Full transcript
Hello and welcome to LEAD — Leadership Enablement and Development, a new initiative from Nirvedha. This is the show for leaders, all about leadership and its impact. And on this episode: have you ever struggled with listening to your inner voice? That's exactly what we are going to help you with on this week's show, where you will learn how to convert your inner conscience into your coach. I'm your host Sudhakar, a certified coach.
I would be kidding if I asked you whether you know what the inner conscience is. Let me ask you a different question. Have you ever thought of converting this inner conscience into your best buddy — that is, your inner coach? Every leader, be it at a junior level or a CXO level, can convert his or her inner voice or conscience into a decision-making guide, and more importantly can transform that into an inner coach.
We as human beings are gifted with this unique gift, our inner conscience, which is part of us throughout our life's journey, in the thick and thin of it. It constantly and continually speaks to us, be it negative or positive.
Bob Anderson and Bill Adams, in their book Mastering Leadership, refer to it as conscious competence. We are always playing two games: an outer game and an inner game. The outer game of leadership consists of leadership competencies, such as developing the technical or managerial skills needed to accomplish results. Most efforts to build mastery in leadership focus on the outer game of competence. The inner game comprises the leader's meaning-making system, the underlying beliefs and the assumptions developed over time — the way the individual makes sense of the world. All competencies are built on the inner game, on the platform of consciousness. The better the outer game and the more mature the inner game, the more effective the person's leadership.
Having said so, now let us look at how to develop trust in your inner conscience. At a certain point, leaders must learn to trust their inner conscience, or intuition, or inner voice — whatever we call it. The inner voice, or just a gut feeling: that instinct is the accumulation of knowledge and experience, and is worth listening to.
Let me share an example from my own experience, to make our understanding better. In one of my corporate roles, as leader of life-sciences and healthcare analytics projects, we were pitching for a multi-million-dollar project and we were at the final stages of closing the deal. The rate was the deciding factor, and our bid team suggested a lower price than our competitors, as they had some intelligence about it. My inner conscience said that we should not lower the cost, as our delivery was top class in comparison to our competitors. I gave my decision to the bid team. With much hesitation, they sent the quotes. Finally we won the deal, but the client split the project amongst two partners — between the competitor and us. We got twenty-five per cent and the competitor gained seventy-five per cent of the project. The whole bid team, including my leadership team, pointed a finger at me for the debacle. I took things in my stride, and my team started delivering with the highest quality. Over a period of six months, we got the complete project. This is an example of the inner voice as an accumulation of knowledge and experience, and it has tremendously helped me by listening to it.
You as a leader may have a fear of the unknown and struggle to go with your intuition. Yes, I agree — and it is not an overnight thing, where you decide one night and from tomorrow you start going with your inner conscience. Making decisions based on the past is a bit like driving into the future using only our rear-view mirror. This view of the world has a significant impact on a leader's ability to understand the difference between what is possible and what is probable. Our patterns of action and habits of thought ensure that we continue to see things linearly and sequentially, driven always by a cause-and-effect mode of thinking. It is a gradual process. One may come across a couple of failures. We have to face it to start building it. A leader can also engage an executive coach, as it would be a good start to assess your present situation, discover your true leadership style and build on it.
You may be wondering what executive coaching is all about. Let me quickly bring you up to speed. In the six years since I started practising coaching, I've been closely following world-leading coaches to figure out what they all have in common, and what, according to them, is the best definition of coaching. If I had to boil it down to one sentence, it would be that they focus less on the result and more on the process — and they recognise that character is what drives the process, which operates the result. To put it quite simply: coaching is a process that aims to improve performance and focuses on the here and now rather than on the distant past or future. Coaching is unlocking a person's potential to maximise their performance. It is helping them to learn, rather than teaching them.
Having understood the definition of coaching, let us look at converting our inner conscience into a coach. We all know that no one can access our inner thoughts except us. I would call it our private voice. I want to take it a step further. How helpful is that private voice? Is it a voice you would be proud to have displayed on the wall, particularly during tough times? How does it speak to you? Is it a coach that is giving you powerful positive messages that help you? Or is it working to break you down, to cause you more grief, more pain, more stress?
Once you begin to realise that voice is almost always saying something, you can start to take more responsibility for how that voice is speaking to you — recognising that this voice will be the only voice that's with you until your death. We want that voice to be someone who is a contributor to your life.
Let me sum up: our private voice can either help us out or break us down. However, it is the only voice that will be with us until our death.
I want you to put yourself in this situation. You are in a crucial meeting with your whole team, and your seniors and peers are watching you. Things are going wrong for you. Things are going crazy for your team. What if, at that moment, the thoughts you were thinking scrolled across the bottom of the screen on which you were presenting, for everyone in the boardroom to see? How would that make you feel? The striking thing about this is that when we think negatively, not only are we competing against our opponent, we are also competing against ourselves. So we have to turn our private voice into our inner coach, so that when we go through those tough times our inner coach can guide us through them.
To make this understanding better, let me give you two examples from my personal life. These situations fire me up every time I recollect them.
Back in the year 2007, when I was trying my hand at the stock market, I was lucky and could earn a couple of lakhs. This luck converted into greed, and my inner conscience commanded me to double the investment, which I followed. Eventually, in the year 2008, due to the financial bubble, I lost almost eighty-five per cent of my investment.
In the second instance, a couple of years back, I was diagnosed with hypertension, and this was a big setback for me. The doctor recommended lifelong medication. He went on to warn me that I shouldn't stop the drug, as it would have a severe impact on my blood pressure. Precisely at this point my inner voice told me that I should alter my lifestyle and start exercising on a regular basis, which would probably change the situation. Since then I have started running on a daily basis, and now I am a marathoner with seven marathons already under my belt, and am able to run ten kilometres under one hour.
Those were two examples. The first one is the untamed inner voice. In the second, it is the inner voice as my coach. I hope you have got the clear distinction between the two.
Further, for your benefit, let me give you a simple exercise. I want you to take thirty seconds and think about this question: when was the last time you felt stress, pressure or anxiety? I want you to write that situation down. Chances are it probably happened today. So here's what I want you to do now. Underneath what you wrote down, answer this question: what about that situation caused you to feel stress, pressure or anxiety?
All right. So now I'm going to tell you what you're thinking about. Any time we feel stress, pressure or anxiety, we are thinking of one of two things. Either the future — something that could happen — or we are thinking about the past, something that has happened. Funny how that works, doesn't it?
As a coach, I firmly believe that we shouldn't focus on the past or the future. We should stay focused on the present. When we focus on the present, we focus on the things that we can control. One shouldn't care about the result, as long as we have no regrets and we make sure we have put in all our efforts without any doubts.
As most of us are more worried about the result rather than the effort, most often we hear that a leader is the one who chases the goal. If you look at the definition of a goal, it's the result to which the effort is aimed. When you focus on goals, you focus on results. And if you think about it, results are frequently outside of our control. The second part of the definition — the effort aimed at the result — we call the process. Your process is what drives the result.
Don't take me wrong: by any stretch of the imagination I am not suggesting you should not set goals. What I am trying to tell you is that one can have the goal of becoming an accomplished leader, but there's a process to get there, and your focus needs to be on that. So if you set the goals, what you need to focus on is the process.
Let me take a step back. Do you know what I struggled with when I was young? Focusing on the process. When I entered the profession I had two goals. The first was that I wanted to get a managerial position within two years of starting my career. The second was that I wanted to be a zonal head by the time I turned thirty. That meant I had to work three to four times harder than my peers to get these two promotions.
Now that's interesting. If you look at these goals, each one of these things is outside of my control. I can't control whether or not my seniors recommend me for the desired role — that's their opinion. I can't control the market dynamics vis-à-vis my sales targets. And I certainly can't control whether or not my colleagues and peers underperform compared to me. You know what my issue was? My thoughts were always in the future. I saw all these dreams inside my head, and I was worried about whether or not I had what it takes to get there. Can you relate to this?
When I look back, in reference to today's world and the advances executive coaching is making in helping executives to be challenged, I sincerely feel that I missed this during the early part of my career.
Based on my past experience, and now being a coach, my sincere suggestion is that the best way to get the next position is to do a fantastic job where you are. I believe that when people talk, that reaches the sky and is unbelievable — and I think excellence is hard to keep quiet. The greatest tip for success is that there are no shortcuts. There is no magic pill. Nobody is going to give you anything. And whenever it is that you do have an opportunity and you're given a chance, you have to be prepared — because you don't know when that opportunity is going to come. You have to prepare for that every day.
One thing I would strongly recommend is that success should be part of your daily agenda. Let me share a very simple and fantastic exercise with you. I want you to document in a book every single thing that you do throughout the day. At the end of the night, before you go to bed, you should review all the activities and pick two things that you will get better at tomorrow. The whole idea is to improve a little each day. Through this exercise you're focusing your efforts on the process, not on the result.
You may be wondering if there is anything else driving the process. Yes, there is — and that is your character. Now, when I say that, the word means so many different things to so many different people. There are two types of character. The first is what we call performance character: the character skills that govern your relationship with yourself. These are the things that will make you get up at half past five in the morning to prepare for your urgent meeting. The second kind is what we call moral character: the character skills that govern your relationship with others. These are the things that make you a great professional and a great leader.
Let me now bring all this together, to help you build your inner coach. Imagine if you used your inner coach to help you create all of these things — how much better would you be? Great coaches begin with the end in mind. So the first thing you want to ask yourself is: what am I trying to accomplish? Is it to improve professionally, financially, relationally, in your outcomes? Once you have that clearly, you then move to the process and ask yourself: what's my plan? How am I going to make that happen? After you have that, you then ask yourself: what are the character skills that I'll need to use and develop?
Let me put this into perspective by sharing a personal experience of how to convert your inner conscience into your coach. I was coaching a senior professional who was struggling to move ahead in his career. I told him: if I don't help you build your inner coach, I have failed you. So I asked him, what are you struggling with? You know what he told me? He said, I have got three on a scale of zero to five in the last appraisal, and I need to get it up to five to move ahead in my career.
I said, here's what we are going to do. I'm going to be you, and I want you to be your inner coach. I want you to give me advice on how you're going to raise that appraisal score. You know what he said? He said: well, the first thing you need to do is schedule a meeting with your supervisor once a month. Second, you need to create schedules of delivery and process maps of all work streams, so that you can remember the tasks and complete them in a timely fashion. Third, you need to quit procrastinating. You need to start expanding your knowledge beyond your scope. And you're going to work on your discipline and your accountability.
You may be wondering — I think that's better advice than I could ever have given him. And he is giving it to himself. However, what's telling is that I asked him this: do you speak to me with more respect than you speak to yourself? He smiled, because he is so hard on himself. How many of you can relate to that?
So what do we do as we move through this sequence and we don't hit the result we are shooting for? Going through experiences is our best teacher. I know that if I mess up, I learn from it and get better. We need to turn results into learning experiences. What we typically do is wrap our identity up in a result. So if you had a bad day at the office, you feel terrible about yourself, and you are only as good as your last performance — and you are on an emotional roller coaster.
So how can we turn those results into learning experiences? Here is an exercise which you can do after an extraordinary meeting, an excellent review with your senior, a great sales call, a successful client visit, whatever it is. When you have your result, you can ask yourself this question: what did I do well, and why? You can take the success and focus on the why — because when you focus on the why, you can then repeat that in the future. Then you can ask yourself this question: what could I do better, and how? By asking how, you take the focus off the mistake and focus on how you're going to improve it for the next time.
Let me conclude by saying this. What I hope by now is that you have a better understanding of how important it is to build your inner coach — so that you focus less on the result and more on the process, and you use your inner coach to develop your character. Winning is not a result. Victory is a process, and it is driven by character.
Thank you all for tuning in.