Then suddenly there you are, as the boss of a team. As the leader of a company with your first staff. You once started at the bottom of the ladder, but have now made it so far that you have a team of people around you to help you achieve your goals? Why the question mark? Because you're not sure if those people are helping you. This is because it depends on all kinds of factors in your leadership.
Want to know how to develop personal leadership? Then continue reading this blog.
When I started as a phobia doctor, a modest one-man business, I never expected that I would now be leading a team of people. Fortunately, they are all highly motivated to teach my clients a thing or two about hypnosis and NLP and to help clients get rid of their fears when my schedule is just too full.
Personal Leadership
To get such a team, personal leadership is very important. To make a team or an organization a success, a number of factors are important, namely:
- Have a clear objective.
- Have methods to achieve the goal.
- Adapt procedures and processes to make everything run more smoothly.
These are very practical aspects of having a business with staff in which all sorts of things need to be taken care of. Then you have to deal with the human side of the business. After all, you want people who work for you to feel comfortable doing so. This is where personal leadership comes in. For this, the following behaviors are important:
- Trusting each other.
- Caring for People.
- Moral behavior.
This personal leadership, according to the 2004 study The importance of personal and professional leadership, is important for staff to engage with the more practical side of a business.
Personal leadership and confidence
Yet you find that personal leadership is not always something you automatically have. After all, it seems like you have to be trustworthy to your staff, which of course makes sense, but in order to inspire trust, you have to have trust in your staff yourself.
On the contrary, if you have a lack of trust in people, either in general or specifically in your organization, it is important to find out why the lack is there. A hypnotherapist can help you explore whether you have an unreal lack of trust, and if so, there are techniques to increase trust in your fellow man.
One way to find out why you deal with people the way you do is through regression. This is a hypnosis technique that allows you to go back to a time when a belief arose that affects how you deal with personnel. For example, this may be about trust in your fellow man and about conception of how a manager should behave.
The results can be quite surprising. This is because many beliefs are formed at a young age (say, elementary school age).
To give you an example of a regression session for a woman who could not lose weight after becoming a mother. This was because one time her mother could not come to her when she had to go to the hospital. Instead, a friend's mother came and she was overweight. Then the belief arose that a good mother weighs a little more and therefore she could not lose weight. Through regression she saw how illogical this was and where this inability to lose weight came from unconsciously. Then the pounds flew off.
You may also have experienced something with executives from your parents or if one of your parents has been an entrepreneur themselves about how to handle it then. So get surprised with hypnosis to become a better leader.
Personal leadership and focus
You also need to dare to open yourself up to your staff. According to the study "Can you see the real me?" A self-based model of authentic leader and follower development from 2005, having a personal connection with staff or team members is important for success. This is because it promotes the inclusiveness of your company which also makes people feel involved in the company's goals.
You achieve this, for example, by focusing on the positive aspects of your team members' work rather than the negative.
This is also a technique that can be used in hypnosis and NLP. This is because when you say what you don't want the focus often automatically comes to be on what you don't want, the word not is then so void in effect that it is just awkward to say what you don't want, this also makes the possibilities of what you do want infinite.
Tell them exactly what you do want, and the focus is on that.
Personal leadership and talking to team members
Finding it difficult to start a conversation with your team members? Then a hypnotherapist can help you with that, too. Perhaps you still have unconscious beliefs of the old school in which you think quite hierarchically about how an organization should work. For example, a hypnotherapist can help you with a Socratic Conversation to find out why you do certain things the way you do them at work.
You can then take follow-up steps to change your current approach in personal leadership.
One way to change your own behavior toward staff or team members is to visualize the desired behavior, such as asking how things are. A hypnotherapist can help you with this through guided visualization.
For a guided visualization, you are first put into the hypnotic state. You do this by relaxing and focusing on your breathing. The hypnotherapist will help you do this and check that you are in hypnosis before the visualization begins, such as by arm-levitation.
A guided visualization may sound like this.
"You come in fresh to work and greet all your team members. You ask who wants coffee and grab it for them, because you know it's pluses of appreciation. Today it's X's turn to have a nice chat with during the break. You walk up to him/her with your lunch and ask how is it?
You tell something about your own situation and recent developments in your hobby. You notice that this improves the atmosphere, X relaxes and he/she begins to talk about own hobbies. You feel comfortable with this and listen with interest.
You notice that something is going on after all, such as little time for hobbies, and ask if you can help X with something. Then it turns out that X actually needs a day off to care for his/her family member.
You like knowing this because it explains a lot and now you can take steps to make sure X gets a day off before X has to call in sick and then you have to organize your team at the very last minute. You're glad you had this conversation and you got inspiration for your own hobby again. A real win-win situation."
This is just an example of a guided visualization. If you are struggling with other behavioral changes or other fears or insecurities, a hypnotherapist can help you with that.
What you see in such a guided visualization is that everything is guided in the positive about your abilities and about how you deal with problems. This visualization stimulates your imagination so that when you want to perform the situation in real life, it almost feels familiar. As a result, you become more confident in your abilities and personal leadership becomes something you can do better.
Personal leadership and self-confidence
Leading other people is something that requires you to stand firmly in your shoes. Especially now that the world has (thankfully) become less hierarchical, it's nice to be able to enter the conversation with your team members with confidence.
This is especially important if you are going to change processes and procedures within the company. You want something new and different and that can be scary for team members because it is unfamiliar and out of their comfort zone.
Then you need to be able to explain why it does work and allay their fears. For this, you need confidence in your own plan and in yourself as a leader who can get a team along.
Hypnosis has long been used to improve self-confidence. It can also be important for executives. Techniques such as visualizations, for example, help improve self-confidence .
In addition, you can use hypnotic suggestions. These can be given to you by a hypnotherapist and then you can use them at home during self-hypnosis. These can be suggestions such as:
"When I explain the effects of the changes, everyone agrees with me," he says.
"My team believes in me."
"I am a social leader."
These are just examples. Depending on your beliefs, you may receive other suggestions from the hypnotherapist.
For personal leadership, hypnosis can help encourage the behaviors that are good for leadership and give you the confidence that you are a good leader, making you a better leader already.
Want to learn more about how hypnosis can help you or how you can help others? Then come to a playshop and check out Hypnosis Institute Netherlands' training programs.
Sources:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1048984305000275
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/01437730410544755
