The People Builder

Do you show the world a true version of yourself every day or is your whole life one big masquerade ball? Hi, this is Grant Herbert, International Influencer and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today, I want to continue our conversation around Personal Power by helping you to remove the mask.

For most of my adult life I got around pretending that I was someone that I wasn't. And once again, the motive for doing that was to get people's approval. And as we talked about last week, that can be very debilitating and hold you back from being who you truly are. And wearing that mask to pretend that I was this person because that was the person that I thought would be good enough, would belong and would be loved meant that there was a lot of stress. You see, pretending is a fun game when you're a kid, but when you're an adult, pretending can get you into some hot water. Pretending can cause a lot of anxiety around your performance.

So once again, this whole thing of wearing your mask is counterproductive for the reason that you're actually doing it. It actually puts you in a state where your performance, where your likeability, where your acceptance, all those things are diminished because people are confused by this version of you. It's not the real you and people can sense that. So, what I want to do is I want to give you the benefit of my own personal experience and my experience of working with others and help you to feel confident to remove the masks that you wear during your day.

Now, there are different types of masks and I'm going to deal with just a few of those in this short time together. However, to get started, I want us to realise that it's okay for you to be who you need to be in particular arenas of your life. So for example, when I'm being a husband or being a father, there are certain ways that I will act and behave and perform that are perhaps not as appropriate in being a speaker, a trainer, an educator, a business person. So, I'm not talking about being this cookie cutter that goes around in a monotone way all their life. What I'm more talking about is forcing yourself and pretending that you’re someone that you're not to feed that approval addiction that we talked about.

As I said, there are many types of masks that you could wear. There are masks that hide just a little bit of you and there are masks that totally hide who you are and a lot of those, as we talked about in the Johari window, are in your unknown area where you don't even know that you're putting on these masks. Some of them are in that blind spot area where others can perhaps see it, but you can't see it. Most of them live in the area where the hidden area lives, where you can see it, but others can't because it's a version of you that you're wanting to portray because you think that that is the one that's going to line up and give you the reaction, the response that you want from others.

So, the first mask that I want to help you to get rid of, if it's one that you are accustomed to wearing, is the “I’m okay” mask. You see, when we wear the “I’m okay” mask, it says, “I got everything under control. I don't need any of your help. I'm doing great.” And I know when I wear that mask and when I've worn that mask, that might be what's coming out when you see me, but inside I'm dying. Inside, I'm scared, I'm anxious, I don't know what I'm going to do.

But the reason I'm wearing that mask is because I don't want you to think less than of me than you already do. I don't want you to think because I had a negative belief, a wrong belief that said asking for help was a weakness, I don't want you to think that I'm weak. So, that mask of “I'm okay” is the first mask that we need to remove.

The second mask to remove is one I see a lot in any area of leadership, whether it's in the home, in the workplace, in the community, doesn't matter where it is. Whether it's leading one person or a whole organisation. And that's the mask of “I've got all the answers”. A lot of leaders feel like, “Well, now I'm a leader. Wow, now I have to have all the answers. Now I have to know everything.” And I don't.

So, this is where the imposter syndrome sneaks in and instead of letting people in and know what's really going on, we go, “Okay, I better pretend that I know everything.” And I know in my career that that created a lot of anxiety. It created a lot of seat of your pants working that didn't always get the results that I wanted. It created an opportunity for me to stay up late at night to make sure that I got it ready just so that I could keep wearing that mask tomorrow.

So, the “I know everything” mask is the second mask that we need to remove. Even as a parent or particularly for me as a parent, I've grown okay in saying to my children, “Hey, daddy doesn't know the answer to that. I can help you find out.” And not fearing at all that they're going to think less than of me. But what it's actually doing is modeling to them what I hope they do as they grow up.

And I used the term “daddy” there. My youngest are about to turn 18, my twins. So, it's a great time in their life. They're doing their last year of high school in lockdown, just going back to school now for some time together with their friends and with their teachers. But I'm really hoping that's something that I can instill in them as they go into adulthood as well. So we've had two masks, the “I’m okay” mask and the “I know all the answers” mask.

And the third mask that I want to talk about is the mask of the victim. This is a mask that we wear that says, “I don't have the ability to do this. I'm not good enough. I'm not worthy. I'm not great. Oh, don't ask me to do that because I'm a bad choice for that.” It's that mask that we wear that says, “I'm the victim here.” And what it portrays is how we're really feeling about ourselves and it's keeping us safe from people relying on us, from people giving us responsibility, from people asking us to do things.

What it also does, it's a mask that gives people an opportunity to go, “No, you're great. You're really good at that.” Which is, once again, feeding that approval addiction. So, the “victim” mask is one that may need some help to be recognised so that you know when you're wearing that.

And that “victim” mask is one that's put on by that small inner voice, that one that wants to pull you back and says, “Hey, okay. Don't portray yourself as being who you're not. Don't tell anyone that you’re good. Come back. We're less than. We're not good enough. We're not loved. We don't belong.” So when we wave that mask, we're telling people how to actually deal with us. We're telling people, “Well, hey. Don't think that I'm worthy because I don't.”

And as we build up those affirmations we talked about last week, as we change the beliefs, as we expand things that are unfamiliar to us now and make them familiar and we rebuild those neural pathways, this is a mask that we want to tear off and throw away because it's a mask that's stopping you from being who you really are. It's a mask when you're wearing it, that someone gives you a compliment and you go, “Oh no, no, it wasn't me. It was such and such.” Or, “Oh no, it wasn't really that good. It's not a big deal.” It's diminishing what they say about you to bring it back in line with who you really believe you are.

So as I said, there are many masks that we can wear and we've just talked about three of them. The mask of “I’m okay”, the mask of “I've got all the answers”, and the mask of the victim that says, “I am not worthy.” So when we can overcome what we feel about ourselves, we can become more self-approved. We can work on the layers that I'd been laying down each week. We can then confidently remove the mask and be who it is that we were created to be. Being who I really am, I find that to be the easiest role to play. I don't have to remember any lines. It just comes out of the abundance of my heart and who I am. And I want that for you as well.

So hopefully, that's spoken to someone. If it's just spoken to one person, then my work is done. And I thank you once again for trusting me and helping you along this journey of developing your Emotional Intelligence and particularly Personal Power.

Well, that's it for another week. Join me again next week when we continue this conversation around Personal Power by teaching you how to change the internal dialogue. I'll see you then.

Do you have a calm inner conviction about who you are and your ability to get what you want and need in life or do you tend to live in a world of self-doubt?

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, International Influencer and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today, I want to continue our conversation around Emotional Intelligence beyond COVID-19 by talking to you and starting a conversation that we will have over the next few weeks about what I believe the number one critical competency and that is Personal Power.

For FREE resources and coaching from one of the leading personal development experts in the world, visit: https://www.grantherbert.com

Get the FULL TRANSCRIPT here:

https://www.grantherbert.com/blog/developing-personal-power

Become A Coach and grow your influence, income, and impact here: https://www.peoplebuildersinstitute.com.au  

Have you given yourself the total gift of approval or are you continually seeking the approval of others? Hi, this is Grant Herbert, International Influencer and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today, I want to continue our conversation around Personal Power by talking about removing the Approval Addiction.

For many years in my own life, I cared way too much about what other people thought of me, and I went around being the person who needed to be liked, who needed to be approved of who needed to be accepted by others. This led me to become a people pleaser, to work outside my boundaries and to totally erode away any sense of my own true self. And over the next few weeks, I really want to give you the benefit of my experience, not only in my own life, but working with thousands of people around the world who have this exact same challenge. And I want to help you to overcome the Approval Addiction.

You see, an Approval Addiction is just like any other addiction. It says I cannot go a day without getting it. I need that. If I don't have that approval, then I'm not whole. I'm not able to go through my day and go, “Hey, that was a great day.” So in subconscious and conscious ways, we go around looking for things that we can do so that people can approve of us. Now, there's nothing wrong with getting approval from others. It's a good thing. It's a part of life being affirmed and knowing that people value you. That's a great thing. But when it becomes the motive for everything that we do, that's when the problems arise.

You may or may not have seen me talk about before what I call the Performance Trap and that is where we perform on a daily basis to get the approval externally from other people. So, our whole motive for doing the performance is clouded in this need for approval. I see people like speakers, for example. People who need to present in front of people, they are challenged and fearful of doing it and indeed stumble as they are doing it because of this Approval Addiction.

You see, the reason that we get up on a stage is to impart and inspire to others. Therefore, our focus needs to be on others. Yet when we get up there with a need to be approved of, to be good enough, to belong, to be liked and loved, those three universal fears, then our focus is on what we don't have. Our focus is on the internal. So, we start looking inwards instead of looking outward. So, that's just one example.

So even though our motive is to do our best job so that we get that approval, it's actually counterproductive. It actually creates exactly the opposite because it creates a state within us of overwhelm, of doubt, of fear, of anxiety, and the negative effect of those emotions and us feeling that is apparent in the actual performance. So what we set out to get, we didn't get. And then what happens is over and over, we try to do our best so that you were like me and you approve of me, but I'm not getting the approval. So instead of changing the strategy, what we can do is we can allow that evidence that we're getting to further a road how we feel about ourselves.

So, let me help you to understand how to change from performing to get approval to operating in a way that's going to empower you to be the best version of you. When I found this out, when I was introduced to this concept, I've tweaked and massaged over the years and worked with many people with, it changed my life. And let me tell you, it changed it for the better. No longer was I getting up every day needing to get your approval. It's like this video right now. It is not perfect and it's never going to be perfect because I'm not doing these with a videographer with all the bells and whistles and I've got a few lighting challenges and whatever and my team will fix those up in post-production probably.

But it's not about my performance. It's about what you can take from it. It's about what I can inspire you with. So now that I'm not focused on getting your approval, I'm focused on inspiring you and I'm focusing on you. I hope I'm giving you a much better version of me and you're getting so much more out of it. So, put your hand up right now if you would like me to show you how to break free of the Approval Addiction and I can see hands going up in my mind's eye everywhere.

Because this addiction, just like any other addiction is holding you back from being the best version of you, from being, as we talked about last week, being the you that we need so that when we have you and your uniqueness, and what you bring and your genius, collectively as a world, we can be who we need to be. So, let's take a look at how to shift from the Approval Addiction to being self-approved.

So, step one in breaking this Approval Addiction is to work on your limiting beliefs. And if you want to get some help on that, I've done an episode on that. So, just look at the previous episodes and you'll see about breaking your limiting beliefs, reframing them, changing them. But you form beliefs about yourself, I've formed beliefs about myself, which are not true. They are beliefs that we formed that are based on what people said about us and what experiences we went through and our failures or whatever it was. So, the first thing is to build your own identity. Build yourself up, look for reasons to affirm yourself rather than need it from the external. Every one of us needs affirmation and the more of it that we give ourselves, the less we need from others. So, step one is work on your limiting beliefs.

Step two is to control the inner dialogue. And over the next few weeks, I'm going to do an episode to help you to do that. So, look out for that to control that inner dialogue, that self-talk that tells you that you need the approval, that tells you to do things or to not do things based on that fear, based on not being good enough, based on not belonging, based on not being loved. So, retraining your mini-me as I call it, retraining that inner voice is the key to being able to have a voice that helps you to accept yourself.

Step three is to practice your new beliefs. So now that you've got a more healthy set of beliefs about yourself, about the world, about others, you've got a better internal dialogue that reminds you of those beliefs, the more powerful and positive beliefs. Now, it's a matter of rewiring your brain by practicing the new beliefs over and over and over again. And a great belief to start with is that you are enough. You do belong and you are loved.

So, one of the things that I like to do is help my clients to write out some affirmations. So, as a practical exercise that I want you to do to get the most value out of this is to pause the video or podcast right now. And I want you to write out a list of at least 10 things that you like about yourself. Now when you're doing this, you might find that a little bit of a challenge, a little bit of a struggle because it's unfamiliar. Because what most of us are doing are rehearsing the things that we don't like about ourselves.

So as you're doing it, I want you to have the thought and put it straight to paper. Otherwise, that internal voice is going to steal it from you and go, “No, that's not true. Who do you think you're kidding?” Just stay in your logical brain and put something down that you like about yourself. This was a big challenge for me. I worked on this. This took some help. I had to actually get an external coach to pull these things out of me and my first list, about 90% of them, I didn't believe them, but I practiced them anyway because what we can do is we can rewire our brain and we can trick it with future things that we're moving towards by stating them in the present.

So for example, if you’re someone who has a skill that isn't quite yet where you want it to be, instead of saying, “Oh, look. I'm not good at doing videos.” What I could say instead is, “I'm getting better every time I do a video.” So, it's a moving towards what we want. If you want to really get the benefit, you could go, “I am great at doing videos.” And even though it may not be totally true right now, it's an empowering affirmation for you to move towards.

So, there's some tips, hopefully, that will help you to break free of this Approval Addiction. Now, it's not going to happen overnight because you have a pattern of belief and behaviour that's gone on for many, many years. So, it's a matter of practicing, practicing, practicing, repeating the new beliefs, the new behaviours, listening to what you say about yourself in the positive that allows you then to have a new set of neural pathways that will be your new normal.

So when you start having a negative thought, the positive one would jump straight in and take you where you need to go. So, the Approval Addiction is about needing approval from others. What you do when you set it up, as we've just talked about, is you get to a position of self-approval. You see, a lot of times, we go around wanting from others what we haven't given ourselves. And if you don't yet think that you're good enough, you don't yet think that you belong and you don't yet love yourself, then it's an unrealistic expectation for you to get that from others. So, all approval starts with yourself.

Productivity trainers will tell you to delegate. And let me tell you, the only thing that you never want to delegate is approval. That's for you alone. Eleanor Roosevelt said it so well, “What other people think of you is none of your business and nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

So, Approval Addiction to self-approved is the next step in you developing your Personal Power. I'd love to get some feedback from you, whether you're on my YouTube channel, whether you're in my blog or whether it's on the podcast, whether you're connected on social media in some way, jump into the comments, get into the conversation, and I'd love to be here for you so that you can soundboard these new beliefs off me and I'll come back and I'll answer those, every single one of those personally because I really see the value in being able to help people to develop their Personal Power.

Well, that's it for me for another week. Join me again next week when we'll continue this conversation around developing our Personal Power by learning how to remove our masks. I’ll see you then.

Are you someone who's reflective and open to candid feedback or do you tend to have a lot of blind spots?

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, International Influencer and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today, I want to continue our conversation around going beyond COVID-19 and developing our Emotional Intelligence by talking about the critical competency of Accurate Self-Assessment.

For FREE resources and coaching from one of the leading personal development experts in the world, visit: https://www.grantherbert.com

Get the FULL TRANSCRIPT here:

https://www.grantherbert.com/blog/accurate-self-assessment

Become A Coach and grow your influence, income, and impact here: https://www.peoplebuildersinstitute.com.au  

Do you have a calm inner conviction about who you are and your ability to get what you want and need in life or do you tend to live in a world of self-doubt?

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, International Influencer and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today, I want to continue our conversation around Emotional Intelligence beyond COVID-19 by talking to you and starting a conversation that we will have over the next few weeks about what I believe the number one critical competency and that is Personal Power.

Many people are addicted to approval. They care way too much about what other people think about them and what they're saying about them. I know in my own life, for many, many years, this is what was holding me back. Everything that I did, everything that I performed, I was doing it with a motive to get you to like me, to get people to accept me.

You see, we all operate with three universal fears in mind. The first one is the fear of not being enough. That means I'm not good enough. I've got to prove myself to you. The second one is the fear of not belonging. And the third one is the fear of not being loved. And whenever those fears are evident whether or not they're imagined or real, a lot of times we will go into what I call the Performance Trap, where we will do everything possible to get people to think that we're good enough to accept us and make us feel like we belong and to like us and love us. And this is a major problem that erodes our Personal Power.

I also see people with a very low self-confidence, but they look in the mirror and they're not happy with what they see. And I don't just mean physically, their frame of reference from their past and from what's been said to them has eroded away that self-confidence, slowly chipping away at their authentic self, who they really are. And because of this, we become in a position where we're unable to set healthy boundaries, where we let people walk all over us, where we say 'yes' way too easily. And all this angst going on, all this emotional disruption going on in our emotional brain tends to make us feel powerless and overwhelmed.

Then right here, right now in this time of COVID-19, there are many things that I've seen, people making decisions around based on these things. It's like I see people in business going, "Oh, should I be selling things right now?" People are doing it tough right now. They're not getting their income that they were getting. And there's people getting sick and there's people passing away and they're making decisions in that emotion because they care that if I sell something, then people might think this about me.

So it goes away from the logic that if I sell something, I might be able to help the economy and I might be able to help people to develop and grow and navigate this pandemic in a much more comfortable way. I know for myself putting together this self-paced online course, which I'm doing and have done for this time of COVID-19, I had those thoughts and I very quickly said, "You know what? No, you're a leader in this field and you have a resource that's going to help people and you need to keep feeding your children." It's funny that kids, they want to eat every day. So for me, I could make a logical decision because I was making a decision based on how I could serve rather than what people would think.

Personal Power gives you the ability to feel self-approved where it starts with self-love, where you look after yourself or you exercise self-care, where you're confident in your own ability and where you are calm and in control. And when you're calm and in control, you can make decisions that are logical and are strategic and will actually solve the challenges that you are in. And all these things come from developing our Personal Power.

So, what is Personal Power? Personal Power is having a sense of your self-worth and your capabilities. It's about having self-confidence, knowing that you have everything within you and around you to be, do and have whatever it is that you want in life. So, what I want to start this week in doing is laying some principles around Personal Power, and we'll unpack these over the weeks to come because this, as I said, is the area that I feel when we get on top of this, it has an effect on all the other competencies of Emotional Intelligence.

The first is that we need to be authentic. You need to be the real deal, who you were created to be. There's only one you, and we need that so that the world can collectively be the world that it needs to be. For many years, I wore a mask where I pretended that I was this because I was feeding those fears and I cared what people thought. Now, by the way, when I say I don't care what people think anymore, I don't mean in an arrogant way where I don't care what you think. I'll be whatever I want. I'll do whatever I want. No, still remaining humble and teachable, but not doing what I do with the motive of getting you to like me.

To do this, we need to retrain our mini-me. We need to retrain that inner voice, that small, not so quiet, sometimes voice of doubt. That inner dialogue that says, "Well, hang on a minute, Grant. Why would you be able to help people all around the world to develop their Emotional Intelligence and reduce their stress and conflict and be happier in their life and…” No, no, no. Retrain that dialogue to go, “You know what? This is what you do. This is the evidence that you've been doing it and this is what I'm going to use as my frame of reference, not what others have said or what they might say or what I've believed in in the past.

Retraining that voice to be a voice that lifts you up so that when you are having those bad days, which they're okay to have by the way, because we are human, we're not robots. That small voice lifts us up and says, “Hey, come on.” Whispers in your ear and says, “Remember that time you…Remember those people that you helped there? Remember what your kids said about you?” Whatever it is. So, it gives you a different dialogue to build you up.

The third thing to develop your Personal Power is that we need to be able to set and then keep boundaries. Boundaries around our priorities, boundaries around what we believe is most important to us. Boundaries around our self-care. By the way, self-care is not selfish. Self-care says, “I've got a balance of looking after myself so that I can take care of others.” Being able to set boundaries around how we'll let people speak to us, how we'll let people behave around us, and then to be very particular and keeping those boundaries. Learning to say yes to our priorities and no to things that go outside our values because we're not concerned about what people think. We're concerned about who we're supposed to be and what it is that we've been put on the earth to achieve.

The next one is we need to move on quickly from things. I want you to imagine you're in a car right now and you're looking at a big piece of glass in the front of your car. It's called your wind screen. And then in the center of that screen, there is a little mirror, a smaller piece of glass, and that's your rear view mirror. What I want you to do is think about your journey, your life with that in mind. So, the rear vision mirror is just there to have a quick look every now and then to see what's behind. But the main focus is on the larger piece of glass, which is where we're going.

Things happen in life. Situations come every single day in my life, just as they do in yours. People say things. This morning, I had someone on a webinar that I was on who attacked me and it was crazy, but I moved on quickly from it because in the scheme of things, listening to that was going to stop me from doing what I need to do for you right now. So, being more focused on where we're going rather than where we've been and going back to where we've been for two reasons. One, to look at the things that we've done in our life that can give us evidence that we are able to do things and two, be able to look at things that we didn't quite get right, so that tells us what to do differently moving forward.

Then number five, to be able to have a high level of Personal Power, we need to learn to speak your truth assertively. Not aggressively, assertively. When we know our priorities, when we know what's important to us, when we set boundaries around those things, we're able to then speak that to others with conviction. And if they ask us to do something that's outside that we can go, “You know what? No.” Or we can say, "Hey, I'd love to do that. I just need to get some more information first before I make a decision.”

Or if somebody is treating us in a way that's not within our priorities and our boundaries to be able to go, "Hey, when you do that, it makes me feel this way and if you continue to do that, I'm going to do this." So, speaking your truth assertively is going to allow you to navigate your life with a lot more happiness and fun and you're going to be able to overcome roadblocks and continue to build up your identity and your Personal Power.

So Personal Power, and you can probably tell by how excited I am going through this this week, is the number one competency of Emotional Intelligence that it underpins all the other 25 that I work with when I'm working with people. And it's a part of the Self-Awareness quadrant where we've got Emotional Self-Awareness, Accurate Self-Assessment and Personal Power. If you're interested in developing your Personal Power, the online course that I've just put together takes you through exercises to do all those five things that we just talked about and gives you support and coaching so that you can get there.

So, that's it from me this week. What I'm going to do next week and beyond is I'm going to pull out elements of that overview that I just gave you and we'll go deeper on some of those things so that you can develop a strong sense of self-worth, that you can feel good about yourself. Be confident in your ability and navigate through this pandemic and beyond with a high sense of Personal Power. I'll see you next week.

Knowing which emotions you are feeling in the moment and why is the first step in being able to express them appropriately.

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, International Influencer and Sustainable Performance Coach, and this week, we want to start our journey in the competencies of Emotional Intelligence in the area of self-awareness by looking at the first competency, Emotional Self-Awareness

For FREE resources and coaching from one of the leading personal development experts in the world, visit: https://www.grantherbert.com

Get the FULL TRANSCRIPT here:

https://www.grantherbert.com/blog/it-starts-with-awareness

Become A Coach and grow your influence, income, and impact here: https://www.peoplebuildersinstitute.com.au  

Are you someone who's reflective and open to candid feedback or do you tend to have a lot of blind spots?

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, International Influencer and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today, I want to continue our conversation around going beyond COVID-19 and developing our Emotional Intelligence by talking about the critical competency of Accurate Self-Assessment.

I know myself in my own life, particularly in my military and in my corporate career, I found it challenging to listen to feedback. I very much resisted feedback and a lot of times that was because the feedback actually lined up with what I was thinking about myself anyway. And it's something that I didn't want to face up to.

You see, feedback, if it's taken and you do something with it, it means that you've got to move forward. It means that you have to put some stuff down and you have to, now that you've got rid of that baggage, lead those excuses behind and do something. I'm not sure whether you are someone that likes feedback and quite often people will say they do until you start giving them some. But getting feedback from situations around us and from other people is critically important if we're going to be emotionally intelligent.

We all have blind spots, things that we can't see or in some cases won't see that are holding us back from being who we need to be to get the results that we want to have. Whether that is in this time of the COVID-19 pandemic or at any part of our life. We can also become very competitive sometimes. This is also a roadblock to being able to navigate and be emotionally intelligent when we're over-competitive with others. Where we feel that if we get any feedback or if we stop and reflect, then we may not be where we think we are or want to be and everything is a competition with people.

We have that one-upmanship going all the time. I see that quite often when I'm looking at comments on social media or on people's blogs or whatever, where someone will be talking about something, but then someone will jump in on the comments and they will one up them by going, "Oh yeah, this happened to me." So instead of contributing to the conversation that was being had by the person who put the post up, they take it down another tangent.

And here's the problem with all this. We become unteachable and stagnant. I believe that you're either green and growing or you're ripe and rotting. So if we're going to be able to accurately assess our strengths and our limitations so that we can up-skill where we need to and leverage the strengths that we have, we need to get feedback. We need to seek help from others.

Now, the first thing we need to understand is that getting help from others is a strength, not a weakness. When we ask for help, when we ask for people's ideas, their perception, it tells them that we're interested in what they've got to say and it tells them that we are human, we are real, that we make mistakes just like they do and therefore they can help and be a part of our learning journey.

It's all about incremental growth. So, it's like a plant when it first enters the ground as a seed and it's in that good soil and it's watered and it seems to take a little bit of time, but then it pops up. But then we keep watering it, we keep having the sun on it, we keep nurturing it and it grows a little bit more and then it grows a little bit more and then it grows a little bit more. I'm not sure if you've heard of the story of the bamboo tree, but it takes forever, years to come up out of the ground and then it shoots up many, many, many feet in the air once it's done that.

So as we become okay with getting feedback, we can be secure in that and know that not everyone's out to get us. It's not a competition. We don't need to be better than anyone else. It's just about where we're at in our journey. We can then be a lot more collaborative and we can work with others and our relationships grow and it's a lot more fun. And the key to this is continuous improvement. As I said, we're not in a race, it's not a competition with others. And it's been said many times, and I agree with this, that all I want to do is be a little different to the version of me yesterday.

So whatever I learned from the feedback that was coming in from my results, from what was happening around me or from others means that I can just take another step towards the person that I want to be. The key to getting to that point is the competency of Emotional Intelligence called Accurate Self-Assessment. And what I want to do is just unpack this week, what this is and why it's so important.

Accurate Self-Assessment is knowing your strengths and your limitations. It's knowing what you're good at, what is your genius and what needs some work. When we are accurately assessing, we have a great start point. There's been many times in my life where I've pretended, that old saying of “fake it till you make it” is not something that I would recommend. It's about being accurate to go, "You know what? This is where I'm at and therefore I need to grow in this area", rather than go, "No, no, no. I'm further down the track than I really am", and then put yourself under a lot of pressure and expectation to be better sooner. So, let me just unpack some key principles around this that will help you to be more accurate in your assessment.

The first one I've talked a bit about already and that is asking is a strength. A lot of people feel that if they ask others for help or they ask others' opinion that they're going to get it. And if they ask people, then they're saying, "I'm less than, I need you", and it's not the case. It's a strength to go, "Hey, I'm teachable, I'm humble, I'm really, really good at this stuff, but I need some help here".

For me, I need a lot of help around things like getting these videos and podcasts up to you. I am okay at getting in front of the camera and I'm getting better with that all the time as I learn and I grow and get feedback and I ask for help from other people, but I've got a team of people behind me who put this all together and do the technical stuff and I ask for their help so that they can get this information out to you. So, that's the first thing.

The second area is to be open to insights. Be open to what you might discover if you are looking for feedback. If you are looking for signs, signals, clues, evidence to say, "Hey, this is what you're good at, this is what you could work on". So, being open to that needs a belief structure that says it's okay not to be perfect. It's okay not to seek approval from others. And next week, we're going to be talking about the competency of Personal Power. And that's where we really are going to work on those beliefs. However, right now I want you to understand that when you are open to seeing what might be holding you back, then those things will appear and they will illuminate for you the next part of your journey.

The third one is that it needs to be a defensive-free zone. So when we're looking for feedback from what's around us or from other people, we need to do it in a way that we're not concerned about what we're hearing. We're not needing to be defensive. A lot of times people go, "Yeah, I love asking for feedback. I love people giving me feedback.", until you give them some, and then as soon as you start giving them feedback, they go "Hang on" and they're defensive. So to do this, we need to operate from our logical brain. We need to realise that feedback is just collecting information rather than allowing it to be down in the emotional brain where we feel a certain way because they've said that about us.

The other thing is that we need to realise that what other people tell us is their perception of reality. So when I'm working with individuals or with organisations, teams, to teach them how to get feedback in a manner that's going to be good for you and for the people that you're asking, we go through a process where we ask for the feedback first and then we actually listen and we listen in a way that is non-defensive. It's, “Yeah, come on. Let me just get this information from you so that I can process it in my logical brain.“

The next point is that getting feedback is a forward-focused analysis. So, what we're doing is getting feedback that's going to help us on the journey ahead rather than getting feedback and then letting it take you back into past failures, past memories, past beliefs, and give you further evidence that you're exactly the person who you feel you are.

You can see my demeanor drop as I did that and I did it on purpose because we dropped down into the emotion of it, but feedback is for two reasons. One is so that we can celebrate the strengths and the wins and we can take learnings from those and use going forward. It's also to work out what we're not quite getting right. What could have some improvement, what not to do in the future, what to do more of so that we can then once again, as we're going forward, we can use those lessons.

And the last point that I want to get across to us is that it's all about being a lifetime learner. It's all about, as I said before, you're either green and growing or you're ripe and rotting. It's all about being a lifetime learner that says, “I am humble, I am teachable, I am not perfect, and that is never going to be the goal.” There are people that know stuff that I don't and there are things that I know that others don't and we and they may not need to know, but I'm going to learn consistently throughout my life.

And the key for that working for me is when I realised that I am best to be a just in time learner rather than a just in case learner. So it's not about just putting heaps of information in there, it's about what do I need to know right now for the next part of my journey.

So, there's some principles that'll help us to be more accurate in our assessment of our ability. See, people who are reflective and open to candid feedback, develop an inner awareness of their strengths and their limitations. So, they take on things that they are confident about and they get support and help within their limitations.

A great tool to help you to work out your strengths and your limitations is the Johari window. If you haven't heard of the Johari window, just Google it. And you'll see that it about the fact that there are things that we see about ourselves that others don't, but there's also things that others see that we don't, and they're our blind spots. And then there's also things down in the subconscious that come up at the most inopportune times usually that we might need a coach to bring up and to work on and hopefully I can be that for you and help you as we're going through this.

Accurate Self-Assessment is a critical competency of Self-Awareness. Self-Awareness is the first quadrant of Social and Emotional Intelligence. I'm really excited right now in this time of COVID-19 to have invested a lot of time in the studio and put together an online course that helps you to become more self-aware and work on these competencies that we're talking about and in a way that gives you exercises and activities so that you can then work on those, building those muscles of Emotional Intelligence rather than just get the information.

If you're interested in knowing about that, there's links here and just follow what we're doing. Emotional Intelligence is one of the critical keys of being able to navigate COVID-19 in a way where we can stay in the logical brain, where we can control our thoughts, where we can recognise when we are catastrophising or when we are thinking, saying or doing things that are not going to give us the results that we want.

So, that's it from me for another week. Join me again next week when we continue our journey through the Self-Awareness quadrant of Emotional Intelligence by starting a conversation around what I believe the most critical component of Emotional Intelligence, and that is Personal Power. I'll see you then.

Do you have total clarity around the emotions that you're feeling in the moment and why or are you confused and not sure why you're feeling that way?

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, International Influencer and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today, I want to continue our conversation about going beyond COVID-19 by going a little bit more in depth around the topic of Emotional Intelligence.

For FREE resources and coaching from one of the leading personal development experts in the world, visit: https://www.grantherbert.com

Get the FULL TRANSCRIPT here:

https://www.grantherbert.com/blog/navigating-covid-19-emotional-intelligence

Become A Coach and grow your influence, income, and impact here: https://www.peoplebuildersinstitute.com.au  

Knowing which emotions you are feeling in the moment and why is the first step in being able to express them appropriately. Hi, this is Grant Herbert, International Influencer and Sustainable Performance Coach, and this week, we want to start our journey in the competencies of Emotional Intelligence in the area of self-awareness by looking at the first competency, Emotional Self-Awareness

You see, many of us suffer from emotional blindness. It's like we’re walking on a wet floor with one of those signs that says that it's slippery. Someone's just mopped it or whatever it is, and we didn't see the sign. And being emotionally blind can create us to slip and fall. We have fluctuating feelings that like being on a roller coaster, we're up and we're down and inappropriate reactions to what we're feeling. After a period of time, that's pretty draining and we feel like we're running on empty. But it doesn't have to be that way.

When we develop our Emotional Self-Awareness, we can get clarity around which emotion we're feeling in that moment and what it's telling us. We can go into emotional flow where we feel it, we pass it through the logical brain, and we respond in a measured way. And that gives us a position of balanced empowerment where we're listening to our gut, we're listening to our heart, we're listening to the way that we feel and then we're processing it in a logical way. And to do that, we have to develop Emotional Self-Awareness.

Emotional Self-Awareness is recognising your emotions and the effects that they're having. The effects that they're having on your thinking, on your self-talk, on your behaviour. So, let's have a look at five key ideas that we need to understand around this before we get in, roll up our sleeves and develop some Emotional Self-Awareness.

Right here, right now, whether you're listening to this on the podcast, whether you're watching it on my YouTube channel, whether it's on my website, in my blog, right here, right now, you can come with me on this quick journey and develop a skill around your Emotional Self-Awareness.

So, the first thing is that we need to expand our emotional vocabulary. There are over 2000 words in the English dictionary alone that describe an emotion or emotions that we could be going through in any moment, and we use about six to 10. We’re either happy or we’re sad. We’re frustrated, we’re angry, we’re fearful, whatever it is for you.

So, the first thing we've got to do is recognise that before we can manage an emotion, we need to make sure we know which emotion we're going through. So, managing anger is different to managing confusion or frustration or disappointment. So, we need to expand our vocabulary around the emotions that we could be going through.

The third thing is we need to listen to our body. Our body will tell us in physical ways when we are experiencing certain emotions. It's like when I'm getting frustrated, I tense up. If I were to be getting angry, the back of my neck feels a little bit hot. If I'm feeling fearful or scared, I've got this empty, funny feeling in my stomach and you know that you have those physiological things happening in your body at the same time as well, depending on what the emotion is. So, we've got to learn to listen to our body. So, it's not just about making a guess, “I'm going through this emotion.” We can actually pinpoint and know which emotion we're going through.

The next thing is to recognise patterns. So if regularly we experience this emotion around this type of circumstance that creates that type of behaviour, that's a pattern, when those patterns can become ingrained in our neural pathways. So, we need to understand when those patterns are taking place. So, that'll give us a lot more information and data that we can play with and tweak and adjust to create a different behaviour.

And number five is we need to go deeper for clarity. So what I'm saying there, instead of just recognising the emotion and seeing it at a surface level, we need to be able to ask ourselves a series of questions that we'll go deeper into giving us clarity around why that makes me behave that way, why that makes you do the things that you do, why that creates that reaction. So, there's five key things that we need to understand when we are developing and building our Emotional Self-Awareness.

So, let's roll up our sleeves right now and I want to give you an exercise that you can do that will help you to go through those five principles we just talked about and become more emotionally aware. Social and Emotional Intelligence is the ability to be aware of our own emotions and the emotions of others in the moment and then to use that information to manage yourself and manage your relationships.

So, step one is about being aware. So, one of the exercises that I take clients through, and we will have this also in the course that we're currently developing, is an exercise where you do a timeline. The key element of this exercise, the key outcome is to create a regular pattern where you stop in the moment at certain parts of your day and ask yourself, “What is the emotion I'm going through right now?”

Now, I don't know about you, but no one ever taught me to do that. So, step one is label the emotion. So if I just react or I, on the fly, just keep going with it without actually going, “Well, hang on a sec. What is the emotion I'm going through right now?”

Now, you'll remember from last week and probably the week before, it might've been, that I taught you how asking “what” questions will bring a logical answer. It'll light up the neocortex instead of getting into too much more of the emotion and going down into it. So, what is the emotion I'm going through right now? Now in this exercise for the moment, let's put aside worrying about or considering why I'm going through it. We just want to identify the emotion.

Now, the thing to understand here is we can be going through more than one emotion in any given moment. And paradoxically we could even be going through the negative and positive emotion around the same thing.

So, I might have a friend who has passed and they've been really, really sick and in pain and I might feel sad that I've lost my friend. I feel sad that they've left their wife or their children or whatever that situation is behind. But I also feel happy and joyful around the fact that they no longer in pain, that they've gone to a better place and they're no longer experiencing what they went through in the last stages of their life. So, you can be going through just like me, more than one emotion at any given time.

So to start us off, let's just consider one. So, what you can do is start when you first wake up in the morning. So when you wake up, instead of reaching for your phone, reach for a signal and go, “What is the emotion I'm going through right now?”

Then when you're having your breakfast, what's the emotion I'm going through right now? When you jump in your car, if you're still working away from home or if you do the commute from the kitchen to your office like me, what's the emotion that I'm going through? What's the emotion you're going through mid-morning, lunchtime, mid-afternoon? When you first get home, after dinner, when you're getting ready for bed.

So, using those particular milestones in your day, just stop. Ask yourself the question: What is the emotion I'm going through right now? When you do that, what I want you to do, if you want to go deeper on that, is if for example, you used an emotional, you came up with emotion like I feel good or I feel okay or I feel tired, which is more a physical state or I feel hungry. I want to challenge you to go a little bit deeper and go, “Okay, yeah, I'm feeling hunger pains, but how do I really feel? How does that make me feel?”

So, the first step is to recognise the emotion that you're going through in the moment. And that exercise will then help you to build that vocabulary and recognise in the moment the emotion you're going through so you can then regulate the correct one.

The second thing we can do when we're recognising emotion is, as I talked about before, is we can go, “Well, how do I know that I'm going through that emotion? How do I feel physically? What sort of self-talk is going on when I experienced that emotion?” And stopping and recognising those things and reconciling that will help you when you go through those emotions. So, why don't we want to do all that?

Well, here's the key. What I love to help people to do is instead of waiting until we get to an emotion which is really strong and it's ingrained in a pattern of behaviour that is unresourceful like anger, we want to be able to recognise the pattern of which emotions I normally go through on the way to anger. So, building your emotional vocabulary and your Emotional Self-Awareness will help you to be able to regulate the emotion in the moment.

Well, that's it for me for this week. Join us next week where we'll have a look at the second competency in the area of self-awareness, Accurate Self-Assessment. I'll see you then.

Are you a glass half full or a glass half empty person? Do you tend to look at the brighter side of life or do you talk yourself into the worst case scenario?

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, International Influencer and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today, I want to continue our conversation around going beyond COVID-19 by controlling our emotions by developing our emotional intelligence.

For FREE resources and coaching from one of the leading personal development experts in the world, visit: https://www.grantherbert.com

Get the FULL TRANSCRIPT here:

https://www.grantherbert.com/blog/putting-covid-19-into-perspective

Become A Coach and grow your influence, income, and impact here: https://www.peoplebuildersinstitute.com.au