How to Cause Breakthrough Results as a Leader - At Work and in Life

Every leader or leadership team that I’ve ever coached has within them a strong seed of desire to bring something new into existence where it didn’t previously exist. Whether it’s aligning their team and building trust, achieving income and profit goals, or experiencing more clear, calm and effective accountability conversations and communication.

And me too… I want similar things in my business and my personal life. I am deeply committed to making a greater impact while increasing income, having more grounded and connecting conversations with my husband and our teenage son and having more, meaningful, heartful, simple experiences with the people I love.

I believe that it is our innate drive as leaders (at work and in life) to achieve new outcomes and results with ourselves and with the people we lead.

My question is, if we all share this same inborn desire, what gets in our way and prevents us from being effective creators as leaders? I’ve discovered that for myself (and all of us as human beings) that what gets in our way is our limiting beliefs and the resentments that we identity with and cling on to.

I was taught in one of my ontological leadership trainings that we can reframe our limiting beliefs as superstitions.  A superstition is a widely held, but unjustified belief in what causes (or leads to) specific actions, events and outcomes.  From these superstitions stem all sorts of strange or unusual behaviors and actions on our part that confuse and lead us off course.

So, what does this mean, exactly? And how do we apply it to being effective creators as leaders?

We are familiar with the superstition of walking under a ladder; if you walk under a ladder, it will bring you bad luck. The superstitious behavior is to walk around a ladder and to do everything you can do to avoid walking under a ladder.

How does this apply to leadership? All of us make up stories in our heads about ourselves and other people. We do this by creating and engaging in superstitions about ourselves and others.

In particular, we hold superstitions around two aspects:

 The word, "is" is a superstition.

When we say someone “is” a certain way, we inaccurately believe that someone has unchanging physical characteristics - just like rocks are hard and water is wet.  It turns out that our beliefs are just interpretations about someone else.  They are our opinions that we hold – not facts. But it occurs to us as if our opinions are the truth about the other person.  And because of the opinions that we hold to be true about people we end up putting others in a box that limits their performance.

For example, one of my leaders had a belief (i.e., superstition) around his service warehouse team. His superstition was that “He needed to show up on site and check on them every day.” This took time and energy on his part. As a result, he wasn’t able to complete other important work priorities. When we explored his superstition (beliefs) more deeply, he saw that he had the belief that “Good leaders show up on site and check up on their teams every day.”

I asked him if his behavior was necessary with this particular team. And he immediately saw that they were an extremely high performing team and that they didn’t need him to check in on them. Furthermore, he was only getting in their way, annoying them and giving them the message that they weren’t capable. When he let go of his superstition and stopped his accompanying behavior, the team began performing at an even higher level.

The word, "I" is a superstition.

When we say we are a certain way using the “I” pronoun, that is a superstition as well. Most of the beliefs that we hold about ourselves are superstitions. For the longest time I struggled with beliefs of, “I can’t do this,” “I’m not smart enough,” “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

However, there is no “I”, except in how I am judging or interpreting myself or my actions. And besides that, who I am and how I am is ever changing and impermanent. There is no set way that I always am. 

I’ve learned that who I really am is the space of possibility. Instead of engaging in superstitions about ourselves, we can ask, “Am I willing to discover myself as the space for a bigger (self) expression?”

How to be a leader creator and bring something new into existence          

Being willing to be personally responsible for the results and outcomes we’ve achieved or haven’t achieved allows us to access the true source for causing a breakthrough.

It’s important for me to really understand at a core level that the beliefs I hold about myself as a leader aren’t actually facts, they are merely superstitions occurring as reality. The space of possibility + creativity become present when I get my limiting beliefs out of the way.

Like everyone, I have a personality and stories that I’ve woven together about myself based on past experiences. But here’s the thing; it’s all a big story that I continually tell myself about myself. I’ve discovered that many of my resentments and core beliefs that I hold as a leader stem from the severe anxiety attacks that I experienced as a young girl.

I get to grow as a leader when I ground myself in the reality of the facts about my past. These facts about my past are simply events or happenings, without any interpretation added to them. They are a neutral; like black and white headlines about what happened and occurred. And here’s the thing, the facts about my past are actually empty and meaningless. I could (and do) create an infinite number of meanings, interpretations and superstitions based on each major event in my past. 

Context is decisive

In the past (and even now, when I forget) my default approach to being a leader is to attempt to fix myself or others. When I try to fix myself or others from my superstitions, I am left with trying to manipulate and force outcomes from inside the box of, “Somethings wrong with myself or somethings wrong with you.” Not surprisingly, I have never achieved a breakthrough result from this space.

I have to become willing to stop identifying myself as my superstitions (i.e., my beliefs, interpretations, judgments and assessments) – because that is ultimately not who I am. This process is about gaining access to the concept of my “being cause in the matter.”

My primary purpose as a leader is accountability – to be 100% personally responsible and understand my part in my situations and communication, and to understand that how I interpret, interact, speak and respond affects what others do and say.

In short, in every situation where I am struggling with causing a breakthrough result, I’m being given the opportunity to identity the beliefs and superstitions that I hold about myself and others and to let them go – because they are merely superstitions dressed up in various Halloween disguises.

How I transformed my superstition around leadership with my family

Recently, I became aware of a lot of stress and anxiety in our family interactions. I felt like my husband and my son were constantly reacting to each other and quibbling over the most basic, mundane situations. The running dialogue in my head and my belief (i.e., superstition) was, “My husband is too reactive and anxious and I need to set better boundaries with him so I don’t have to be around his anxiety.” I went on to explore the multitude of beliefs that I held around why my family was being so reactive.

I investigated each belief, and asked myself if it were actually true. With careful consideration I punched holes in each belief/superstition that I held. In the end, I was left with was the insight that, “I am the one who is anxious and reactive - and I attempt to cover it up and by appearing calm and in control.” What an epiphany!

I couldn’t stand the anxiety between my husband and son, because I detested experiencing anxiety within myself.

After I saw that I was the source of the anxiety in our home, I practiced simply noticing my anxiety and my instant desire to assert my counter-will when my husband made most any form of request. Instead of reacting with an instant retort (designed to deflect and redirect my internal angst), I allowed myself to experience the sensations within me. When my feelings began to settle (usually within just a few minutes) I would then respond. Another big part of my practice was to practice saying, “yes” to his requests, instead of, “no.”

The result? The anxiety in our home settled, and I have grown by leaps and bounds as a leader.  It turns out I had been running from and avoiding experiencing my own internal anxiety for most of my life, and it dissipated when I welcomed and embraced the opportunity to heal it.

How to put this into practice

1.     Identify an area (i.e., situation, person or yourself) that you are currently struggling with causing a breakthrough around. For example, “John not initiating, and just sits around waiting to be told what to do.”

2.     Take a sheet of paper and divide it in half. On the left side list out all your beliefs about the person, yourself or the situation (i.e., “John is lazy,” “If I talk to John it won’t make any difference in his behavior,” “John always gets defensive and retorts with how he makes more sales than anyone else.”

3.     Examine each belief, and ask yourself, “Is it true?”  “Is it absolutely true?”

4.     On the right side of the paper list out all the facts about the situation, as if you were a reporter or scientist. Write statements like impartial, neutral headlines (i.e., “I saw John sitting at his desk three times yesterday.” “I talked to John once about this issue and he said, ‘I make more sales than any other sales person.’” )

5.     Read both sides of the paper. What insights open up for you? What do you see newly and differently? What action or behavior do you feel inspired to take as a result of your new insights?

(i.e., “Just because John seemed defensive the first time that I talked to him, doesn’t mean my next conversation will go the same way.” “I didn’t take the time to help John brainstorm the various tasks he could be doing,” “I didn’t explain to John why it’s important to stay engaged and busy at work,” “I have an opportunity to coach John that being a great salesperson doesn’t make it okay to not be engaged at work, because he is role modeling behavior for others).

POST NOW: WHAT'S YOUR "AHA"?

What "Aha" did you get from reading this post + reflecting on the questions above? YOUR thoughts and insights make a difference, and I would deeply appreciate hearing from you! Otherwise, when I send an article out, I can't tell if it resonates, or if it's just floating aimlessly in the multiverse somewhere ; ) Please share - even if it's super brief!