Becoming An Inspirational Leader with Executive Leadership Coaching

Executive Leadership Coaching removes all the barriers to inspiration. When the leader is inspired, the energy of that inspiration pours through and energizes the entire company. Results naturally skyrocket.

Executive leadership coaching is a powerful tool for creating that energy and inspiration. It is about designing a collective future for the company that is so inspiring that the entire company – all of the employees, all of the players – can step into that future and take action in alignment with that future.

I’m not talking about motivating people. Motivation is different than inspiration. Motivation is external and is based on rewards and punishment. Inspiration bubbles up from the inside. Inspiration is the natural inclination to act. It is the lighting of an internal fire, and the result is immediate: powerful energy surges through the entire company. It creates a buzz and a pull towards a common future.

Great leadership is ultimately about inspiration and communication.

Now, there are times when leadership must be stern and drive accountabilities. But the ultimate leader speaks about the future in such a way that the future he or she sees inspires the entire company. And everybody gets behind it and takes action on their own. The results can be so astounding that accountability becomes moot. The leader doesn’t push. He lights the spirits of the entire team with a vision that works – and works for everyone.

That’s the key! The vision works for everybody. There are two common mistakes that leaders make when trying to inspire their team. First, they are inspiring the wrong team. If you speak the vision and people don’t get it, consider you may have the wrong group. You can’t get pigs to fly, but if you have a vision that includes rolling around in the mud, no accountability is necessary for the pigs.

The second mistake inspiring leaders make is speaking the vision one way and one way only. You will know you have the right team when you speak the vision the first time and they all get excited. The next thing to do is discover what that vision means to each individual on the team and learn how to speak the company’s vision inside of the context of the employees. This insures they will get it at the core of their own being. No push will be necessary because there will be an internal drive to achieve the vision.

Executive leadership coaching is about learning to orient your language, your thinking process, and your perspective such that when you speak, everyone around you is inspired to take action on their dreams. And this begets results for the dream of the company, as well. Everything is in sync.

In your business, results will flourish to the point where accountability structures are bypassed again and again. It becomes easy when the leader inspires.

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Developing Intuitive Listening Skills, Part II

We continue our discussion of developing intuitive listening skills with the third powerful strategy which is:

3. Align yourself with their body. When you align your body, your mind will follow. If you want to truly know a person and understand them, then you must learn to entrain your physical energy with their energy. Move your attention off of yourself and on to others. Thinking of yourself clutters your mind and makes intuitive listening impossible.

Practice physical entrainment today. Stand the way people stand, sit the way they sit, and move the way they move. Put your body in the same physical position. Feel yourself tapping into their physical energy. Encourage your mind to appreciate how they are sitting, standing, leaning, or moving. If they look like they are moving to avoid discomfort, feel the same discomfort and position yourself to avoid it as well. Truly acknowledge the perfection of how their body is moving. Become totally fascinated with the person you are connecting with. Tap into the subtle messages they are sending to you.

Important: Always give yourself time to fully appreciate a person’s body position before adopting the same position yourself. Spend 15 to 30 seconds really acknowledging the perfection of their body position. When you have fully appreciated and accepted it, move your body to the same position. You’ll immediately notice a surge of energy between the two of you. You’ll begin to perceive a flood of intuitive information.

Move your upper body the way that they move their upper body. Adopting the way they are nodding their head, changing their facial expression, shrugging their shoulders, and gesturing will trigger your body in the same way they are being triggered. This type of entrainment of physical energy causes you to send and receive the same energetic messages they are sending to themselves with their movement, further intensifying your telepathy.

Remember that gesturing is a natural part of the conversational dance. Hand gestures made without speaking look like you are mocking them and will disconnect you from the energy and create resistance. That’s why it’s important to use their gestures only when you are saying something, not when you are silent.

Facial expressions, nods, and shrugs can be done instantly. When human beings are in sync, they perform these movements like in a game of Simon Says. The leader does something and you follow.

Speak the way they speak. From your perspective of total appreciation, adopt their speaking pace and rhythm. Do they speak fast, slow, or moderately? Begin to enjoy the client’s tonality, inflection, and pronunciation or accent. Do they speak through their nose, throat, or chest? What do you like about it? Do they hold out their vowel sounds long or short? What is interesting about the way they say the words?

As you entrain yourself with the energy of the sound they make to communicate, you gain access to their beliefs and you intuitively understand their motives. This means you will speak appropriately and inside the confines of what they feel is important, right, and acceptable.

Use the words they use. If they say “y’all,” you say it too. Not mockingly. Remember your intent is to connect, to appreciate, and to accept them. As long as you come from that perspective people will experience you as “family.” Make their language your own and you will begin to understand their model of the world. You will begin to understand why they think the way they think. When you understand why they think the way that they think, you can more fully appreciate the intricacies of their perspective. As you begin appreciating their perspective, you’ll find your opinions and views disappearing, and you’ll begin to “hear” their thoughts, spoken or not. It will be as if they began transmitting their thoughts directly into your mind. You start saying things that they would say and taking the words right out of their mouth. At this point, communication with other human beings is becoming delightful for you.

Ultimately, you are giving up your opinion of how this interaction is “supposed” to be. You are entering into the unknown by giving up your Self, your personal style and your personality.

Get ready for miraculous results. Positive and surprising results are available when you give yourself up and honor others. Start experimenting with it, right now. Watch the magic happen. See the resistance melt away. Marvel in your ability to read people’s minds, thoughts, ideas, and know what they are going to say next.

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Matthew Ferry is the author of “Creating Sales Velocity: Awaken Your Power to Attract Sales Effortlessly” (www.creatingsalesvelocity.com).

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Developing Intuitive Listening Skills, Part I

Developing intuitive listening skills gives you an extreme advantage in life. Imagine knowing what other people are thinking or feeling during a business negotiation, or what your kids are thinking or feeling. How much more power would you have? How much faster could you get things done?

You’ve experienced “telepathic” listening skills before. You’ve had moments during conversations when you felt so connected to the other person that you could sense what they were thinking or feeling.

This is your natural state. When you feel peaceful, calm, and uncluttered, you listen with more intensity and more zest for the conversation. It’s very apparent when someone is listening without distraction. When people feel heard, they engage you in conversation with more excitement and interest. When you are listening in this way, they want to be in your presence. Your attention is attractive.

Why don’t we connect with people in this way more often? Why is meaningful interaction so rare? One word: Survival! As you observe your own interaction with others, you start to see that you resist people. You resist the way they talk, move, act, and also their opinions and their ideas. It’s automatic. We all do it.

Ever notice the people you feel most connected to are just like you? That’s survival behavior. Your mind naturally gravitates toward people who have similar and predictable behavior. Predictable is safe.

What does this have to do with developing intuitive listening skills? Being in a calm and peaceful state is the prerequisite. Being calm and peaceful is not possible when your your mind is paranoid and “on alert.”

Here are two of three powerful strategies from my book “Creating Sales Velocity: Awaken Your Power To Attract Sales Effortlessly” (Spirit Publishing) that begin to open up the possibility of telepathic listening.

1. Give up righteousness. Righteousness is a judgmental and protective state and is easily sensed in conversation. To start letting go of your natural righteous mind chatter, ponder this: There are six billion people on this planet. Every single person has a completely different perspective. Every person has billions of experiences. Experience shapes our opinions, judgments, ideals, preferences, and ultimately our view of life. Every one of these experiences helps us to make new decisions about the world, our desires, and the meaning of life itself. In other words, no one lives in the same world as you. In fact, there are currently six billion worlds on the planet. Read that again and fully digest the meaning.

Each person has a personal experience of reality. Reflecting on this enables you to let go of your judgments in conversation. Start to notice that people are simply doing the best they can based on how they are perceiving the situation. People are getting on with their lives, pursuing their desires, and it has nothing to do with you. Give up the notion that other people’s moods, upsets, actions, behavior, beliefs, and judgments of the world have something to do with you. This frees up your mind to observe the subtle non-verbal cues indicative of “telepathic” listening.

2. Remind yourself daily that resistance is not natural in communication. People resist you when you resist them. When you resist their true nature and want them to be different, they can sense it, and you inevitably express it. But you don’t have to speak for people to sense your resistance. Your energetic body extends far beyond your physical body and your clients feel your resistance to them long before you open your mouth.

Your resistance triggers their defense mechanism. Something deep down inside of them fires off the warning signal and the wall goes up. You know this feeling. You can walk into a room and know who is safe to talk to and who is not.

Intuitive listening is about connecting with people, and you’ll never feel connected to people unless you can be yourself. You’ll never feel totally free to be yourself when you don’t feel accepted. You’ll never feel accepted until you learn to accept others first.

To feel free in conversation, you must give others the freedom to be themselves. As you begin to honor people exactly the way they are and the way they are not, their resistance melts and you feel calm. This is the state of mind necessary for developing intuitive listening skills.

We will continue this discussion next time with the third powerful strategy in Part II of Developing Intuitive Listening Skills.

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How to Eliminate Fear From Your Life

1. As a life coach, my job is to support my clients in getting inspired and empowered to take action on their most cherished dreams. A problem that we all face is that fear gets in the way. You know what you want. In fact, most of the time, you even know what to do to get what you want, but you get stopped by fear, doubt, uncertainty. These are emotions that tell you that you’re listening to, or you’re allowing your mind to control your life. Your mind, which I call the “drunk monkey,” is nothing more than a survival tool. It’s a fantastic device that has developed over time for human beings. Its job is to steer us away from danger. Its job, of course, is to steer toward propagating the species, but that’s about it.

2. No goals and dreams are achieved via the mind. Goals and dreams are achieved via inspiration. How do you get the inspiration, when what you want seems so big? Seems too unattainable. Maybe you feel like you’re not enough or you don’t know what to do. You have to begin with the empowerment process.

3. The empowerment process begins with the word aware. There are four words in total: awareness, flexibility, options, and power. Let’s take them one at a time.

4. With awareness, you start to see that your mind is not your friend. You begin to see that the “drunk monkey” in your head is really focused in on what isn’t working, what you don’t like, what might hurt you. I’ll be embarrassed. I won’t look good. I won’t be enough. I’ll feel stupid. I’ll feel like an idiot. My family will leave me. These are the kinds of thoughts that the “drunk monkey” in your head is going to spin for you, when you ask it to do things you don’t normally do, which is what your goals and dreams are, things you don’t normally do, expansion, where you want to go. With awareness, you can start to see that your mind is not on your side. It’s not helping you achieve your goals. It’s just this biology. It’s operating independently of you and it’s doing what it’s doing. That awareness will lead to the second part of the empowerment process, which is flexibility.

5. Once you are aware that your mind is running the show, that you are literally the “Drunk Monkey’s” puppet, you can begin to make choices. This flexibility that you have now, leads to the third part of the process, which is options.

6. As soon as you recognize that your mind is running the show, that the “drunk monkey” is holding the puppet strings of your life and pulling those puppet strings with fear, anxiety, doubt, uncertainty, anger, frustration, as soon as you realize that, a new set of options open up. Well, what if I took the action? What if I went this direction instead? How about if I ask for help? On and on you go, with all these new options popping into your head that weren’t there. Once you realize that your mind is not a goal achievement vehicle or a goal achievement organ, as so many personal developments gurus have espoused in the past, that leads to number four, which is power.

7. When you’re aware of what your mind is doing, you become more flexible. When you are flexible, you see more options. You have optionality in your life. Those options empower you to take new actions. This action is what I call inspired action. Inspired and empowered to take action on your dreams. An energy inside of you, pulling you forward, and having you actually feel confident in the face of what you would normally feel fearful of.

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How Inspired Action Life Coaching Leads to Bliss

As an inspired Action Life Coach, my job is to support my clients in living a life of happiness, joy, peace, and most importantly, bliss. The dictionary defines bliss as, supreme happiness. Most people don’t have an experience with bliss. Most people don’t know what bliss even is.

1. It is that state of loving life so deeply, so turned on, so much about life, that you can hardly stand it. You are nearly brought to tears of joy by how amazing your experience of life is in that moment.

2. This is what happens when you follow the inspired action life coaching process.

There are three phases that I recommend you go through to get to this place of extreme bliss:

A. Phase One is the Breakthrough Phase. In this phase your job is to explore what did you conclude about your life that is not true early on, that is now holding you hostage, and having you experience your life in ways that cause frustration, anger, suffering, pain, etc. In other words, what did you fundamentally misperceive about yourself, others, and situations, that now make life feel like it is not enough, and you are not there yet?

aa. By discovering this and seeing it for what it really is, a mistake, a misperception, you are able to let it go and create a new context for your life. That new context is really what Phase Two is all about.

B. Phase Two is the Life Creation Phase. In the Life Creation Phase, you must begin to examine how your life is designed out of guilt and obligation. You start to see that your life is really nothing more than trying to prove to everyone that you are good enough, that you fit in, that you are smart and intelligent, that you are not ugly, that you are a part of the group. As you begin to see these pursuits for what they really are, nothing more than trying to prove a childhood misperception doesn’t exist, and you let them go, in favor of doing the things that make you feel good and feel happy now, you start to have a realization as to what your life is actually about. You begin to recognize what your purpose is, where you are going, and why you are going there.

bb. You begin to enter into inspired action. You find yourself in action doing the things that you love doing, no longer doing the things that come from guilt and obligation, and trying to prove to the world that you are something or somebody, which leads you to Phase Three in the inspired action coaching process.

C. In Phase Three you now have to set your life up so that it can begin to relate to you as this new person. Disciplines, structures, systems, procedures, processes, new promises, new accountabilities. All of these things must be put into place so that your life recognizes the new you, and asks that the new you show up rather than the old you. This is why when you go to a seminar or read a book and learn something new, that new thing that you have learned doesn’t stand much of a chance of actually existing in your life, because your life actually responds to you from the old paradigm of who you were before you read that book, or who you were before you went to that seminar.

D. The Third Phase of the inspired action coaching process is absolutely one of the most important phases because it cements your purpose into your life so that you can do nothing else than be your purpose in your life. What a blessing to have a life that calls you every morning to be the person that you want to be. That right there leads to incredible bliss. You literally are moved to tears on a daily basis, blown away that your life is so perfectly fit for what it is that you want to do, what you want to experience, and who you want to be.

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Life Coaching Greg Smith – Why I’m Leaving Goldman Sachs Part 2

The banking industry is under attack and the flavor of the week is Greg Smith’s, New York Times article, “Why I am Leaving Goldman Sachs.”

I generally have no opinion of such matters, yet, this one hits close to home. I am a coach to some very powerful executives at Goldman Sachs and frankly, they are leading the transformation of Wall Street from the mindset of greed, back to the mindset of service and doing what’s right for the customer.

If I was coaching Greg Smith, he would likely be a central “Change Maker” in Goldman right now. I respect Greg for his courage and would encourage him to use it to serve the nation, his customers and himself.  In doing so, Goldman Sachs would become a better place to work and undeniably more profitable.

Here’s the coaching I would give Greg today: In his article he states, “The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college, that I can no longer, in good conscience, say that I identify with what it stands for.”

Greg, what you are for, is more powerful than what you are against.  What you resist will persist.  What you accept will transform.  You have the power to transform what appears to be unchangeable aspects of the world, with a simple change in perspective.

Here’s the perspective I would suggest you adopt:

Everything changes.  Nothing stays the same. If you don’t like the change, then do something about it.  You are not a victim of your circumstances. The only reason you would avoid standing up for what you believe in, is the fear of not being accepted. I understand this fear. I have never seen a more political environment in a company.

When you tame The Drunk Monkey, (my nickname for the talking in your head) you can release your attachment to being liked and fitting in.  When you stop trying to be liked by people and take a stand for what you believe in, the people around you are magnetized to you.

Here are the questions you need to ask yourself:
1.  What am I committed to?
2.  How can I be a part of the solution?
3.  What changes will I need to make in my process to bring the culture back into alignment, with the principles I hold so dear?

This is not an easy thing to do.  The Drunk Monkey in your head can not stand change and begins to diminish it, make it wrong and justify why things should go back to the way they were.  The Drunk Monkey tells you to simply oppose the new conditions rather than do anything about it.  Apparently, complaining and resigning ones self to long term misery, is more appealing to The Drunk Monkey, than the short term pain of confronting the situation and creating the change you seek.

Gandhi said it best, “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

Being the change takes courage. It takes extreme self honesty. You have to learn to tame The Drunk Monkey in your head and no longer allow its perspective to run your life.

If you allow yourself to be a puppet to The Drunk Monkey, your life will be mostly frustration, with moments of happiness and peace.

Tame The Drunk Monkey and you start to feel happiness and peace most of the time, with brief moments of frustration.

Greg, I whole heatedly admit I do not know the entire situation that you faced, but I am glad that you had the courage to say what you did.  It is giving me an opportunity to use your words as a teaching tool for the people who care about my message. For that I’m grateful.

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