Unlocking Your Leadership – Overcoming Mental Obstacles For Business Success
Written by: Adriana Bárbara Rodríguez, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Have you ever felt trapped in a leadership cycle that seems to make no progress? Have you invested time and effort in improving your leadership skills, only to encounter internal obstacles that seem to hinder you on the path to business success?
In this fascinating journey toward unlocking your leadership, we will explore the mysteries of the mind and discover how to overcome the mental barriers that may be holding back your potential. Get ready to challenge your perceptions, unleash your true leadership, and reach new heights in your professional career. So, join me on this path toward growth and business success! Let's begin...
I don't know about you, but it certainly has happened to me. Let's see if you can relate. Imagine you've just finished reading a great book on leadership, or you attended a course or seminar. You end up feeling motivated, with a sense of hope that you can experience a great change as a leader. You took notes, reflected, and decided to change your style of leadership and influence on others. You start making changes, and your team notices it, they are surprised but show enthusiasm. Even though you know these changes are good, you feel strange and somehow uncomfortable, yet you continue. Days go by, and the challenges and pressures of everyday life arrive with the deadlines, demands, and pressures. You get caught up in the activity, meetings, problems with team members or colleagues, and situations with your boss. Suddenly, you realize that you've been reacting the same way as before for days now and that ultimately, you're still the same. You're convinced that you need to change to improve, yet your attempts do not stick and don't yield the desired results. Sound familiar?
Let me tell you that this happens to most people, do you know why?
Our being is driven by mental conditioning, which is formed by beliefs and mental paradigms that have been shaped since childhood and have been strengthened and updated over the years with new experiences.
This conditioning lies in the unconscious mind, which is what drives us to act and defines who we are. It is the unconscious mind that directs our emotions, and behaviors and determines our perspective on life.
Our conscious mind can understand information, accept it, and believe it, but if this information is not properly planted in our unconscious mind, it will not produce emotions, behaviors, and perspectives consistent with the new information.
To better explain, let's use the previous example as a basis. Let's say Pablo is a Plant Manager, his leadership style is somehow controlling, he struggles to delegate as he finds it difficult to trust that his team can do a good job. This has made his team demotivated, lacking initiative, and overly dependent on him. This consumes a lot of his time and adds great pressure.
Pablo attended a leadership course where he learned that it is important for a good leader to trust his people, empower them, and let them know that they are capable of doing things themselves. He understood this idea and decided to change. He started delegating a bit more, sending his team members to lead meetings in his place or assigning them important projects. His team felt motivated, but Pablo, although he changed his behavior, internally felt great fear, discomfort, and insecurity.
Eventually, he couldn't take it anymore and unconsciously began to take control again, relieving his stress and insecurity, and justifying his actions to regain power. As a result, his team became even more demotivated, and he ended up frustrated for not being able to make a sustainable and effective change.
Pablo's main hindrance is his mental conditioning, which contains the following toxic paradigm: "I'm afraid that if I don't supervise and participate actively, I won't be necessary anymore." This paradigm was planted at an unconscious level since childhood when his father constantly belittled him in front of his brother and grew over the years by interpreting relevant experiences and relating them to his paradigm. Pablo is not aware of this paradigm, but it exists, generating fear, insecurity, and patterns of excessive control behavior.
Just like Pablo, we all have toxic paradigms that guide us and affect our leadership, and no matter how much we consciously want to change, it won't be possible until we transform them by planting new healthy paradigms at an unconscious level.
How to achieve this?
First: Discover the toxic paradigms that are limiting our leadership.
Second: Understand their origin, when, and how they were created, so they lose power.
Third: Reconceptualize: See them from another point of view, from a different
perspective.
Fourth: Create new healthy paradigms to replace toxic paradigms.
Fifth: Establish and stabilize them at an unconscious level through targeted neuroplasticity strategies (such as repeatedly applying thinking-feeling-acting, visualization, and affirmations, among others).
In Pablo's example, through a Neuroscience Coaching process where the mentioned steps are applied, he was able to discover his toxic paradigm, understand its origin, see it from another point of view, and create the following healthy paradigm: "I am very capable. I can delegate and help others grow and continue to be valuable to the organization." He stabilized this paradigm at an unconscious level, which habitually generated feelings of security, leading him to delegate calmly and confidently, freeing up time to focus on more important matters. As a result, this led him to grow as a leader, empower his team, and together achieve better results and greater satisfaction.
With this process, we can truly apply effectively and sustainably everything we know and learn about what it takes to be a great influential leader and transform our leadership to another level, impacting our work teams, helping them grow, and together achieving great results for our organizations.
As a Mind Coach, I guide my clients through this process to generate this change and transform their minds at the core, achieving decisive and lasting results. On a business level, I apply this to leadership teams, transforming entire organizations to achieve extraordinary results. (For more information about my Neuroscience in Leadership program, visit my page)
Don't miss my next article where we'll delve deeper into the mind, how it works, and how by understanding it, we can better manage it.
Adriana Bárbara Rodríguez, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Adriana Barbara is a Mind specialized Coach that is focused on helping CEO's and high-level entrepreneurs to develop their leadership teams by assisting each member to transform their mindset from the root, achieve their full potential and improve their highest productivity in order to accomplish the organization’s goals in an effective and sustainable way, with her innovative NEUROSCIENCE METHOD IN LEADERSHIP.
