Transform from a good to great leader – with emotional intelligence coaching

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Organised, confident, enthusiastic, committed, consistent!

These are some of the traits needed to be a good leader.

But why be a good leader when you can be a great one?

There’s only one thing that separates the good from the great – and that’s emotional intelligence.

Managing your emotions

At its most basic, emotional intelligence is the ability to identify, understand and regulate your emotions and those of the people around you.

In practical terms, this means being aware that emotions drive your behaviour and impact others (positively and negatively) and learning how to manage those emotions, especially when you’re under pressure.

This is particularly relevant to business leaders, because as a leader, you set the emotional tone in your organisation.

The emotional state you demonstrate (consciously, or unconsciously) primes the behaviour of your employees.

Let me demonstrate.

Do you think you are good at hiding your feelings/emotions?

Have you ever asked someone how they feel and they answer they are fine; and yet, you have the distinct feeling they are not fine. How do you know that?

We know that animals can sense our feelings and are more likely to attack when we are in “Fear” than when we are feeling strong and in control. What people generally don’t know is humans are also good at sensing other’s feelings – they have just forgotten how to do it most of the time when it really matters.

So, if you can sense when others are lying about how they are, others can also sense when you are putting on an act! This has important repercussions for businesses.

If you’re positive and motivating, and I mean really that and not just pretending, your staff will be also begin to be motivated.

If you’re negative, it will bring your staff down and affect their productivity and level of engagement.

If you are a good leader, but think you are hiding your emotions / feelings, think again. Great leaders don’t need to hide their feelings – they can change how they feel. They know how emotions shape their behaviour and know how to change their emotions to elicit the best from those they lead.

Emotional intelligence coaching

The good news is you can improve the emotional climate of your organisation with the help of an emotional intelligence coach.

Having worked with many professional entrepreneurs, business owners and public organisations, I‘m very well placed to help you master your emotional intelligence and become the best leader you can be.

How?

There are five basic components of emotional intelligence:

  • Self-awareness: Knowing what you are feeling at any given moment and understanding the impact it has on others
  • Self-regulation: Controlling or redirecting your emotions; anticipating consequences before acting on impulse
  • Motivation: Utilising emotional factors to achieve goals and persevere in the face of obstacles
  • Empathy: Being sensitive to the emotions and needs of others
  • Social skills: Managing relationships, inspiring others and eliciting the response you want from them.

The more that you as a leader, control these components, the more successful you will be in business.

Through emotional intelligence coaching, I can help you understand these elements and give you the tools to develop them – resulting in a happier workforce and a healthier bottom line.

Contact me

I’m convinced that mastering your emotional intelligence will be the most valuable personal and professional training you’ll ever undertake.

To start your journey, email me at sanjay@sanjayshah.tv or call me on 0121 270 6060

How emotional intelligence is helping athletes get gold (and how it can help you too!)

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I’m sure that like me you enjoyed watching the recent Olympics and Paralympics on the TV.

Wasn’t it great to see Team GB do so well and come away with so many medals?

Telling words

Whilst watching I became very interested in some of the comments that the athletes made when they were interviewed.

Following their event, quite a few of them began to talk about how they were feeling. However, more than once, the TV presenter interviewing them instead moved the conversation on to ask them about their mindset.

One particular question was, “How did you cope with the pressure?”

And the athlete replied, “Well, I didn’t put any pressure on me. It was other people that wanted to put the pressure on me. I choose instead to focus on the event.”

Another athlete spoke about ‘being present in the moment’ and having the ability to not be distracted by other people.

The language they used was interesting and I believe that now, in addition to physio and coaching support, senior athletes are receiving emotional intelligence training.

So, what’s it all about?

Emotional intelligence for sport

Emotional intelligence is simply being aware that you are here, right now, in the present time.

Have you ever tried to go back in time or jump forward into the future? Of course you haven’t and that’s because time travel is simply not possible.

The past has happened and it cannot be changed. The future is something that may or may not happen – you simply can’t guarantee it.

So, whilst we can’t jump through time, one thing we can do is to get better at living right here, right now.

With me so far? Great.

The Olympic mindset

Let’s go back to our Olympians.

Quite a number of coaches work with their team members before the event and take them through a visualisation exercise.

Of course, the thing they’re envisaging and visualising is them achieving their time, beating their opponent or winning that gold medal.

This obviously helps them focus on achieving the thing they want.

Personally, I’d call this ‘building belief through visualisation’.

Choose to believe

We all have a choice between feeling good and feeling bad and, if we are able to make this choice, we will always choose the good over the bad. I know you may find it hard to believe we have a choice, especially when feeling particularly bad (I call this ‘feeling CRAP’!). I can, and often do, prove this when working with people on my events, that they have a choice in how to feel about a particular person or event.

It is therefore much better for an athlete to choose to feel good and to believe in winning – even if they don’t win.

Visualisation is just a tool an individual is using to get their mindset to a place where they can also feel good. Why is feeling good so important? Imagine the times you last felt CRAP. Did you do your best? Enough said…

Inspiration from others

Belief also relates to the process where one person’s success drives the successes of others.

If a sportsperson sees a fellow team member win a gold and then perhaps, a second team member wins a gold, they will then believe that they have so much more of a chance of doing this themselves.

Be here now

So it’s all part of the same thing. We have to be present in the here and now because the here and now is the only place we can actually do anything.

Focused thinking

Emotional and mental intelligence are therefore both important when it comes to achieving an Olympic win.

Being in the moment is central to this because if an athlete focuses on anything other than being in the moment, as soon as they do this, they will have dropped back into thinking about either what happened in the past (that time they had to pullout or failed to complete) or what may happen in the future (will I get a medal, will it be gold or silver, will my main competitor be faster than me at the end?).

In addition, if an athlete runs a race and all they think about is crossing the finish line first, their mind will only be on that one thing. Therefore they will not be focusing on each moment in the race, on how they are running at that time, where their fellow team members are, how many laps are left, when to make their move, where their main opponents are.

Each moment requires a different focus.

Rather than focusing just on that finish line, they must therefore focus 100% on each moment and respond accordingly.

So the visualisation thing is good, but being in the moment is the most important thing.

Amazing achievements

Our amazing Olympians are therefore wonderful examples of people who are able to focus on the moment and use emotional intelligence.

And when the difference between winning and losing may be a millisecond, they must do this to win.

It could help you too

Would you like to know how emotional intelligence can help you? I have a track record of helping professional business people do just this. Can you do with more success? Or maybe you are already successful and are working even harder to maintain your success than you did to achieve it?

If you would like be more of the person you want to be, do less to achieve your goals and achieve them even faster, then please give me a call and we can have a chat about how EQ may be relevant to your circumstances..

You don’t by the way, have to be an Olympian to benefit. You do need to have big dreams! Here’s my version of Faster, Higher, Stronger:

Be More, Do Less, Achieve More
Go on then…….

Let emotional intelligence take the C.R.A.P. out of your day!

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Let me ask you a question: Have you ever had a crap day?

Of course you have. We’ve all had them, and we all react to them in different ways. For some of us, the crap days stay with us for a lot longer than for others.

Why is this?  Well, we are taught history, science and maths when we’re growing up but few of us are taught about emotional awareness – the ability to identify and deal with our emotions and the emotions of others. Do you remember a single lesson in emotional awareness?

These skills are equally, if not more, valuable to us in life but you’ll never learn them in a schoolroom.

People who exhibit emotional intelligence have the skills to read emotions, respond to the needs of others, manage conflict and stop emotions disrupting their lives.

Managing your emotions
Whether it’s a cringe-worthy job interview that you could have done better at or a misunderstanding between you and a colleague that’s resulted in an attack of paranoia and self-doubt; I guess we’ve all been in situations that we ‘could have’, ‘would have’ or  ‘should have’ handled better.

These ‘could have’, ‘would have’ or ‘should have’ are negative thoughts that alter your emotional state – resulting in feelings of guilt, shame, upset, fear, embarrassment and anger and get stuck in what I call ‘below-the-line’ states. Or we can experience ‘above-the-line’ states of Courage, Acceptance and Peace.

Resistance
Let’s look at CRAP as an acronym:

Courage
Resistance
Acceptance
Peace.

It’s Resistance to the situation and your thoughts or feelings about the situation that put a CAP on your ability to handle the said situation. In short, take the R out of CRAP and you take the CAP off your ability to perform at your very best. This is what I have been successfully applying to my life and teaching the many clients I have worked with over the course of the last 18 years in business. So I have plenty of success stories to back up my claims.

Giving you the tools
Emotional Intelligence gives you the tools to take the ‘R’ out of C.R.A.P. and helps you focus your mind on ‘above-the-line’ states of courage, acceptance and peace to achieve your goals and outcomes with less effort.

Back to your situation.

The majority of us could have feelings of guilt, shame, upset, fear, embarrassment and anger following an experience like this and get stuck in ‘below-the-line’ states

These feelings are difficult to let go of unless we are taught HOW to let them go.  Emotional intelligence can help you let go of the Resistance to the situation, which, as I show on my courses, just wastes your energy – valuable energy that can be used to IMPROVE the situation. It helps you recognise what you’ve done, take ownership of your feelings, and then allow yourself to move on.

This ‘emotional mastery’ is the key. These people found their key to unlocking their true potential – see what they have to say:

[LINK]

Find out more
To learn how to do this for yourself, come to up to my three-day ‘Emotional Mastery’ weekend from May 20th – 22nd 2016, where you’ll learn a range of powerful techniques to help you take control of and master your emotional state. GUARANTEED, or your money back.

To arrange a conversation with me to discuss how it can help you with your unique situation, simply email me on sanjay@sanjayshah.tv, or check out http://sanjayshah.tv for further information.

You need to be in the highest state to achieve the best in life. Is this just another interesting article you’ll forget in a few minutes, or are you going to do something to learn how to be in that best state? Go on, do something NOW. Your life is waiting for you to turn up.

When the mind questions but the heart knows – overcoming Mind Sabotage

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It is often said the children have the highest level of natural emotional intelligence.

Parents and those who’ve spent time with children will have noticed how they always act instinctively and let their heart rather than their learning, guide their actions.

What is Mind Sabotage?
Mind Sabotage is when we allow our mind to overtake what our heart intrinsically knows is right.

To put it simply, it’s when we get so wrapped up in the ‘doing’ we actually stop listening to ourselves.

How do we make decisions?
In the past I’ve asked a number of people how they make a decision and a common answer is, “Well, I look at the situation, weigh up all and facts and figures and then base my decision on these and my own experiences.”

OK, that sounds pretty sensible but I think it ignores the most important decision making tool that we have; our ‘gut feeling’.

Imagine if someone asked you the question, ‘How do you make a decision?’ and your answer was, ‘I just know what the right thing to do is!’

Do you think that would feel more powerful?

Overcoming paralysing Mind Sabotage
The key way to overcome this Mind Sabotage is to simply take time to listen to your heart and refuse to let your logic mask what you know is right.

Learn to believe in the intrinsic knowledge of your heart therefore and allow it to give you the best response.

It takes a little time
Be aware that your ‘heart response’ may not be as immediate as your ‘mind response’ but if you can pause and take a moment to recognise how you really feel about something (or the potential of something happening) then your internal answer is likely to be revealing.

OK – why is this important?
Well the simple answer is, if we observe our feelings and making conscious choices we have more control, we take full responsibility for our actions and we then feel so much better about the outcome.

Being open and honest with yourself also enables you to be more open and honest with other people.

Here’s the good news
The good news is anyone can do this. It’s actually quite a simple thing to do.

The challenge is, when you have to make a decision or you’re faced with a dilemma, can allow yourself to take a few moments to really listen to your heart? (This is something that can be learned with the right tools).

Take time to pause before you act and you may be surprised at just how much more sure you feel as a result.

How I can help you
I help individuals and organisations APPLY Emotional Intelligence – most teaching was focusing on understanding Emotions and that is NOT the same as being able to APPLY Emotional Intelligence.  How do you understand something that has no logic to it? The mind can work with logic and reason but it is completely paralysed when faced with something irrational – the emotions however CAN deal with irrational and illogical information.  Learning to apply a combination of Mind Intelligence (IQ) with Emotional Intelligence (EQ) can make huge, exciting and positive differences in your life and in your business, every single day.

Are you ready to learn from a place of knowing or are you happy continuing to doubt?

If you are ready to know what the right thing to do is simply give me a call on 08451 153 0037 or ping me an email.

Loser to Winner

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We have just had the Monaco Grand Prix, where Lewis Hamilton was in the lead on a track which is almost impossible to overtake on for most of the course.  A bad judgment call by his team to bring him for a pit stop to change his tyres resulted in him being passed by and ending up in 3rd place, having led for most of the race. You could have forgiven him for being angry at losing the race. When asked about it he replied:

“It’s not how you lose, it’s how you come back”

Champions aren’t winners every time. Champions are champions because of how they come back from every setback, every loss. The term ‘overnight sensation’ is used to describe someone’s ‘rapid’ rise to success – what it fails to mention is that the night may have lasted many years. And the night ended because they kept coming back from every setback, every loss.

Losers become winners by honing their ability to keep coming back, by never giving up on themselves. You are a winner, unless you decide to settle for a loss.

Be a winner, become a champion.