident that she would figure it out.

A Safety Net

When we change, the people who love us often project their fears onto us and share their fearful opinions. In her decision to leave NASA, Laura simply asked herself: “Do I have confidence in myself that if this doesn’t work out, I could get another job?” The answer was: of course I can! Feeling this implied safety net helped her make the leap into entrepreneurship.

Most decisions we make in life are not permanent. We have the option to change our minds. For her, that calmed her fears. She left NASA, struggled a bit, and took another permanent job for 10 months before leaping again into her business full-time in 2015.

Innate Resilience for Coping

Laura believes only one fear underlies everything: “I cannot cope with this.” It’s not fear about what will happen, but about being unable to deal with it. The reality is, however, that we cope all the time: with big changes, heartache, loss and pain, disappointment, rejection and more. We have each coped with and survived incredible changes, from our first day.

To endure change, Laura taps her inner resilience. She says: we are all so much more resilient than we realize. We don’t need to build up our resilience as much as remind ourselves that it’s there. Looking back to those times of resilience, in the depths of discouragement, can remind you: “I have been able to cope with this before. I can cope with this again.”

In a crisis, an exercise she does for herself or her coaching...

5 Success Tips for Busy Mompreneurs and Women Entrepreneurs

 

A few years ago Vyky Rafai needed to figure out who she was and make some big changes in her life. When the women around her reached out and lifted her up, she decided to replicate that powerful experience for other women. Vyky birthed I Am Brave, an organization with an annual conference that brings together top women leaders and entrepreneurs in Orlando with informative talks about a range of topics, from family to business and community. Her main goal is to help women develop supportive relationships that can propel them through anything.

As a creative, with a background in fashion design, accounting, and investing, Vyky also founded and runs a digital agency, One Alliance Group, which builds online presence for businesses.

1. Balance Comes from Planning

Something that amazes me about Vyky and garners her lots of questions is how she runs two businesses while co-raising three young children. She told me she laughs at the word “balance” and says it’s more about planning which tasks you will do—business or children—and when. First you have to define balance for yourself, by choosing what is important and what you can let go of (like not cooking dinner). Then break up your day to allocate to each task.

We all seem to be chasing time, something we can’t get back. Visiting Europe regularly, I’m aware of the difference in time cultures. In France or Latin America, there isn’t the scarcity of time we feel in the US, Australia or other English-speaking countries. This concept was difficult for me to grasp at first, but now I’m running after time too.

2. Know Yourself and Push through the Unknown

At her transition point, Vyky realized she had to take the huge step of ending a marriage that wasn’t nurturing who she was or helping her grow. She had to figure out who she was, her true self, what she loved to do and how to make herself happy. As women, she says, we are selfless beings. That’s where you have to ask yourself how to say yes to you. She watched what she enjoyed and built businesses doing that.

After that hurdle, the hardest thing for her was the fear of the unknown, which cripples so many of us. She was afraid of uncertainty, of taking leaps of faith like ending a relationship, becoming a single mother, and maybe becoming a statistic. It feels hard to go into the unknown, but on the other side, she reminds us, it’s glorious. That’s where the most growth and self-learning happens.

3. Support Keeps You on the Road to Success

Vyky enjoyed a great family support system but lacked mentors, which is what she believes I Am Brave can provide. She could have gone much faster if she’d had those mentors around her, so she’s on a mission to cultivate supportive relationships among women. You need people in your life who are not just taking from you but giving to you, she says. (When you are extremely honest with yourself, you can identify the harmful relationships in your life too.) Vyky knew her cup was empty because she kept pouring water into everyone else’s.

We agreed that many people who see women doing incredible things assume it just happened or they were born into it. But it never works like that. Those women work very hard and endure a lot. Success is not an overnight process. It takes strength, work, dedication, and tenacity.

Saying yes to yourself will inspire others. This is walking the talk and living by example. She wants to see leaders communicating this to up-and-comers. We are not superwomen, she says. We have to plan, and we mess up and grow. “Failure isn’t supposed to cripple you,” Vyky says. “it’s supposed to propel you.”

4. Be Natural, Be True to Yourself

I love Vyky’s story about integrity and her hair. She has a huge, beautiful afro, and women are often amazed that she’s owning that. It started with wanting to cultivate her son’s confidence in himself.

How Speaking Your Core Message

Can Build Your Business

My guest Carol Cox works with high-performing women entrepreneurs who want to increase their visibility as they grow their business. She helps them create their signature talk and develop a visibility plan to have more influence in their industry or community. On the side, during election season here in Orlando, Carol also serves as a democratic political analyst. She’s been doing this about 12 years when she can and has loved politics and international relations since high school.

Speaking Builds Business… When Your Message Is Clear

Speaking Your Brand is the third business Carol has built, and she knows that relationships are the bedrock of business. To build relationships, Carol highly recommends speaking as a key skill for entrepreneurs to polish. Face-to-face interactions encourage people to do business with you, she says. Tapping into your community and giving back by speaking is a great way to reach out.

The secret to connecting with your audience is sharing personal stories, which can feel vulnerable or scary even to those who enjoy speaking. Yet it’s one of the best ways to increase that know-like-and-trust factor with listeners. Online today, there’s so much noise, options and content that people don’t truly connect with you there. Speaking at conferences, events, associations, and local networking groups—that’s where you develop deep and beneficial relationships.

I love that Carol helps people to face their speaking fears. I never expected to do public speaking myself, but today I recommend many of my executive clients become speakers. Benefits include trust-building and forcing you to develop a clear message, as well as becoming more comfortable with yourself, sharing your own story, and experiencing vulnerability.

So many leaders, executives and entrepreneurs have an inconsistent message, which unfortunately impacts their credibility level. If your audience, whether your team or the wider world, can’t relate to you consistently and know what you stand for, they won’t see you as an expert or authority. Speaking is a must!

How to Focus Your Message

One of the biggest challenges Carol’s clients have is the volume of content and expertise they want to share. Whether through a long career or specialization, all their knowledge, in 45 mins, cannot be absorbed. Her goal is distilling out the core message into 3 to 5 points that will be understandable to the audience, relevant, and immediately applicable.

Typically, Carol works in “intensives,” about six hours in one day, or three if working virtually. She likes the momentum this approach builds and how ideas stay connected. Asking a ton of questions, she takes her clients through a 3-act structure storyboard, from the opening of the presentation to the closing, and how everything ties in. At the end, the client has a polished signature speech.

To focus your message, Carol says ask yourself this question: “If you can only tell your audience one thing, what would it be?” Then boil down that key point into a short tweet and from there build it up again into your speech. I believe Carol’s process is valuable in the corporate world, too.

Carol finds that most of her service-based provider clients, though they may not have recognized it yet, are doing the same types of things with all their clients. So she also helps them see that and create a framework for their signature system. She says it’s not that they can’t figure this out or do this themselves, but they are too close to see it clearly and do it easily.

I had intended to do this myself but ended up procrastinating—generating draining catabolic energy that can zap productivity. Working with Carol was enjoyable and it was so much easier to have someone else walk me through the process. I encourage anyone putting this off to catch yourself and find someone with the right skills to help yo...

5 Tips for Maintaining Resilience through Difficult Times

My podcast guest, Cynthia Petti of Genuine Spark in the bay area of California, has gone through significant changes in the last year due in part to her partner’s brush with serious illness and her own recovery from that battle. I invited her to share what she learned about maintaining resilience through it all.

1. Build a Positive Environment Around You

Last year when her partner was diagnosed with stage 3 testicular cancer, Cynthia says was very frightening. She was forced to look at her own mortality, and, to get through it, had to start to find joy in life every day. Once he became cancer-free, she looked at herself and realized her cup was half-empty and needed filling.

So she set a goal to attend an inspirational conference more than a day from her house. She came back fully energized. She began to eat healthy again, after looking honestly at her weight and forgiving herself for using comfort food to cope with stress. Soon she began to feel like herself.

But her family resisted her transformation (as families often do!) and didn’t believe it would last. As she puts it, “Negativity in the house won.” Yet Cynthia maintained her daily meditation and goal practices, and hungered to learn more, to stay inspired. She’d had such a great release and awakening that she wanted to share it with others and do it again. When Cynthia signed up for another seminar in New York, she took her daughter and turned it into a vacation. Her partner didn’t want to be left out and came too. The daughter ended up walking on fire and going home changed. The partner struggled with his PTSD and anxiety, but made connections and pushed through, also deeply transformed in the end. As a couple, they then attended a third conference in Palm Beach.

I love that Cynthia created the environment she was looking for at home! She committed to her recovery and her goals, and kept at it, creating the support system she needed.

2. Meditate and Visualize Daily

Cynthia maintained her evolution, visualizing and meditating daily. She began to build a business around her favorite activity—talking to people. She realized her mission was to inspire people to be the best version of themselves, and named her new company Genuine Spark.

As she expanded personally, Cynthia set personal goals of a nicer house and the money to pay for it. Within just a few months, she manifested this and they moved into their new home. Even so, as happens for so many of us, sometimes the negative self-talk in her head asked why she couldn’t do more. What got her through that, she reports, was “the small pieces” day to day, especially gratitude for life’s little things.

Another big help was letting go of negative relationships and setting up strong boundaries with those she can’t avoid. I love that she limited toxicity in her life in this way so she could focus on her own life.

Cynthia’s motto in life, besides “Be the best version of yourself” is “Leave a legacy.” For her, it’s about making a positive impact on others and leaving an impression now that will help transform future generations.

3. Be the Master of Your Time—and Your Goals

One of Cynthia’s big goals was to know that she is the master of her time. That gave her the power to say “no.” In growing her business, she balances events she wants to attend with work and home life by asking herself if attending the event would fulfill one of her values, a great tip!

Her business, Genuine Spark, helps people with goals and accountability for personal and professional development. Cynthia finds that we often say we want to do things, we even share it online, but rarely follow up, thinking it will magically happen. Yet research shows that just writing a goal down makes it 46% more likely to be achieved. She helps people turn those vague intentions into specific,

Lauren LeMunyan, PCC

Owner, Lauren LeMunyan Coaching, LLC & The SpitFire Coach

At the age of six, Lauren tasted her first drop of entrepreneurship and was hooked (literally). What started as way to cure boredom while hanging out with some octogenarians, Lauren learned the art of crochet and quickly mastered the beginnings of hat-making. Fast-forward three decades filled with a successful career in association management and multiple business launches, this SpitFire Coach now teaches creative entrepreneurs and passionate professionals how to streamline their focus, reduce stress and make magic happen.

Lauren incorporates a fun, direct and intuitive-based coaching process to build clear, concise and creative strategies in marketing, branding, operations, hiring and business development.

When she’s not combating gremlins and energy blocks, Lauren spends her time in Washington, DC

With her personality-packed English Bulldog, Rico Suave where she also produces and hosts a weekly business-focused podcast – The SpitFire Podcast. And if that isn’t enough fire spitting, she can be found up and down the East Coast performing on stage as the Bluegrass-Americana Rapper, JRZ FRSH. www.laurenlemunyan.com

 

 

5 Tips for Adding a Dash of Spitfire to Your Life and Business

My podcast guest is iPEC-certified coach Lauren LeMunyan, who came from the nonprofit space and then opened a CrossFit gym in Las Vegas. As she began to see how people hold themselves back, she realized she was holding herself back. So she hired a coach and ended up becoming one. In meditation, she discovered her coaching gift was “spitfire:” understanding the passion each of us have in our bellies and how to fire it up and express it. Today she helps small business owners and executives, whom she sees as change agents bogged down by details and self-expectations. She becomes the catalyst to help them find their passion and feel confident creating the positive change they envision.

Lauren firmly believes that what we do best for others, “we suck at doing for ourselves.” In struggling with her own distractions, expectations and fears, she has created many tools to help her clients stay focused. I know we entrepreneurs all experience—yet few want to talk about—our bouts with doubt. Our recent conversation uncovered many wise tips you can use to create success.

1. Fire Up Your Passion—and Have Fun

Given the alluring security of a corporate job, the risks of starting a business by yourself today are huge. Lauren begins by helping her clients rediscover their values and passion. Once they touch their original why, she says, the creative floodgates open. The next step is brainstorming where they want to be in one, three or five years and reverse-engineering a plan.

Everything is on the table for Lauren when working with her clients. She always finds some kind of “no-fly zone,” something “protecting” the client from making change, which she helps them understand and address.

Lauren’s favorite success quote is, “If it’s not fun, why do it?” She feels that in having fun she can be most powerful and helpful for others. Sometimes we start businesses with a short-term goal in mind—perhaps making a quick buck or out of fear. If you find yourself unhappy and uninspired, it may be time to transition out. And that’s ok, too. I agree that if you are not waking up smiling about your work, about serving others, what do you need to look at?

2. Develop Personal Refocusing Tools

Like many of us, Lauren personally struggles with patience and trusting the process, often pushing and making things more intense than they need to be. She has to remind herself to let go, or to pick herself up when others aren’t sharing her excitement. Her daily meditation practice helps her sit in stillness and move through any anxie...

How to Gain Influence as a Leader for Better Outcomes and Increased Productivity

Let’s talk about influence. My coaching clients often ask me to help them gain confidence and influence others—to rally others to their cause. Yet many of them also believe that wielding power over others is disliked and inappropriate.

Influence is different. It is not manipulation or force. It’s more about gaining the trust and credibility that inspires others to follow you. As leaders, we can significantly benefit from becoming influencers, both at work and in our personal lives. It will boost productivity, teamwork, and results.

While telling people what to do often seems like the shortest, easiest road to your goal, it can actually be the worst in the long run. How many times have you felt that you weren’t asked the right way to do something? Or you thought of a better way yet had to do it the other way? Did you resist, feel frustrated, or not follow the directions?

Influencing avoids these pitfalls. You will give others the power to overcome challenges, create change and find better solutions. Influencing gains many benefits in the long run, whether at home as a parent or at work as a leader. We’ll go over three barriers to avoid and three skills to develop.

Three Big Barriers to Becoming an Influencer

In his book Real Influence: Persuade Without Pushing and Gain Without Giving In, Mark Goulston talks about several limiting behaviors that cause us to reach for an authoritarian approach instead of exercising influence. (It’s a great book to pick up for a deeper dive after this article.)

* Lack of Trust. The #1 barrier to influencing is lack of trust. Your followers need to trust you. (And you need to trust yourself and your team.) Under today’s stress levels, however, our behavior is distorted. We tell people what to do without a thought to negative impact on engagement. We don’t pause to get buy-in, look for input or better solutions than ours, or consider the personalities of others. In this state, we dictate.

A common symptom? You want people to do something you feel is important, but others are simply not responding. Directing restricts others’ ability to trust us. When we pull authority, they sense the one-way communication, which feels like a lack of confidence in them. Many executives are unable to lead and facilitate change simply because they push, tell, and direct, and it doesn’t work.

The most successful leaders report that the two most valuable lessons their mentors gave them included the opportunity to fail and to learn from challenges. Yet it’s easy to feel you cannot take the risk of those under you failing (which may be seen as your poor performance), nor afford the time to listen for even a few minutes to others’ ideas. This perception is an illusion.

* Close-Minded Solutions. Another limitation (from Real Influence) is the assumptions we make. We respond based on past experience, yet our knowledge base drives us to behave the same way, day after day, situation after situation.

When our ideas are less effective and we still push them, we cannot influence others. In the long run, telling our team what to do creates disconnection, damages trust, hurts your reputation, and disempowers others from making decisions, learning, or proposing better solutions. And it blocks new solutions.

Is this you? Close-minded leaders often find people knocking at their door with problems and no solutions, waiting for an answer. When I work with this type of leader, and they never understand why their team is not performing and providing solutions themselves! When you can empower others to do their job and even to experiment, you will gain influence.

* The Dark Side of “I Can Do Better.” Sports psychologist Stan Beecham explains that an “I can do better” mindset actually holds us back from becoming an influencer.