DO THIS to create your thriving target:

1. Schedule time in your agenda (No, I won't stop nagging you about actually scheduling time in because honestly, if you don't schedule it, chances are, you won't do it!)
2. Free write about what it looks like for you to thrive in your leadership role. Make sure to focus less on what you don't want and get more and more specific on what you DO want.
3. Grab this guide Your Thriving Target to go a little deeper into what it looks like for you when you ditch survival mode and begin to thrive more in leadership and life!

There is one little ⚠️WARNING ⚠️ I want to share.
Creating that target won't make it happen. It's only the first step.
You've then got to come back and create a plan and do the work to get there.

• Doing that work is often uncomfy - Setting boundaries
• It requires you to focus on something amidst the distractions - Can I just ask you a quick question?
• Oh and...um ugh...it means you've got to get really good at managing your thoughts and emotions. Because let's be honest. Just saying you are going to leave at 6:00 doesn't take into account the guilt you feel about the project that's due tomorrow, the thoughts about how bad you'll look if you don't complete it on time and the overwhelming urge to "just this one time" stay late.

-That requires you to focus on your self-control, inner discipline or willpower. Yes, there is that willpower word again. 

🆘HERE'S A GREAT OPPORTUNITY FOR YOU
If you've been thinking working on the Willpower Essentials course but haven't had time to register, start or finish the course, now's the time to do that.
For 7 weeks, I'm going to be guiding you through the course, week-by-week in the Willpower Essentials Study Group.

• MEMBERS: If you are a member of The Training Library and want to join in, just reply to this email and say you want to join.
• NON-MEMBERS: If you are not yet a member, you can join now or purchase the course separately.

What if I told you that your ability to lead with integrity is only as good as the management of your stress? It's true! 

Consider these questions:

• If you are tense and agitated, how quickly are you making decisions? 
  
  • And, are they the decisions you would have made if you'd taken a few minutes to breathe and reflect with more focus?
• If you have a mountain of deadlines, meetings and emails weighing you down, will you take time to reflect on what's deeply important to you?
• If you are numbing out with painkillers, prescriptions, alcohol, social media or Netflix, can you think clearly about how to stand up for what you morally believe in?

I'm guessing you'd say no to those questions.
However, if you are like most leaders self-care, wellness and your health are often put on the side while you put out fires, juggle crisis and focus on just surviving this meeting, just getting through today, or coping with this busy time.

Keep reading to learn how you can gain the trust of your team and have them judge you as being a leader with integrity.

Are you ever about to enter a tough talk and wonder if you've got what it takes to pull it off? 

If you have read the first chapter of my book, you know I have! In one particularly challenging meeting that's hard to forget, I wondered if I was about to upchuck my morning oatmeal...but I digress...​

3 Kinds of Tough Talks!
There are certainly more than 3 kinds of tough talks, but let's look at what might constitute a tough talk.

1. One-to-one meetings that are dealing with performance issues or completing a performance appraisal.
2. Group meetings where you are leading the conversation. These meetings might be tense, charged, or complicated.
3. It might be that the tough meeting you are entering is with someone that you deem more important than you or superior to you. For me, that would have been my boss or my funder. In those kinds of meetings, I might have been asking for a raise, a promotion, or to take a training course that costs a substantial amount or would pull you away from the team.

What makes these talks tough?
What makes these talks tough for you, me, or anyone else? For any talk to be considered "tough," they all have one thing in common.

Do you have any guess what the one thing is that makes talks tough?

The one defining factor is...
The thing that they have in common is that you THINK they are tough. That's it!! Each of us can enter the same meeting, and some of us will think that it's going to be a tough meeting, and some of us will think it will be just fine.

It's time to turn it around
You need to change your perspective if you want to enter your next meeting or talk and not see it as tough.  I am not suggesting you snap your fingers and say, "It's easy peasy!" No. A perspective change is about seeing in a way that is ALSO true.

Want more practice?
Not convinced? No, perhaps not. This work takes practice. But please keep at it. This is why I am always harping about the need to do the inner work. Practice makes progress!

️If you need more help with preparing for upcoming tough talks, I encourage you to check out this webinar inside of The Training Library: Preparing for a Tough Talk: So you can handle it with integrity!

I'm guessing you have on a pair of heels, dress shoes or casual shoes...at least if you are reading this during your workday. On a typical workday for me, I spend the majority of it in slippers  I switch to runners...then back to slippers.
The exception is when you see me face-to-face at a speaking event, I'm rockin the heels! ​

Sounds cool right! You can do this. It might take some practice, but you can transform the way you engage with your team into an inspiring and motivating conversation that helps your staff grow into their full potential. 

Do you want to get better at coaching your employees?
If you want some more help with this, join me for this month's webinar: Creating Comfortable Coaching Conversations. 

Why are women not rising to the top as equally as men in nonprofits? Because we are not! Here are the statistics in Canada's Nonprofit"

• Women make up approximately 75% of the workforce in our nonprofits organizations
• Yet, women hold only 40% of top leadership positions in our nonprofit organizations

Hmmm, does something about that not quite sit right with you?

What is holding women back?

Charity Village recently is offered a free webinar in which the Ontario Nonprofit Network (ONN) shared key findings from their recent report Decent Work for Women and the 10 solutions ONN is working on. This session was relevant across the country as we all work together to change things.

Change though, won't come from a report. It will come from action. The challenge is, that many women continue to feel oppressed, bullied and lack the confidence to step forward.

We need to take this part into consideration as well:
Before many women are ready to come forward, they need to develop their courage and confidence. For many women, they will do that when they find their authentic leadership style and owning it. ​

​It's about leading with confidence to be ourselves.

We need to become the female role models for the future generation of women leaders
For far too long we've been mentored by men, had male role models and seen bits of success by acting like men leaders, but feeling like frauds. That inner turmoil between who we really are and how we want to lead with how we think we SHOULD lead has cost us our confidence, career advancements and quite frankly, our sanity.

You know I have been a strong advocate of leading aligned with your values, belief, morals and ethics. I've also been known to get on my soapbox more than once about how you need to do the inner work to get there. Well, back up on the box I get....

MY RANT:
Here is the thing, my dear, authentic, compelling, impactful and enjoyable (yes, you can enjoy your role) comes when you are "in character" not out of character. When you are "acting" like someone you are "supposed" to be, you'll continue to find that you feel overwhelmed, under-appreciated, and lack meaning in your work.

• INSTEAD, a leader with strong character leads with authentically with their natural traits, their values and leads with integrity 

I'm so passionate about this that I've devoted this month's webinar to helping you compete authentically with men for the leadership position and respect you desire by learning to lead with your leader character.

Not convinced character is critical for you? Let me ask this:
​
Which list of Character Traits do you aspire to?

Character matters, BIG TIME!

There is one word you should NOT use when you are giving your staff feedback, praise or encouragement. 

You may already have an idea what it is...but what do you use instead?

You’ll learn that, when you watch this FB Live session:

LINKS from today's session

Listen to the beginning of MASTERING CONFIDENCE here

Find your GUIDE SHEET #27 - Create your powerful vision + Chapter from Mastering Confidence

MASTERING CONFIDENCE INTENSIVE - Join the 8-week online program

Join the CONFIDENT WOMEN LEADERS Group here

,Do you have a love/hate relationship with your job, your role, your team or your organization?
I sure did! It sucked the life and fun out of me!
Do you want to learn how to lose the loathing love the work? 
On this week's FB Live show I talked about what I did and you can too - to learn to love leadership. Let me give you a bit of an overview here.

I was in a pretty toxic environment
In my book Mastering Confidence, I tell the story of a time when my team was just a wee bit toxic. Ok, honestly, very toxic. At the time, I blamed everyone around me. It was her fault, his fault, and their fault. Certainly, I wasn't the one to blame. As such, I didn't want to go to work. I dreaded it each morning as I got ready and headed into the office. Whenever I could, I avoided certain people, teams, and sites. I loathed my job.

It took a shift in my mindset and some learning to turn that around.. I need to take responsibility for my self, my impact and move from victim to leader. I find that many of the women I work with also struggle in this way.

My client was in a pretty toxic environment
Take Rebecca for example, she came to me a few months into a new promotion. Initially, when she took the role of a supervisor on she loved it. That quickly turned to overwhelm, extreme dislike for her boss and frustration with her team. Rebecca felt like no one listened or cared about the work or her. She found she was turning into an uncaring person, simply focused on the tasks for the day. 

We both need to see things differently
When we started coaching, the first thing I began to do was help Rebecca gain an understanding of herself. She needed to get clear on what her values were. She began to get more connected to her inner guidance system, which helped her recognize what triggered her, her self-talk and take back control of her emotions. It was the same place I started when I turned my team back around from toxic to strong. Once I figured out how important family was to me, honesty and my deep connection to the work we were doing, I quickly realized why I had reacted to so many things that had happened in the preceding months. 

We moved from ourselves to focusing on our team
The next thing I worked with Rebecca on was helping her to see her team as individuals and realize her job was to grow them. She started to see them differently as I'd also began to see my team in a new light. It is always fascinating for me to watch my clients now take the same journey that I did so many years ago. That path is seeing an individual's strengths, identifying their potential and putting a focus on growing them and helping them to realize their full potential. It's an amazing feeling to turn from seeing your staff as "problems to be fixed" to "potential to be drawn out."

We both reconnected to the love of our job
The final thing that helped Rebecca to learn to love her leadership role again was taking her newfound inner growth and her shift in her mindset about her team to the bigger purpose of their work. Why do you do what you do? What difference does your work make to the community you serve? These questions helped me years ago to really find that passion and inner spark again. Rebecca lit up too when she began to find the answers to these questions. 

This is what we did in a nutshell
These three things, are the things you can also do to move from loathing your leadership role to loving your leadership role

1. Grow yourself from the inside out
2. Grow your team members
3. Connect you and your team to your purpose

My final thoughts for you
To move from loathing your leadership role to loving it takes some time. Let's be honest; Leadership is a tough gig! However, these three things, when you put your focus on them, will help you to make that shift more permanent. Grow yourself from the inside out. Focus on seeing the potential in your employees and focus on growing them. Then, take yourself and your team and remind yourselves today and every day...why you do what you do. Trust me, my dear, you will find the love for your work again...as soon as you do!

Want to learn more?
Listen to this week's Facebook Live session to help you make the shift from loathing to loving your job. Don't forget to download this week's guide sheet to help you personally make the shift. Remember, you have to do something with this information, or it won't actually make a change in your life!

Have you ever felt like an outsider? 
Perhaps you were the one individual in the room that no one was talking to you.
It sucks.
Have you ever felt that not one cares about you?
Maybe your boss didn't have a clue what you were doing or why you are doing it?
​That feeling sucks too.

I’ve felt I’m an outsider, and I bet you have too
Not all the time, but you’ve probably felt that sense that no one cares about you. You walked into a meeting, and there was a group on the side talking. They didn’t seem to notice that you had entered the room. No raised heads. No eye contact. You overheard their conversation and knew you have something to contribute, but they didn’t acknowledge you, let alone asked for your opinion. Ouch!

It happens
Most of the time you can shrug it off knowing it wasn’t that they didn’t care about you or your ideas. They were just engrossed in their conversation. Perhaps later they did look up, invite you over and away you went. 

That feeling sucks
It’s that initial feeling, though, of not being noticed or not perceiving you are a valuable part of the group that, sad to say, many employees feel on an ongoing basis. They don’t get the impression they are seen, nor do they feel appreciated.  Far too often, employees feel insignificant, secondary and dispensable. 

These people give less than 100%
When you don’t feel respected, you don’t commit to your work. That means you are producing significantly less than 100% of what you are capable of generating. 
When you don’t feel like you matter, that your work counts or that you are cared about, you put your time in and go home. Barely. 

You want 100% employee buy-in
My guess is you want more of your team. I suspect you are looking for committed, dedicated and loyal staff. I bet you want people who are invested and care about the work they are doing, the quality of their work, and the impact they are making.

How do you get that? 
You care. Simply put:

• you care about your staff as individuals, 
• you care about the work they are doing and 
• you care about the contribution they are making.

When you change your interactions with your staff so that they feel that you care about them, their work and their impact, you will find yourself bragging to others about your stellar team players.

3)    Use all-inclusive language

Approach conversations as if you are all in it together, because you really are all in it together!
Use your words to communicate that everything you are doing is connected, because everything is truly connected!

You can see this in the above example about goals.

• “I’m expecting that we…”.

It was clear that the whole team is in it together. Yes, each practitioner works on their own with individual clients. But the overall work they are doing is united.

Discovering you do have a stellar team
Make these deeper connections with your staff:

• Relate to them as individuals
• Give them meaningful work and share that meaning with them
• Acknowledge their contributions to the whole team and vision

When you do this you’ll discover your stellar team sharing ideas, working together and helping each other out. Yes, it will be kind of like a family. After all, isn’t that what we want? "Let's all get along, work through challenges we encounter and support each other in the process. 
​

Build relationships and you will have engagement

Employee engagement begins with relationship building . If your employees are not engaged in your meeting, you are wasting your time. Get the engagement by really including them. Be clear the meeting is about building relationships and structure it so that it truly can aide in that.

Question: Which one of these suggestions will you try at your next meeting? Make a comment below and let me know how it went.