write your new future

The Most Influential Practice To Write Your New Future

write your new future

Listen to the full podcast episode to learn the science-backed practice that not only changed my life, but also the lives of countless people over the last two decades. This is something you can’t ignore if you want to achieve that great goal you identified for this year and write your new future.

There are a handful of days in my life that stand out in my memory because of their mind-blowing impact on me. One, in particular, was the day I was given a life-changing practice that taught me how to overcome what was keeping me from making the necessary changes in my life so that I could enjoy more happiness and success. I doubted it when I first received it, but then I saw its effects on my life and the lives of people just like you over the last two decades.

Today, we’re continuing our 3-part series where you will get just what you need to do your most satisfying work and create meaningful change and the life you really want. 

In Part 1, Get Your Great Goal Down, we talked about overcoming the #1 mistake high achievers make when setting goals and how to overcome it. 

In Part 2, The #1 Ability You Need to Elevate Your Life in 2023, we covered what self-aware, high-performers understand and do to raise their performance and satisfaction at work and in life. 

In Part 3, I’m teaching you something you absolutely cannot ignore if you want to do the best work of your career — the simple, science-backed practice used by some of the greatest change-makers in history to create things that have never before existed. It doesn’t take hours to do, but without a doubt, because it works with the brain in the way the brain works, it will create and allow for the change that you desire.

If you think about the great leaders in history – Gandhi, Thomas Edison, Martin Luther King, Jr. – they all shared one common thing: they each believed so strongly in a future that was so real in their minds that they began to live as if it was already happening, regardless of their circumstances.

Those who have achieved great things in life once became so possessed with a future vision that, although it could not yet be seen in their current reality, they behaved as if that vision was already happening. When they did that, their environment bent to their behavior. 

The key to writing your new future and creating the life of happiness that you desire is to become unconditionally committed to your vision regardless of your current circumstances.

While coaching a CEO the other day, I challenged her to put this practice into action. Whereas her company had always been the manufacturer of an automotive line, in her vision, she created products for an entirely new industry: medical. But, her current reality didn’t reflect evidence that that was even possible. Regardless, she became completely immersed in the reality of her vision getting her to the future reality in advance. I know that the same has happened to you, you probably haven’t recognized it yet. 

How often have you stopped working on a goal or an objective because your environment didn’t show evidence that you need to stay the course?

Perhaps you were waiting for your work environment to reflect leadership that publicly endorses your special project. Perhaps you are waiting for employees to like coming to work before you make any changes in your leadership style. 

Oftentimes, we are waiting for some type of evidence in our environments before we actually begin to believe in this new vision and take action. But, it’s in these moments when we let our environment control us instead of communicating with our brains to take action that will then change our environment. We think the environment should lead with change and then we will follow suit, but that’s absolutely backward. This is the #1 reason why so many of us in this overstretched and the unfocused world won’t get the change we want this year.

Greatness, however you define it, requires you to hold onto your dream, your vision, or your goal regardless of the circumstances in front of you.

So, how do you do this when the reality is staring you in the face and your brain has given you 100 pounds of evidence that it’s not going to work out? You mentally rehearse it.

Those great leaders often reminded themselves of the reality they were envisioning and to do this, they had to have mental rehearsals. Having a mental rehearsal means stepping into the state of being of your future vision. This state of coming from your thoughts, your feelings, and your behaviors. Stepping into this state of being means understanding how you would think, how you would feel, and how you would behave in this ideal future and then –and here’s the key – leading your present life in that way.

Does this sound at all complicated? Well, here’s the truth for you: we are all mentally rehearsing something. 

We’re mentally rehearsing whatever is ruminating in our minds all day long:

  • I never have enough time
  • I’m in trouble
  • This isn’t going to work
  • These people are all the same
  • It’s never going to change

What brain science demonstrates is that what we mentally rehearse, we create. Oftentimes, we are mentally rehearsing an unwanted past or a dreaded future. That alone is why we may continue to repeat the limited reality we have come to know and dream to change.

The good news is that we can change our brains,  and in order to live a life of happiness and success, we have to change our brains. We have to create a new way of being for ourselves and we can do this just by thinking differently. 

If we repeatedly think about something to the exclusion of everything else, we will encounter a moment when the thought becomes the experience.

When this occurs, neurons fire together and start rewiring your brain. Your rewired programming then creates the results you want. Let’s face it.  Your existing hardware is not going to take you to that new reality. If it could, it already would have happened.

The best way to begin your mental rehearsal practice and write your new future is with these two questions:

  • What would it be like to live in that reality?
  • What if I was the person living in that reality?

Once you begin to immerse yourself in these answers, you will feel it. Then behave like that in the present time. In time, you will see that your environment bends to you and your success.  

Your Call To Action for this week is to practice mental rehearsal daily.

It doesn’t need to take long, perhaps just 2-4 minutes, and it’s best done in the morning or right before bed. This is when your brain is most receptive to suggested thoughts. You can either write something down and read it to yourself each day or envision it in the silent moment. During this process, understand that emotion is the ultimate conductor to fire those neurons and to really get your brain to change. 

I’d love to hear from you when you’ve done this practice. Commit yourself to mentally rehearsing like the leader who simply saw their idea as so, before it ever came to be. Become obsessed. 

Share what you find with me below or over on Instagram at @ritahyland. 

In this episode I share:

  • The simple, science-backed practice I once resisted but provided a massive desired change in my life once I accepted and implemented it
  • An example of this practice in action with a client and how it can elicit a completely different future reality
  • What really keeps you stuck in a limited reality (that should have been taught in school) and what you can do to more easily create life-changing work and a life guided by your design 

Resources and related episodes:

 

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts for more tips, tools, and inspiration to lead the optimal vision of your life, love, and leadership. Remember, a half version of you is not enough. The world needs the fullest version of you at play.

Listen on Apple Podcasts

___

About Rita Hyland

With over 20 years of experience as an executive and leadership coach, Rita helps leaders — emerging and established — excel in corporate and entrepreneurial environments.

Rita believes if leaders were more clear about how transformation really works and more intentional about creating what they want, their impact, success, and influence in the world would be unstoppable.

Through her coaching programs, private coaching, and masterminds, Rita shows leaders how to win consistently and create the impact and legacy they desire.

Central to Rita’s work is the understanding that you will never outperform your current programming, no matter how strong your willpower.

When you learn to use Rita’s proprietary Neuroleadership Growth Code, a technology that uses the best of neuroscience and transformational psychology to hit the brain’s buttons for change, YOU become both the solution and the strategy.

Her mission is to end talented, hard-working, and self-aware leaders spending another day stuck in self-doubt or confusion and not contributing their brilliant work and talent the world so desperately needs.

the 1 ability you need to elevate your life in 2023 playing full out rita hyland podcast

The #1 Ability You Need To Elevate Your Life In 2023

the #1 ability you need to elevate your life in 2023 rita hyland playing full out

Listen to the full podcast episode to learn what self-aware, high-performers understand and do to raise their performance and satisfaction in life and why it’s the #1 ability you need to develop this year.

Sometimes when we want to get to elevate an area of our lives, we believe we need to move faster and work harder.  As a result of the stress, we lose our focus and any hope of executing our best ideas, work, and creativity.   

We’re continuing our 3-part series that will teach you just what you need to do your most satisfying work and set yourself up for the life you really want. In Part 1, Get Your Great Goal Down, we talked about overcoming the #1 mistake high achievers make when setting goals and how to overcome it.  

Today, I want to show you the #1 ability you most need to hone your focus so that you make decisions from your highest level state of being instead of from the rampant stressed-out level and pace that too many are seeing as ‘normal.’

Let’s start with a story about a man named John

John, a respected leader in his field of work, came to work with me with the goal of managing the increasing stress levels and pace of his life. He’d been feeling overextended at work and absolutely exhausted from the stress and pace of his life. He noticed he was more irritable and anxious than he used to be. 

He didn’t feel there was ever any time for what he really wanted: freedom to focus his time and energy on his priorities. 

John and I have worked together for a few months and recently had a conversation that was notably different than prior ones. This one was about his recent experience when his teenage daughter came home sick after drinking at a party. 

At the time, John’s wife was out of town and it was just him and the kids.  He was unsure of how to respond to his daughter and noticed that he was both worried and angry. He noticed his stress dropping and rising as he watched his daughter. He also noticed his immediate pull to react impulsively.  

Where he typically would react by reprimanding his daughter, by raising his voice to command attention, he instead paused and observed.

At that moment, he stood next to his daughter at the toilet and searched Google for an answer. In his search, he clicked a link that said, “Stay calm. Your child is in a vulnerable state.” These words were just enough to allow him to recall the work we’d done together.. 

He’d recently gotten feedback from his team that he was impatient, intimidating, and not listening well. This was holding him back, it was holding his team back from fully trusting him, and holding everyone back from achieving as much as they could together. He knew this same reactivity had impacted his personal life too. The relationship between himself and his daughter had deteriorated too. 

Stress steals our focus. When this happens, we are no longer in control of our lives.

We start living in survival mode (flying in late to meetings, being annoyed at colleagues who aren’t doing things the way we do them, being hard on ourselves, yelling at our kids, and more) as our normal way of being. So, we race harder. We move faster until we’re further stressed out. Simultaneously, the goals and commitments we’d love to prioritize have no way of being executed.

The 1 thing that’s robbing us of the amazing capacity we have to get our lives back is our ability to move fluidly between the Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) and the Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS).

Think of your SNS as your “Survival Mode” and your PNS as your “Peaceful State” and both generate their own types of emotions.

Survival Mode emotions include:

  • stress
  • imbalance
  • breakdowns
  • contraction
  • fears
  • struggle
  • frustration

Peaceful State emotions include:

  • expansion
  • health
  • order
  • trust
  • repair
  • love

Each of us is familiar with Survival Mode. It’s an ability we’ve been gifted with to protect us in the presence of danger. It alerts us to a threat and powers us to escape. This was especially useful during caveman days when we needed this stress response to escape animals seeking to hunt us. But in modern days, we get these same triggers when we’re stuck in traffic or we’re late for a meeting. Unlike animals and our caveman ancestors, we don’t come out of these stressful states as easily. 

We don’t realize when we are leading our lives from triggered, stressed-out states. As a result, it prevents us from going after our most desired goals and priorities. 

In order to begin allowing yourself to fluidly transition between your SNS and PNS, I want to challenge you for the next week to be aware when you are operating in your SNS and then recognize any thought, behavior, or emotion you’re holding that is unloving to yourself. This is going to be the beginning of a detox that will liberate you, your body, and your emotional addiction to whatever it is that you worry about. 

What this exercise will do is begin to impede the signals of survival emotions from conditioning you any further. This will help you begin to tune those out which will free up energy that you can then use for something more beneficial. 

When you do this repeatedly, you will begin leading from your parasympathetic nervous system  (PNS) instead of your sympathetic nervous system (SNS). Think survival mode. 

Remember, you are not hardwired to be a certain way for the rest of your life. You are not hardwired to be riddled with stress on a daily basis.  And nothing profound was ever created in survival mode. 

Your ability to fluidly shift from your SNS to your PNS will be the #1 ability to elevate your life this year to create your highest levels of performance and satisfaction.  When you do it you will gain a significant advantage in business and life. 

In this episode I share:

  • The #1 ability you need to develop to elevate your performance
  • The most important thing you will do to hone your focus this year
  • A personal story exhibiting this ability in action and how it can play out and create new, ideal relationships and performance

Resources and related episodes:

 

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts for more tips, tools, and inspiration to lead the optimal vision of your life, love, and leadership. Remember, a half version of you is not enough. The world needs the fullest version of you at play.

Listen on Apple Podcasts

___

About Rita Hyland

With over 20 years of experience as an executive and leadership coach, Rita helps leaders — emerging and established — excel in corporate and entrepreneurial environments.

Rita believes if leaders were more clear about how transformation really works and more intentional about creating what they want, their impact, success, and influence in the world would be unstoppable.

Through her coaching programs, private coaching, and masterminds, Rita shows leaders how to win consistently and create the impact and legacy they desire.

Central to Rita’s work is the understanding that you will never outperform your current programming, no matter how strong your willpower.

When you learn to use Rita’s proprietary Neuroleadership Growth Code, a technology that uses the best of neuroscience and transformational psychology to hit the brain’s buttons for change, YOU become both the solution and the strategy.

Her mission is to end talented, hard-working, and self-aware leaders spending another day stuck in self-doubt or confusion and not contributing their brilliant work and talent the world so desperately needs.

the #1 ability you need to elevate your life in 2023 rita hyland playing full out podcast

Get Your Great Goal Down

get your great goal down playing full out rita hyland

Listen to the full podcast episode to learn what to focus on as the year takes off so that you can do your most satisfying work and set yourself up for the life you really want.

It’s 2023, can you believe it? The new year is here and it’s going to be a fabulous one!

I know this for certain because you have never been more experienced, wiser, and ready for what’s to come. This year is filled with an abundance of potential, and it’s the perfect opportunity for you to take advantage of the fresh slate that the new year brings.

This is your year to get your best and most satisfying work of your career out into the world and enjoy a vibrant life with the freedom to do whatever else it is you want.

However, what I see happen all too as the year progresses, among fast-paced, high-contributors like yourself,  those who are serious about growing themselves and making a real difference in their businesses and at home is that they get caught back up in the fast-paced work environment and personal lives that they lead. 

Unfortunately, this can lead to distraction and frustration, and it’s at this point that many people make one killer mistake: they begin to think that their vision isn’t that important.

But let me tell you, it is! Like an airplane needs a runway to take off, you need your vision to take off too.  As I experienced on an airplane recently, without an assigned runway,  we simply remain stuck on the tarmac. 

Without a clear vision, you’ll find yourself floating through life day-to-day, keeping yourself busy and eventually realizing you have nothing to show for all the time that’s passed you by. Maybe this feels a bit familiar to you. Maybe you’ve started your vision and you had the best intentions for it, but you’ve become distracted from it. You begin to say, “I’ll do it later.” Maybe you’re no longer lit up by the vision you’ve set out for yourself.

Friend, I want you to know that you are not alone and you are not behind. You are right on time. Each one of us has felt this in some way, so today I am going to get you back on the direct flight pattern to guarantee that you can get your vision down so you can  get started immediately. 

I want you to have the freedom to focus on planning your dream vacation to Italy  you want and to work on your business without wondering what you’re missing or second-guessing if you are doing enough.  

Let’s start by covering the biggest reason that we miss creating a vision and great goals each year and how to resolve it.  

The big mistake we make when it comes to goals is that we make our goals mean something they do not.

The first way we do this is by attaching our own personal value, worth, or adequacy to the goal.  We believe that if we hit the goal it means we’re good enough.  If we don’t, it validates our inadequacy.  

The second interpretation we put on goals is that we believe that the bigger the goal, the bigger its meaning.  If we shoot a basket in our backyard and miss, no big deal.  But when we take the same shot at the United Center, we make it mean something entirely different.  Or if we say we want to build 100 widgets instead of 10 widgets, that extra zero means so much more. 

The meanings we give our goals riddle us with stress which then contracts our ability to deploy our talents and ingenuity.  A lot of times the meanings keep us from even setting our goals. 

What we can do to resolve this is to first understand that goals are neutral. They are directions to guide us to our next action. Nothing more.

The meanings you give or don’t give to your goals change everything. When you view your goals as neutral, you will feel a sense of relief that will lead you to taking focused and deliberate action. 

Remember that our goals are not designed to assess us or our worth. Our goals are designed to guide us, to give us direction. Be aware of when you are leaning towards creating a goal that you think is going to validate you in some way. 

Once you change your mindset around goals, you are ready to clarify and declare them. I’m here to help you get that done.

  1. Begin by answering what on December 31st of this year would make you shout, “This has been an incredible  year?” Jot down 5-7 things that would light you up and excite you to experience, build, or achieve.  
  2. Once you do this, your next step is to narrow your focus. Circle 3 of those that are the most significant. Once you get your top three, highlight the ONE that you know is calling you and cannot wait.  This is it.  Your #1 goal.  It’s the goal that excites and inspires you to show up as a greater version of who you are today. 
  3. Know who becomes better off when you achieve your goal. Why does achieving your great goal matter? What is the cost and who is hurt when you don’t achieve your goal? Why is it so important? When you understand the impact of your one great goal, it’s going to help you move towards your goal when difficult moments arise.  Knowing your ‘why’ becomes your fuel in the inevitable tough times. 

That’s it. Once you do this you will have done more than 98% of the world will do this year when it comes to setting goals. 

BONUS: To get yourself going, write down the next 5 to 7 action steps you will take to achieve it.

By following these three simple steps, you’ll be able to sharpen your vision, focus on what’s important, and take action that will lead you closer to your fabulous year. 

Stay tuned for the next episode of this series where you will dismantle the hardest part of starting and following through on the best and most satisfying year of your life… learning how to identify and overcome the mental blocks. 

These are the things that keep well-meaning high-contributors stuck working too many hours and not enjoying the freedom in their lifestyle that they want. You’re here to achieve great things and live a full and vibrant life.  Let’s make sure that happens this year!

In this episode I share:

  • Part 1 of my 3-part series to help you get the focus so that you have the freedom to achieve your best and most satisfying work and vibrant life this year
  • 2 key reasons that make setting our goals difficult and how to get relief immediately 
  • 3 simple steps to take to sharpen your vision, get focused, and take action
  •  The right order and approach to narrow down what you REALLY want

 

Resources and related episodes:

 

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts for more tips, tools, and inspiration to lead the optimal vision of your life, love, and leadership. Remember, a half version of you is not enough. The world needs the fullest version of you at play.

Listen on Apple Podcasts

___

About Rita Hyland

With over 20 years of experience as an executive and leadership coach, Rita helps leaders — emerging and established — excel in corporate and entrepreneurial environments.

Rita believes if leaders were more clear about how transformation really works and more intentional about creating what they want, their impact, success, and influence in the world would be unstoppable.

Through her coaching programs, private coaching, and masterminds, Rita shows leaders how to win consistently and create the impact and legacy they desire.

Central to Rita’s work is the understanding that you will never outperform your current programming, no matter how strong your willpower.

When you learn to use Rita’s proprietary Neuroleadership Growth Code, a technology that uses the best of neuroscience and transformational psychology to hit the brain’s buttons for change, YOU become both the solution and the strategy.

Her mission is to end talented, hard-working, and self-aware leaders spending another day stuck in self-doubt or confusion and not contributing their brilliant work and talent the world so desperately needs.

reviewing the year before moving on playing full out rita hyland

Reviewing the Year Before Moving On

reviewing the year before moving on playing full out rita hyland

Listen to the full podcast episode to learn the simple practice to review the year that can help you grow in every area of your life.

What I am profoundly aware of is that there have been many times in my life when I have – in the simplest terms – been wrong. 

For the longest time, I believed that I would hit a certain age and magically everything that I wanted would happen. For years, I believed that it would all just come together and I judged myself when it didn’t. 

I now realize that is not the truth – that wisdom doesn’t just arrive based on time, age, or even some external situation, but it requires deliberate actions to learn and grow.

I realized that my thoughts on success were all wrong – success is an inside-outside job. The most successful people are those that feel good in their skin, have humility and confidence, forgive themselves, and have the awareness to reevaluate their lives. 

And that last one is what I am discussing today.

Reevaluation is absolutely necessary as our old ways are not always our best ways. Without reevaluation, we make things a lot harder on ourselves as we continue to repeat things we’re unconscious that we’re doing. Conversely, there are also our achievements, our successes, and our positive habits that deserve and require our acknowledgment.

So, at a time like the end of the year when there is a collective pause, it’s important to step back, review what worked in the past year and what didn’t work well, and consciously identify what it is we want to carry with us into the new year. 

To help myself and my clients do so, I implement a simple practice I call Catch & Release each year. The practice will help you know exactly what it is you want to take with you into the year ahead, what you want to let go of and why. Let’s get into it.

  1. Celebrate your wins and accomplishments

    1. My suggestion during this step is to grab your calendar and go week by week reviewing gatherings you’ve had with family and friends, projects you accomplished at work, improvements to your house, and any other experiences you have had in the past year. This is very helpful because, if you’re like me, you may forget all the great moments you’ve experienced. 

  2. Acknowledge your mistakes and challenges with grace

    1. Just as we have reviewed our wins, we want to also take a moment to review our mistakes or difficult moments of the year. These may be goals you didn’t reach, projects you didn’t finish, or something that didn’t go as planned. Although these can be difficult to look at, they may actually become gold for you in designing the year ahead.

  3. Identify insights from both lists

    1. Once you’ve made these two lists, go through them noting next to each what insight or lesson has come from that experience. Nothing happens without a purpose, so ask yourself, “What did I learn from this?” It may have been to ask for more help or for what you want, to delegate and let go of more, or to set bigger boundaries. Look at the themes you can notice with each win and setback. 

  4. Forgive someone or yourself

    1. Forgiveness allows us to make space for other things to enter. When we’re holding grudges or judges, they retain and take energy which depletes us of the fuel for other great endeavors and dreams. What is it that you need to forgive and release so you can welcome something wonderful and extraordinary?

  5. Ask “What do I need to say goodbye to?”

    1. Maybe you’re ready to say goodbye to a relationship that isn’t serving you or to pleasing someone that’s too difficult to please and you’ve realized that’s no longer your responsibility. Being conscious of what you need to say goodbye to allows you to take the next step toward what you’d like to have.

Once you’ve gone through the Catch & Release practice, you can create your master list listing what you’re going to “catch” on the left side and what you will release on the right. As an added bonus, cut off the Release side and burn it. Perform a ceremonial goodbye and officially release those things from your life entirely. 

Once you do this, you will find more freedom to design and pursue your ultimate future.

Before you sign off on the past year, thank it for everything: the positives and the messiness. Express gratitude. Each year is another opportunity to expand ourselves.  

There is much to come in the year ahead!

Your Call to Action this week is to give yourself the gift of a break to recharge.

Take this opportunity to rest and review the past year before you move into the year ahead. The pause is a requirement to reenter the game of life with strength. 

 

In this episode I share:

  • My go-to 5-step practice for reviewing the year or evaluating the end of any significant cycle to ensure growth and success in the upcoming year
  • Personal lessons I’ve learned in life that only came from a practice of reevaluating  
  • How this practice has impacted both my life and the lives of my clients over the years

 

Resources and related episodes:

 

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts for more tips, tools, and inspiration to lead the optimal vision of your life, love, and leadership. Remember, a half version of you is not enough. The world needs the fullest version of you at play.

Listen on Apple Podcasts

___

About Rita Hyland

With over 20 years of experience as an executive and leadership coach, Rita helps leaders — emerging and established — excel in corporate and entrepreneurial environments.

Rita believes if leaders were more clear about how transformation really works and more intentional about creating what they want, their impact, success, and influence in the world would be unstoppable.

Through her coaching programs, private coaching, and masterminds, Rita shows leaders how to win consistently and create the impact and legacy they desire.

Central to Rita’s work is the understanding that you will never outperform your current programming, no matter how strong your willpower.

When you learn to use Rita’s proprietary Neuroleadership Growth Code, a technology that uses the best of neuroscience and transformational psychology to hit the brain’s buttons for change, YOU become both the solution and the strategy.

Her mission is to end talented, hard-working, and self-aware leaders spending another day stuck in self-doubt or confusion and not contributing their brilliant work and talent the world so desperately needs.

why who you are matters just as much as the work playing full out rita hyland

Why Who You Are Matters Just As Much As The Work

why who you are matters just as much as the work playing full out with rita hyland

Listen to the full podcast episode to learn the 1 thing I wish someone had told me and 1 of the most common mistakes I often see being made by people in leadership, business, and entrepreneurship.

This week, during a podcast interview, I was asked, “What 3 things do you wish someone had told you?” It inspired me to share with you the most significant one and also the most uncomfortable one for me to relive and share publicly.

Early on in my career, I was hired to present a keynote for a product company. As I organized my thoughts on what I would include in my speech, I was hung up on something. There were thoughts and images of very well-known speakers who I’d seen do successful keynote speeches in the past and I began to compare myself to them. 

Since I had never given a presentation to this amount of people before, I was suffering from a bout of imposter syndrome. 

Looking back now, it makes me squirm thinking of how I approached that presentation. But, the issue didn’t come from what I was speaking on or the words I chose to use. The real issue lied in who I was being as I presented.

Imposter syndrome led to self-doubt which pushed me towards attempting to mirror what I admired in other speakers. Now, there is some logic to this. We always hear “Success leaves clues. Watch what others are doing and repeat it.” However, in this case, my attempt to mirror someone else completely overshadowed the most important thing: who I truly was. 

Each of us has the instinctive capability to sense a disconnect between who a person is behaving as and who they truly are. When this happens, we immediately lose trust in that person. 

Here’s what I wish someone had told me: Who you are matters just as much as the work you do. People want you just as much as they want your strategy, your service, or your product. 

My coaching clients love working with me because there’s a trust and knowing that they’re going to receive the real, authentic me – transparency, imperfections, and all – as we work together. It seems simple enough, but it’s actually one of the most uncommon things to experience. 

Being true to yourself, being who you really are takes time to fully grasp. It takes each of us a unique amount of time to fully realize it, choose to be vulnerable, and implement it. We must be intentional about being true to ourselves, especially as we grow and become leaders in our industry. As the number of eyes that are on us grows, the harder it can be to stay true to who you are. 

But it is so irresistibly attractive to be authentic because it is so uncommon. When you are able to truly be yourself, it easily shines through to others due to your humility and confidence. You don’t need validation. You realize you are special and enough just as you are. 

The sooner you can realize, accept, and own that you are special, the sooner you can progress with helping those you are here to serve.

This will lead you to enjoy a greater deal of happiness. If you’re ready to do so, here are 3 steps to guide you in getting there:

  1. Set the intention to share yourself vulnerably, to not be so rigid in sharing who you are.
  2. Pay attention to how you talk to yourself. Remember: words really do matter. 
  3. When someone tells you that you’re special, accept it, own it, and say “Thank you.” Don’t deflect or dismiss. 

What can you expect to happen? For me, I began to share more of who I am and it’s led me to becoming a person more focused on how I can help others instead of concerning myself with what they will think of me. When I do this, I’m real and the experience is much more comfortable, authentic, and real for both parties. 

In this episode I share:

  • One of the most important things I wish someone had told me long ago
  • A practice to instantly defeat a bout of imposter syndrome when it strikes
  • A personal story recounting a cringeworthy time in my life where I wasn’t authentic
  • The idea that people want YOU as much as they want your smarts, strategies, and solutions
  • Why becoming truly authentic requires some initial personal work

Resources and related episodes:

 

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts for more tips, tools, and inspiration to lead the optimal vision of your life, love, and leadership. Remember, a half version of you is not enough. The world needs the fullest version of you at play.

Listen on Apple Podcasts

___

About Rita Hyland

With over 20 years of experience as an executive and leadership coach, Rita helps leaders — emerging and established — excel in corporate and entrepreneurial environments.

Rita believes if leaders were more clear about how transformation really works and more intentional about creating what they want, their impact, success, and influence in the world would be unstoppable.

Through her coaching programs, private coaching, and masterminds, Rita shows leaders how to win consistently and create the impact and legacy they desire.

Central to Rita’s work is the understanding that you will never outperform your current programming, no matter how strong your willpower.

When you learn to use Rita’s proprietary Neuroleadership Growth Code, a technology that uses the best of neuroscience and transformational psychology to hit the brain’s buttons for change, YOU become both the solution and the strategy.

Her mission is to end talented, hard-working, and self-aware leaders spending another day stuck in self-doubt or confusion and not contributing their brilliant work and talent the world so desperately needs.

relationship-will-last

The #1 Sign Your Relationship Will Last

relationship-will-last

Listen to the full podcast episode to learn the 1 simple thing that will show if your relationship will last, what you need to do to improve the health and longevity of your relationship, and how to apply this same principle to ANY relationship you may be struggling with.

None of us have taken a class in life that tells us how to have healthy relationships, but most of us don’t need much convincing that happy relationships are key to a successful life. Despite the importance of relationships to our overall well-being, happiness, and success, often we navigate through relationships on our own and learn as we go through a lot of trial and error. We don’t really know how to tell if a relationship will last or how to make sure a relationship lasts longer.

Today, I want to clear that up for you by sharing the science found by two marriage and relationship experts that will help you understand what it really takes to make sure your relationship will last. The best part is this principle can also be applied to your relationships with coworkers, family members, and with anyone else you may connect with in life. 

Lately, several people have described the struggles they are experiencing in their relationships.

For some, the connection in their marriage has waned. For others, they aren’t clicking with a fellow coworker. These experiences got me thinking of something extremely interesting that I learned years ago.

There are two psychologists – John and Julie Gottman – who, within 15 minutes of meeting a married couple, can predict if the couple will stay married or they will divorce… and with 94% accuracy. When I heard this, I thought it was crazy! I had to learn how they could figure this out.

John and Julie Gottman have determined that the outcome of a couple’s relationship comes down to one simple factor: the balance of their positive and negative interactions. They call this principle The Magic Ratio (or P&R, the Positive-Negative Ratio). 

In The Magic Ratio, couples with a Positive-to-Negative ratio of 5:1 are likely to have a relationship that will last.

This means they have 5 positive interactions with one another for every negative interaction. This counters our common belief that we only need to have a 1:1 ratio when a positive interaction happens to resolve any negative one. Unfortunately, that’s just not how science works.

Let’s put this in perspective. Say you’re having a bad day and you take it out on your spouse throughout the day: once at breakfast, once in mid-afternoon, and once around dinner. According to The Magic Ratio, you have to have 15 positive interactions to actually make up for those 3 negative interactions. Can you see the multiplying impact of having a bad week? 

If this science is true for romantic relationships, it can also be applied to other relationships in our lives. The Gottman’s applied The Magic Ratio to predict marital success and there is more academic research conducted by Heapy and Losada that found that the average ratio for high-performing teams was 5.6:1, 2:1 for medium-performance teams, and -3:1 for low-performance teams. 

The Magic Ratio is such an easy way to gauge how your relationships are going and if you want stronger relationships, you know that your number of positive interactions needs to increase. 

This week, I challenge you to take notice.

Choose one relationship in your life and look at your Positive-to-Negative Ratio with that person. Notice how many positive and negative interactions you have with them within a week. Then, be intentional about increasing your positive interactions. All it takes is a little intentionality. 

I want to invite you to tune into this week’s podcast episode as I take this topic even deeper to discuss the impact that negativity has on our interactions and the important role we each play in bringing a bit more positivity to this world. 

In this episode I share:

  • The #1 predictor of your relationship lasting or ending
  • Examples of how to use this principle in different types of relationships
  • What I believe to be each of our responsibility to the collective frequency

Resources and related episodes:

 

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts for more tips, tools, and inspiration to lead the optimal vision of your life, love, and leadership. Remember, a half version of you is not enough. The world needs the fullest version of you at play.

Listen on Apple Podcasts

___

About Rita Hyland

With over 20 years of experience as an executive and leadership coach, Rita helps leaders — emerging and established — excel in corporate and entrepreneurial environments.

Rita believes if leaders were more clear about how transformation really works and more intentional about creating what they want, their impact, success, and influence in the world would be unstoppable.

Through her coaching programs, private coaching, and masterminds, Rita shows leaders how to win consistently and create the impact and legacy they desire.

Central to Rita’s work is the understanding that you will never outperform your current programming, no matter how strong your willpower.

When you learn to use Rita’s proprietary Neuroleadership Growth Code, a technology that uses the best of neuroscience and transformational psychology to hit the brain’s buttons for change, YOU become both the solution and the strategy.

Her mission is to end talented, hard-working, and self-aware leaders spending another day stuck in self-doubt or confusion and not contributing their brilliant work and talent the world so desperately needs.

a simple practice to elevate your personal brand playing full out rita hyland podcast

A Simple Practice to Elevate Your Personal Brand

a simple practice to elevate your personal brand playing full out with rita hyland podcast

Listen to the full podcast episode to understand the important role self-awareness plays in your personal brand and learn my simple 3-step practice that will help elevate your personal brand experience.

We are all familiar with companies and their different brands. Brands instantly connect us to certain feelings and expectations. Take Tesla for example: this brand is all about cutting-edge innovation. The Disney brand is a joy and delight. When you think of Disney, you know what experience you will have.

Just like well-known companies, do you realize that you as an individual have a personal brand experience, too?

I didn’t think I’d be sharing this, but I want to tell you about my experience with a recent purchase from a new brand. I ordered a purse from an online company. When it arrived, I opened the box and there was a message reading: Your experience begins.

There were many layers to the opening experience. The purse was wrapped as a gift to me with a personalized letter in a handwritten script, there was a lot of beautiful tissue paper, and it was all inside a gorgeous, luxurious, and royal navy blue box. The company also included a surprise gift — a credit card case. Inside, they’d placed a high-quality business card from them with a lifetime guarantee and an address to use if the purse ever needed to be fixed. 

The company had strategically placed two of these cards in different places which signified to me how much they cared about my delight with my experience of their product. I’m exposed to many different brands, but this one really got me thinking about brand experiences.

Let me explain how you have a personal brand experience, as well.

When coaching leaders at companies, I often interview the individuals who work with an individual within the company and I ask them this question: When you think of this person, what one thing comes to mind that describes your experience of them? What I find amazing is there’s always repetition in the answers that I collect. I may interview 6-8 different individuals and there’s always a theme. 

In essence, the interview process hones in on the individual’s personal brand.  It ultimately answers the question: Who are they to others? Notice I didn’t ask how their work, product, or services are. Although the product we create or the service we perform is important, what’s just as important is who we are being in the delivery.  What is another’s experience of us? Why?  Because you yourself are an experience. 

When you understand this, the next natural question to ask yourself is, “What experience do people have with me? What do I bring beyond what I’m doing or providing?”

I can’t tell you how many people don’t know or have ever even considered this before. 

One of the traits of a conscious leader is that they realize it’s not just what they accomplish or achieve, but who they are being while they do it.

In other words, how do people feel in your presence?

Does your personal brand delight others?

Fuel others?

Elevate others?

Or, does it drain them? 

We all know someone in our lives who after interacting with them, you feel more exhausted or drained than elevated. The worst part is the individual usually has no idea of what they’re known for.  

Each of us has a responsibility to be awake, to be conscious and this begins with becoming more self-aware each and every day.

I believe the answer to all of our problems from a national level to a personal level is this: our ability to be self-aware and awake. 

If you haven’t given thought to your personal brand, I have a practice that you can use to hone in on the experience you bring to all of your interactions so that you can elevate your personal brand. 

The first step is to ask yourself: Who am I being while I do what I’m doing?

In your daily interactions, are you simply focused on getting it done, or are you deliberate about the experience you bring as well? To do this, simply look back at the interactions you’ve had within the last 24 hours. What do you think those on the receiving end felt when they were with you? Is that an experience you want to be associated with you?

Since it can be difficult to see ourselves accurately, I also recommend a more straightforward approach. Ask a friend or a trusted coworker this: If you had to describe who I am known for being, what comes to mind? If you had to describe what your regular experience is with me, what is that? 

The second step is to identify the personal brand you actually want to promote. 

How do you want people to experience you? Maybe you want to be the go-to expert, the person who sweeps people off their feet, or the one who gets things done. There is no right or wrong answer to this question, but you do need to know how you want because you can’t hit a target you can’t see. 

This step is where you identify who you are, what you’re bringing to the table, and the experience you want others to have with you.

The third step is to make a list of the 5-7 things that will help you bring forth that experience for others consistently and elevate your personal brand.

An important aspect of elevating your desired personal brand experience is to be intentional. To do that, you have to know the things that will deliver that experience on a day-to-day basis. 

How will you surprise and delight others’ experiences with you? There are so many ways to surprise and delight in your workplace and your community. This step calls you to get specific on what those will be. 

Just like the company that sent me the purse. They defined the 5-7 things that they do to surprise and delight their customers and they did them. That’s what I’m asking you to do. 

Some of those things may look like this:

  • streamlining a process
  • making something easier because you saw the opportunity
  • sharing a compliment publicly at a team meeting
  • grabbing a coffee for someone who has been sitting at their desk fighting a tight deadline
  • doing something that needs to be done even when you haven’t been asked 

All-in-all, your personal brand is a pulse check on who you are being and how people experience you.

This matters because it either elevates others — your co-workers, clients, or family members – in the organization, in the community, or in your family — or it diminishes them. There is no neutral. You either contaminate or contribute. The last thing you want is to be unaware of who you are as an experience to others. 

Our #1 responsibility in this lifetime is to wake up and elevate the consciousness of the world. That may seem lofty but it can be done every day in each of your interactions by bringing a little surprise and delight. 

You are more than what you do or the products or services you provide. Who you’re being matters!

In this episode I share:

  • 3 actionable steps to improve self-awareness and elevate your personal brand
  • Self-reflective prompts to analyze others’ experiences of you
  • My personal experience of surprise and delight while shopping with a new brand
  • Several ways to add surprise and delight to your personal brand experience

Resources and related episodes:

 

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts for more tips, tools, and inspiration to lead the optimal vision of your life, love, and leadership. Remember, a half version of you is not enough. The world needs the fullest version of you at play.

Listen on Apple Podcasts

___

About Rita Hyland

With over 20 years of experience as an executive and leadership coach, Rita helps leaders — emerging and established — excel in corporate and entrepreneurial environments.

Rita believes if leaders were more clear about how transformation really works and more intentional about creating what they want, their impact, success, and influence in the world would be unstoppable.

Through her coaching programs, private coaching, and masterminds, Rita shows leaders how to win consistently and create the impact and legacy they desire.

Central to Rita’s work is the understanding that you will never outperform your current programming, no matter how strong your willpower.

When you learn to use Rita’s proprietary Neuroleadership Growth Code, a technology that uses the best of neuroscience and transformational psychology to hit the brain’s buttons for change, YOU become both the solution and the strategy.

Her mission is to end talented, hard-working, and self-aware leaders spending another day stuck in self-doubt or confusion and not contributing their brilliant work and talent the world so desperately needs.

recognizing your self protection mechanism playing full out rita hyland

Recognizing Your Self-Protection Mechanism

self-protection

Listen to the full podcast episode to learn how to identify the coping strategies and self-protection mechanisms you employ when someone triggers you. By the end, you’ll know how to respond with vulnerability versus reacting with vigilance to end the self-sabotage and self-betrayal you may or may not realize you’re a part of in your relationships.

 

 

Today, I’m talking about the coping patterns and self-protection mechanisms we resort to when we feel triggered. Today, I’m going to show you how to comfort that conditioned part of yourself that for so long has behaved in a certain way as a means to self-preserve.

 

What is a self-protection mechanism?

A self-protection mechanism is a behavior or coping tool that we employ when a part of us doesn’t feel that it can manage or navigate a solution. 

We may feel unsafe, that something’s out of control, or that we’re going to get hurt. So, we rely on certain behavior we’ve become conditioned to using to escape from the feelings we don’t want to feel. 

Since we’ve repeated it for so long, it has become a pattern and the roots often stem from an experience in our childhood where we felt unsafe, hurt, afraid, angry, or resentful. 

There are a lot of different self-protection mechanisms that we employ. They’re very unique and specific to each of us and we’ve created them to help us cope with feelings we don’t believe we can handle feeling again. So, these mechanisms become our automatic reactions, becoming habits and often causing us to sabotage our relationships – including the one with yourself. 

How do we change our self-protection mechanisms and coping tools? 

There are 3 steps that will help you move from reacting to responding  and with vulnerability instead of vigilance:

Recognize your protection mechanism by looking at your patterns of behavior in relationships. 

Becoming aware is an essential first step in experiencing the greatest version of yourself. Let’s do an exercise to get you started. 

Think of one way you protect yourself in relationships. When someone says or does something that triggers you, what behavior are you most likely to respond with? One way to do this is to look at your last disagreement or a recent time you were triggered by someone. How did you handle it?

  • Do you pretend you’re laid back not showing that you care to avoid getting hurt? 
  • Do you defer to filling others’ needs or wants and remain silent when it comes to yours? 
  • Do you resort to using sarcasm to protect yourself from being seen authentically? 
  • Do you keep people at a distance by becoming argumentative?
  • When someone says or does something you don’t like, do you betray yourself, by not stopping a person if they’re coming against you?
  • Do you refrain from asking for what you want?
  • Do you allow others’ needs to supersede your own?
  • Do you raise your voice as a means to shut someone down?

Witness yourself at the moment. 

When you witness the moment, take a deep breath in and relax. Don’t run from it or numb yourself from feeling it. Just notice it. It’s key to see and name this mechanism for what it really is — a part of you that’s trying to protect you. So, instead of self-identifying or justifying it, just notice it.

Comfort yourself. Become friends with your protection mechanism and the part of you that’s protecting you. 

Think of this mechanism as a good friend who has had your best interest at heart and has been looking out for you for a long time. Thank it for being there when you needed it to survive. 

Begin to reparent yourself. Reparenting is the practice of relearning how to meet physical and emotional needs that your inner child or younger self may have not been able to take care of. Since these mechanisms developed during past times in our lives, you’ll most likely be having conversations with your younger self, giving your younger self what you needed at that very moment. Through reparenting, we are able to guide ourselves and really transform our subconscious where this protection mechanism is housed. 

 

It can be hard to change our patterns of behavior because we’ve been using them without even realizing it for so long. For me, it took years after I began my self-protection mechanism to bravely speak up for myself and to do so from a place of clarity and love. 

But when you get to know your specific protection mechanisms that show up when you’re triggered, your relationships will dramatically improve in every category of life.

You will speak with love, with clarity, and with boundaries. You will feel better because you’ll be responding from your healed and secure self. 

By being aware of how you self-protect using the coping mechanisms specific to your needs, you stop leading your life from your past conditioning. 

Your Call to Action for this week is to identify the self-protection mechanism that you use when you feel triggered. Become aware and witness it when you see it. Instead of running from the feelings you’ve tried not feeling for so long, breathe into the moment and relax. Then, take some time to become friends with that part of yourself that has protected you for so long, and thank it. Let it know it no longer needs to react as it always has because you no longer need to resist or run from those feelings.

 

In this episode I share:

  • 3 steps to stave off the self-sabotage and self-betrayal that’s often associated with your conditioned protection pattern of choice
  • The long-held patterns you resort to when you feel triggered and how you become conditioned to use these coping mechanisms
  • A practice to befriend the part of you that is seeking to protect you but often costs you your happiness and success

Resources and related episodes:

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts for more tips, tools, and inspiration to lead the optimal vision of your life, love, and leadership. Remember, a half version of you is not enough. The world needs the fullest version of you at play.

Listen on Apple Podcasts

___

About Rita Hyland

With over 20 years of experience as an executive and leadership coach, Rita helps leaders — emerging and established — excel in corporate and entrepreneurial environments.

Rita believes if leaders were more clear about how transformation really works and more intentional about creating what they want, their impact, success, and influence in the world would be unstoppable.

Through her coaching programs, private coaching, and masterminds, Rita shows leaders how to win consistently and create the impact and legacy they desire.

Central to Rita’s work is the understanding that you will never outperform your current programming, no matter how strong your willpower.

When you learn to use Rita’s proprietary Neuroleadership Growth Code, a technology that uses the best of neuroscience and transformational psychology to hit the brain’s buttons for change, YOU become both the solution and the strategy.

Her mission is to end talented, hard-working, and self-aware leaders spending another day stuck in self-doubt or confusion and not contributing their brilliant work and talent the world so desperately needs.

simple step by step candid conversation formula for addressing conflict

The Simple Step-by-Step Candid Conversation Formula

simple step by step candid conversation formula playing full out with rita hyland

Listen to the full podcast episode to learn a simple 7-part formula to address and resolve conflict in any relationship (whether in the boardroom or bedroom) so that you can clear your issues, resolve conflict and actually improve your relationships by addressing the unspoken and uncomfortable.

What percentage of people do you think have been taught a simple process for conflict resolution, considering that conflict is inevitable in every relationship both personal and professional?  The answer is so low that researchers have likely never thought it worthy enough to measure. 

When it comes to conflict, it’s not if it will happen, but when. While we do not want it, it’s key for the sake of our relationships and leadership that we get good at addressing and resolving it. 

That’s why today I’m going to walk you through a reliable 7-step formula that you can use any time you’re having an issue that needs to be cleared.  Using this approach you will feel more confident leaning into even your most difficult or charged conversation.  It will also ensure that you are heard, that you care, and that you resolve issues healthily and quickly. 

Before we step into this process, it’s important to  establish a strong foundation for the candid conversation. Here are 3 steps you can take before you begin:  

  • Set the intention.

    • It’s important to approach any candid conversation with the intention to support, to love, and to provide what needs to be said. While engaging in a conversation to clear your issues, don’t come to it unprepared or in a less than positive state.  Know what it is you want by the end of the conversation. 

  • Be sure to mention what is working.

    • You can do this by saying, “This is the 90% that is working really well.  Now let’s talk today about the 10% that will take us to the next level.”

  • Honor the other person by being vulnerable.

    • Vulnerability shows the other person that you care, that you see each other as equals, and that you value the other in the experience. You can do this by saying, “I am committed to your success and being in this conversation until we get to a good place for both of us.”

  • Let the other person know that you want the real deal.

    • You can do this by saying, “I’m going to be transparent with you. I want you to be transparent with me. If you don’t understand or agree with something, I want you to tell me that.”

 

One of the biggest problems when we attempt to engage in healthy conflict, is that we tend to come to the conversation with facts, interpretations, stories, judgments, feelings, and wants that get entangled. As a result, often little is heard, issues go unresolved, and things are left even messier than they were before. 

One of the key elements of this 7-step formula to candid conversations is to discern and identify each part for what it is.  The steps include:

  1. Affirm the importance of the relationship. Set the stage and affirm that the other person is important to you. For example: “Our relationship is important to me and I want to discuss something that’s affecting it.”
  2. Set the intention. This is just a little bit different than our foundational step above. Here you want to articulate your intention making sure to be clear so if the conversation gets off track, you can use your intention to get back on track. For example: “My intention for this conversation is that our relationship is stronger as a result of us talking.” Or “My intention for this conversation is to be clear about what is expected of you when you come to our leadership meeting.”
  3. State the facts. This is where things can begin to get messy. In this part of the conversation it is important to state only the facts. Be very clear about what happened without any added judgments or stories. For example: “Less than 50% of the team came prepared with the answers to the questions that were laid out 2 to 4 weeks ago.” Or “You came in 15 minutes past curfew.”
  4. Offer your interpretations. This is where you can begin to share your interpretations and what you are concerned about. For example: “I interpret the facts to mean…”, “I’m concerned because to me this means…”, or “The story I tell myself when this happens is…” and then fill in the rest.  That may sound like: “You’ve been gone for three out of the last four weekends. I interpret that to mean that you’re not concerned with investing time in our marriage.”
  5. Clarify your feelings. This may sound like: “When I believe this, I feel disrespected, I feel unheard, I feel unseen.”
  6. Own your level of responsibility. I am a big believer that each of us is 100% responsible for 50% of the relationship, and we have to own our half. For example: “My role in this is…” or “My part in allowing or enabling this issue is…” If we’re speaking to a child that’s missed curfew, it could sound like this: “My part in this is that I have allowed you to be late before and not held you accountable. That may be confusing.”
  7. Articulate what you want and ask for it. Be clear and specific in your request focusing on the positive. This is a part where it can be very easy to focus on what you don’t want, like “I don’t want you coming in late,” or “I don’t want you coming to team meetings unprepared.” It’s much more important and effective to speak to what you do want because the subconscious brain doesn’t hear words like “don’t” and “no.” Paint a vivid picture of the ultimate ideal future as it pertains to this issue. For example: “I’d like you to arrive at the meetings 10 minutes early. At that time, we can address each other, enjoy each other, and proceed with our intended agenda.”

If you want to effectively address and resolve issues in your relationships, it’s essential to communicate in a way that your concerns are heard, that is not overridden with judgment, that sees others as equal, and expresses your feelings and interpretations of the situation. 

Once you’ve effectively and clearly communicated, you can move forward by listening and hearing the other person with responses like, “Tell me what it is you’re hearing,” or “Tell me what it is you’re taking from this conversation.”  You will also want to get the other person’s commitment to take the steps you identified along with other ideas they might have.

Having a method to resolve issues allows you to feel more confident heading into an issues clearing conversation and more likely to lean in instead of step over it.  

Remember that being transparent is kind. When you use this formula to have a candid conversation with the purpose of clearing issues, you will see your productivity, peace of mind, and quality of relationships dramatically improve. 

Your call to action is to challenge yourself this week to step over nothing. Instead, address what isn’t being said. Talk about issues before they get so large that they can’t be disarmed or dispelled. First, lay your foundation and then use the simple step-by-step formula.

As reassurance, know that if these issues are on your mind, they’re probably on the other person’s mind too.  You’ll both be served by clearing the air and acknowledging the elephant in the room.

In this episode I share:

  • 3 foundation-building steps to set your candid conversation up for success
  • A step-by-step formula to engage in difficult conversations whether personal or professional 
  • Examples of the exact words in the right order that will help you to resolve even the most difficult conflicts in the boardroom, office, or at home 

Resources and related episodes:

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts for more tips, tools, and inspiration to leading the optimal vision of your life, love, and leadership. Remember, a half version of you is not enough. The world needs the fullest version of you at play.

Listen on Apple Podcasts

___

About Rita Hyland

With over 20 years of experience as an executive and leadership coach, Rita helps leaders — emerging and established — excel in corporate and entrepreneurial environments.

Rita believes if leaders were more clear about how transformation really works and more intentional about creating what they want, their impact, success, and influence in the world would be unstoppable.

Through her coaching programs, private coaching, and masterminds, Rita shows leaders how to win consistently and create the impact and legacy they desire.

Central to Rita’s work is the understanding that you will never outperform your current programming, no matter how strong your willpower.

When you learn to use Rita’s proprietary Neuroleadership Growth Code, a technology which uses the best of neuroscience and transformational psychology to hit the brain’s buttons for change, YOU become both the solution and the strategy.

Her mission is to end talented, hard-working, and self-aware leaders spending another day stuck in self-doubt or confusion and not contributing their brilliant work and talent the world so desperately needs.

Improve Your Connections By Employing the Art and Neuroscience Of Engagement

Improve Your Connections By Employing the Art and Neuroscience Of Engagement

Improve your connections by employing the art and neuroscience of engagement rita hyland playing full out

Listen to the full podcast episode to learn what is needed before every interaction to be successful, what the savviest managers and most effective leaders do, and my simple 4-step S.A.F.E. method that will drastically increase the quality of your engagements and allow others to not only feel safe but truly empowered by you.

Recently, I was training a group of managers in the coaching leadership style, discussing how to have an effective coaching conversation with team members. This particular company understands that the best version of a business comes only when employees are becoming better versions of themselves.  The company is creating a culture that reflects that. 

At one point in the training, I noticed one of the managers had a smile on his face. I asked him what was so funny? “Well, it’s not that it’s funny,” he said, “but I can’t imagine some of my team wanting to have this conversation with me.”

He was right. It occurred to me that much more was actually needed to be said about the art and science of engagement. After all, if the employee views talking to their manager as risky instead of rewarding (as he was suggesting), then the team member is not going to engage with him. The communication is shut down and he becomes ineffective no matter how talented he is.

And this applies to all of us in ANY interaction. 

We want to contribute, to serve, to help, to support, and to influence in business, at home, or in our community, but we can’t do this if we are perceived as more risky than rewarding to engage. We can really want these outcomes, but if the individuals on the other end of our engagements do not feel safe with us, we won’t be able to share our talents, gifts or services with them.

So, how do you get others to engage with us while feeling safe?

One of the most important aspects of getting individuals to talk to you is understanding neuroscience to establish yourself as someone rewarding and safe to engage with. 

Here’s a quick peek into how the brain works:

5 times a second, the unconscious mind scans the environment and asks, “Is it safe here?”

If the answer is no, then our mental operation is taken over by the amygdala – the least developed part of our brain whose primary focus is on survival. If it determines that the environment is unsafe, it focuses solely on what it needs to do to survive: fight, freeze (remain quiet), or leave the interaction completely.

Now, when the brain does feel safe, it operates from the prefrontal cortex, at its highest level. It’s capable of navigating nuance, managing ambiguity, and assuming positive intention. 

With that quick dive into how the brain works, we can see that how we manage people matters. How we let them know they are safe is absolutely critical.. In order to do so effectively, I’m going to share with you my simple 4-step process called S.A.F.E. that’s going to help you communicate so others feel safe and empowered in their engagements with you. 

S.A.F.E.

When the brain feels safe, it can operate at its most sophisticated level. When we feel safe, we are engaged and are capable of progressing forward. If we are unsure of a situation, our subconscious minds will default to reading it as unsafe. Think of it as a barking Chihuahua. If you walk into its home, it has now perceived – something bigger and unknown – as a threat. It does not feel safe and therefore begins to bark incessantly. This is equivalent to the mind that chatters and ruminates. Before you can go any further, you have to make the barking dog feel safe. 

In the first step of the process, we address Status.

The brain asks: What is my status in this? Is there a ranking in this interaction? Am I valued in this engagement? Are we equally important?

If the subconscious brain sees itself as lower, it barks incessantly like the chihuahua. Your job in this step is to not set the dog off by threatening its status. 

For example, if you’re providing feedback as a manager to a direct report, it’s important to let the individual know this is an interactive process where you’ll be providing feedback and that you see them as equally important to you. Where the brain may be concerned with a difference in status, you want to assure it that although we may have different rankings in the world, you and I are bringing equal value. 

In the second step, we address Autonomy.

The brain asks: Do I have a choice? 

Not having a choice makes individuals feel walled in. We want those engaging with us to feel that they have choices. We can do this by asking them for ideas or suggestions. As I begin a coaching engagement, I say to the other individual, “I’m going to ask you questions and you get to choose whether you want to take my observations or reflections back or to drop them.” I don’t make the person feel like a prisoner. It’s like a pair of shoes: if they don’t fit, you wouldn’t buy them.

In the third step, we address Friend or Foe.

The brain asks: Are you on my side? Are you with me or against me?

An easy way to do this as a manager is to remind the person that you are on the same team. You can say things like, “We’re on the same team here… What I want for you is…” and then fill in the blank. Use “we” and “us” language instead of “you” language. That way, you ensure people know you are a friend that is on the same team as them. 

When I first engage with new clients, I let them know that once I agree to work with them, I become their number one fan. This act calms the subconscious mind. 

In the fourth step, we address Expectation.

The brain asks: What’s the future?

Remember that the future is uncertain and the brain sees uncertainty as exceedingly dangerous. If the brain doesn’t know what to expect in an engagement, it’s going to resist. It might fight back. So, be aware in the initial moments of an engagement to clarify what is going to happen. This helps individuals know what to expect, even if it’s just for the next 15 minutes. In doing so, you provide clarity which calms the brain and keeps it from ruminating and interpreting that  danger is lurking. 

When beginning an engagement, you can say:

“Today, we’re going to…” 

“I’m going to ask you this…” 

“At the end, we’re going to come full circle and this is what we’re going to make sure we covered…”

Doing so paints a picture that lets others know what to expect by telling them what the future is going to look like. 

When you follow this 4-step acronym, you set the foundation for and begin a very healthy and rewarding interaction regardless who it is you are engaging with. While the 4 parts are the same no matter with whom you’re interacting, the order of the steps can be adjusted to flow with your conversation.  

This week, I challenge you to make someone feel safe in your next engagement with them. Ensure that they feel valued and equal to you, that they have the autonomy to make certain choices, that you are there for them, and clearly paint a picture of what they can expect in this engagement. Then, sit back and enjoy the connection.

In this episode I share:

  • The key thing needed before expecting any successful engaged conversation
  • My simple 4-step process (S.A.F.E) to drastically transform and elevate your engagements both in the office and at home
  • Specific examples of what you can say to establish instant connection in any interaction

Resources and related episodes:

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts for more tips, tools, and inspiration to leading the optimal vision of your life, love, and leadership. Remember, a half version of you is not enough. The world needs the fullest version of you at play.

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About Rita Hyland

With over 20 years of experience as an executive and leadership coach, Rita helps leaders — emerging and established — excel in corporate and entrepreneurial environments.

Rita believes if leaders were more clear about how transformation really works and more intentional about creating what they want, their impact, success, and influence in the world would be unstoppable.

Through her coaching programs, private coaching, and masterminds, Rita shows leaders how to win consistently and create the impact and legacy they desire.

Central to Rita’s work is the understanding that you will never outperform your current programming, no matter how strong your willpower.

When you learn to use Rita’s proprietary Neuroleadership Growth Code, a technology which uses the best of neuroscience and transformational psychology to hit the brain’s buttons for change, YOU become both the solution and the strategy.

Her mission is to end talented, hard-working, and self-aware leaders spending another day stuck in self-doubt or confusion and not contributing their brilliant work and talent the world so desperately needs.

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