The Key To Leadership Mastery? Understanding The Unconscious Mind
- Feb 7, 2023
- 4 min read
We all have blind spots – unconscious thoughts, feelings, and assumptions that drive ineffective habits and unproductive behavior patterns. Blind spots affect both our personal and professional lives, and in the business world they hold leaders back from mastery – enabling teams to perform at their highest levels, continuously elevating results and driving the organization forward.
Unaware of the unconscious root of the problem, leaders can become stuck. This awareness often surfaces too late, in the form of poor team performance, ineffective communication, and substandard company performance. When leaders recognize the unconscious behavioral patterns early and bring them to the surface – moving them from the unconscious to the conscious level – these patterns can be examined and changed.
The Road Often Taken: A Superficial Approach
Traditional coaching often fails to shine a light on the unconscious, where the roots of behavioral patterns live. The results are typically limited and temporary because these methods work only at the surface level and never reveal the true source of ineffective or uninspired performance. Think of it as the tip of an iceberg peeking out of the ocean. The only issues showing up and being addressed are the ones above the surface when, in fact, there is an entire unconscious level of issues lurking below. Over the long term, leaders remain stuck because they have not changed how they think and act on a deeper level.
Common methods usually involve complex assessment systems that graph problematic behaviors and results. This may be useful for analyzing the details of job skills compared to performance, but in terms of leadership development, the effects are most often superficial.
Coaches who use these methods typically ask, “What’s the problem?” and “What are your options?” then interject their own solutions, which limits results to the coach’s knowledge and past experience. This well-meaning advice is based on subjective judgements and does not tap into objective, deeper levels where the answers lie that can move leaders forward on a profound level.
Diving Beneath the Surface for Lasting Change
Lasting leadership development happens by tapping into the unconscious level – that place just beneath the surface where the real barriers to elevated performance exist. This is where the brain’s neurological sequencing, which is based on core beliefs and previous experiences, lives. The scientific principles of neurolinguistic programming (NLP) are highly effective at identifying and changing ineffective behavioral patterns and enhancing the patterns in the unconscious mind that underpin elevated performance. This approach leverages five steps to get below the surface and ensure deep, lasting change (traditional coaching does not explore three of the five which are keys to lasting results):
Identify the situation, goals, and objectives.
Establish development plans, metrics, and target goal dates for individual leaders.
Use neurolinguistic programming to unravel problematic behavioral patterns.
Pinpoint patterns, root cause, impact, and resolution options with opened neural pathways.
Evaluate and measure accomplishments and determine next step (s).
Starting with a completely open mind is vital to a leadership coach’s ability to uncover the past or present experiences that have created the neural pathways that produced a leader’s beliefs and resulting actions. Listening closely and utilizing principles of neurolinguistic programming, an expert coach can pinpoint the behavioral patterns and their origins by examining the words the leader uses. Language typically comes straight from our unconscious and therefore is a window into deeper thought patterns.
For instance, phrases such as, “am not,” “can’t, “unable to,” and “must not” reveal an assumption of the impossibility of a desire or goal. NLP-trained coaches listen deeply, not only to the words used but the tone, pace, energy level, and smoothness of speech, as well as the use of fillers, such as “like” and “ya know,” to uncover the experiences that lead to negative neural pathways and the resulting behavioral patterns.
Typical questions an expert behavioral and NLP coach ask include:
What is the root of the issue?
What is really stopping you?
If you could do it over again, what would you do differently?
What is your desired outcome?
What is the thing we are not discussing that we should be? (reveals a blind spot.)
At an even deeper level, by observing how leaders conduct or participate in meetings, coaches are able to observe them in their “natural habitat,” which reveals behavior patterns the client may not report because they are simply unaware of them. Observation is conducted virtually, making it easier and faster for the coach to melt into the background. The coach reads sensory acuity and words, noting the leadership approach and style as well as the team’s non-verbal reactions.
Neuroscience techniques are applied to change the leader’s thought patterns and the resulting behavior. The tangible results come to light once they are aware of their own unique, limiting thoughts and behaviors, and learn how to implement them with this three-step technique:
Identify the thought/behavior pattern in the moment.
Interrupt it every time it repeats.
Run a new, enhanced pattern.
Lasting Leadership Development Elevates the Entire Organization
The blind spots that hold leaders back, personally and professionally, repeat themselves until unconscious patterns surface at the conscious level where blind spots can be transformed.
When leaders have the opportunity to consciously work with their submerged, unconscious behaviors in this way, they can unleash their full potential and make a powerful impact on their organizations. The best part is that, using the neuroscientific approach to coaching, the results are fast-tracked with leaders typically achieving their first round of objectives within five weeks.
There’s a lot going on in our unconscious and subconscious minds. Some of it is very positive, while some is holding us back in terms of reaching our ultimate leadership potential. A good leadership coach is one who is not afraid to get out their figurative shovel and dig deep into those areas, uncovering the negative patterns and thoughts that act as speed bumps to our advancement.
It’s not just a good way to effect real change. It’s the only way.
About the author:
Karen Brown, Founder and CEO of Exponential Results, draws upon her experience as a corporate executive, senior executive coach, and behavioral expert to elevate the performance and impact of senior executives. Follow her on LinkedIn.
