This month I celebrated the quiet launch of Successful Coaching Ltd to the lovely surprise of over 1070 new subscribers to the leadership and wellbeing newsletter, which is frankly amazing news. To celebrate, I have brought in an additional co-author, Curtis Harren who is a key partner as we move forward with planning our CEO leadership training offer.
It got me thinking how we make this space really come alive. So this month, I am trying a new format, I hope you like it. If you would like to contribute meaningful, non-spammy content please get in touch with the page! Funny, irreverent, and always thought provoking is the angle we are aiming for. Let us know if we have got it right in the comments.
A bit about Successful Coaching Ltd
We are a chief executive training agency with combined 35 years’ experience of coaching and training chief executives. Our work has spanned 40 countries, including extensive work in Canada and the UK. Our work this year is focused on developing a workforce development programme for CEO’s. More on this soon. We are a niche boutique training company that does not focus on showmanship or policy work, but more on the growth of individual CEO’s to excel in their roles- combining expertise in peak performance coaching; hypnotherapy, business coaching and high growth strategies. Our work is delivered and designed by former CEO’s who have been successful in their own right, and have turned around organisations and businesses repeatedly with proven success strategies for people management, leadership and organisational development.
On the podcast
We are launching and co-hosting a new leadership wellbeing podcast- and looking for guest contributors. This is not a marketing platform for consultants but instead a place to discuss what it really means to stay healthy at the top, and how this impacts our work throughout our organisations and how we create wellbeing cultures across our workforce. We are looking for podcast guests- get in touch with us if this appeals and we will schedule in an interview if you are a good fit.
Taoism, Hypnotherapy and the art of Leadership
I’ve been fixated since I started my hypnotherapy and coaching business for leaders on how I make this work relevant to improving both you as an individual leader, as well as your organisations too, and if I am honest, it has been a struggle. This is not because mental wellbeing is central your own wellbeing as a leader, but actually because it has become a cliché, I wondered how I can bring a meaningful dialogue to an already crowded space.
This month I have been reading about spirituality and hypnosis, and it made me begin to spark with connections. Hypnosisis a process that allows you to access a non-ordinary state of consciousness, and therapy, well we all understand what therapy is. But what place does this have in a bustling workplace?
Leading organisations is very much about helping your teams to help themselves. Being a leader involves profound states of presence and emotional intelligence. Of course, you can do it without that level of self-awareness, but you will probably not only be doing yourself a disservice but also those you serve and manage. Many of us take ourselves to work, as well as our foibles, and it can be hard to be present when our under-riding anxieties are at large.
Hypnotherapy can provide the great reset needed. Many people have visions that hypnotherapy is akin to stage hypnosis, but they are in fact two distinctly different things- stage hypnosis is a little like magic, designed to enthrall and entertain. Hypnotherapy is accessing someone’s unconscious state to help them recover from a range of mental health issues, limiting beliefs or problematic perceptions, as well as how to overcome much more serious mental health issues to enable someone to deliver a high performance, whether that is professionally or personally. Used globally in peak performance coaching, it is an exceptional tool 600 times quicker then psychotherapy in resolving trauma. Hypnotherapy uses techniques to make changes in the subconscious part of the mind, which stores memories and learned behaviour, while the conscious critical mind is at rest.
A survey of psychotherapy literature by Alfred Barios PHD revealed the following recovery rates:
PSYCHO ANALYSIS - AFTER 600 SESSIONS 38%
CBT - AFTER 28 SESSIONS 72%
HYPNOTHERAPY - AFTER 6 SESSIONS 93%
Wellbeing initiatives tend to fall into two camps:
Tokenistic – you have implemented a policy, and have a mental health contact internally, who is perhaps even trained, and you try to make everyone’s working lives the least stressful you can manage- accepting workplace stress is a certain amount the norm.
Meaningful- you integrate wellbeing aspects into all working life, and take seriously your duty to look after your employee’s wellbeing whilst they are in your service.
I think a lot of people shy away from the meaningful- not through want of trying, but not knowing how.
The Taoist Principle ‘Go With the Flow, be like water. Spontaniety and the right response come from listening to the way things are, describes goodness as:
“True goodness is like water,
In that it benefits everything and harms nothing.
Like water it ever seeks the lowest place.
The place all others avoid.”
When we start to compare this to our wellbeing initiatives, it is really useful for us to think about whether our wellbeing initiatives genuinely benefits everyone, and everything in our organisations, and harms nothing. Does it really begin to tackle how you walk with someone when their job has got too much for them, either as a result of in work, or even out of work happenings?
Authentic leaders provide spontaneous responses that support their staff wellbeing. Managers often describe themselves as counsellor to their staff, but are they really equipped to do this? Is this the correct response? Or are we missing a trick by not enabling them to access real mental health professionals.
Wellbeing is not just a response to a situation, but actually putting building blocks in for wellbeing that make it a framework for your entire ways of working.
What does wellbeing really look like in the workplace?
To explore what good wellbeing means in the workplace, we need to understand firstly what it means to have good mental wellbeing at work.
The Happy Level paper (Sender, G et al; 2021) sets out some base criteria;
“First, there are individual effects directly related to one’s personal life, such as income (Diener et al., 2002), higher life expectancy and health (Salas-Vallina et al., 2017), increased career self-awareness, no burnout, and feeling of solidarity (Ozkara San, 2015). The second is workplace behaviors (i.e., how people behave at work), such as better teamwork (Peñalver et al., 2017), reduced turnover, increased task and contextual performance (Thompson & Bruk-Lee, 2020). Each individual’s workplace behaviors help organizations improve their results, leading to the third group of impacts, the organizational outcomes. For example, Gallup’s meta-analysis showed nine outcomes: customer loyalty/engagement, profitability, productivity, turnover, safety incidents, shrinkage, absenteeism, patient safety incidents, and quality (defects) (Gallup, 2013).”
Despite the wider improvements in organisational outcomes, wellbeing is often seen as a fluffy subject. One leader described to me their view on wellbeing:
“I’ve got a mental health first aider and trained my managers in asking about peoples’ mental health”.
Another one, during a coaching call said “If they can’t stand the heat, they need to get out of the kitchen”.
A key here is to understand that many leaders harbour secret thinking that their work environment is high pressure, and therefore their staff should be resilient enough to cope with it. But what if they are not?
Failure and Taoism
As leaders, we can look at failure in a range of ways; total quality management might encourage us to reflect on failure and build a better iteration next time. Old school techniques might encourage looking for blame- wishing to find a person to blame, or a particular moment or grieve what could have been, or fantasise what could have happened. The problem is that when you seek to apportion blame, people stop coming forward to tell you when they have done something wrong. There is a third option. If we can stay present in the moment, and help everyone cope with failure. To let go of control for a moment and ponder on what a way forward looks like together. To support your staff without ego, and work through their anxieties about failure, and coordinate solutions.