Graduate of The Coaching Academy, Nelia Koroleva, helps her clients overcome their personal challenges on a regular basis as a professional performance coach. Here she shares her experience with managing personal influence and bias for the better.
What you say says a lot about your personality and your influence. Many people focus solely on negativity and criticism, when they communicate with each other. It is a quick way to disengage and damage your reputation. Your influence would be proportionally diminished to the intensity and level of your negativity. For example, you've delivered a feedback, appraisal or performance review. Your words were judgemental, harsh and overly critical. You were looking for errors and jumped to conclusions by passing judgment. The problem is, the more you stew in the negativity, the deeper the pathway becomes. Even though you might have a position of authority, you do not have the right to be negative Critical Parent to your employee, colleague, associate, friend, partner, child, etc. You verbally attacked the person who challenged your way of thinking, doing and being.
Change it! Always make sure that you choose appropriate words, whether you’re a parent, a boss, a colleague, or a friend. Your words are incredibly important for your own well-being. When you focus solely on negativity and criticism, you cannot be happy. You can't neglect words that bring you and others motivation, encouragement, development and growth. Focus on what you are saying, and remember, when you pass judgment, you immediately lose the ability to establish a rapport with others and influence them. It’s much more liberating to take responsibility for your own feelings and encourage people than to criticise and blame them.
If you don’t like your own image, and you are unhappy /cannot accept yourself, you will often feel unsatisfied/ unable to accept and like others. Look at yourself in the mirror and speak with yourself for about one hour. YES, ONE HOUR.
And just like any strengthening exercise, the work requires activity and repetition to reinforce the new learning. So, every time you want to criticize someone, find a room with a mirror, speak honestly to yourself about your frustrations by looking at yourself. I promise, you will discover many new things about yourself, i.e. acknowledge your own shadows. I believe, you will understand more than you ever did.
How you behave is extremely important. Have you ever seen a healthy adult behaving as a child or as a teenager? It might be funny, shocking, sad, depressing, embarrassing and even tragic. Consider your behaviour, and be smarter than 5-7 year old. Consider the effect your behaviour would have on others. You must do it, as too many seemingly simple habits can have a huge impact upon your influence and your rapport with your team, friends, colleagues and family. For example, every morning after coffee you walked over to Elena's desk and told her about her mistakes in front of the team. Would Elena feel pleased at your attention? Would she look forward to seeing you? Would she feel motivated and encouraged? Would she prepare simple questions to clarify aspects of her work? Or would she develop a Pavlovian hatred for coffee and be busy elsewhere whenever you pass by?
Of course, you would never be so destructive - provided you thought about it. Research by the centre for Creative Leadership has found that the primary cause of derailment in executives involve deficits in emotional competence. The three primary ones are the following: difficult in handling change, not being able to work well in a team, and poor interpersonal relations. Do you have such problems at work, which usually described in terms like: ‘Jack is just lazy’ or ‘Jackie is a bad-tempered old has-been’? On the one hand, such people can poison the working environment; on the other hand, these descriptions are totally unhelpful.
Are you feeling tired, frustrated and ‘over it’? Deeply frustrated person, who internalises secular values and dread change most, usually demonise those who disagree with them, attacking anyone who challenges their thinking and unaware reliance on antiquated instincts, out-dated traditions and destructive ideologies. Many frustrated people waste so much time and energy resisting change rather than adapting that they fail to win satisfaction and success. It is your responsibility to ensure that your influence is a positive one.
Devote some time to changing this, and you will complete life tasks and enjoy rewarding personal and professional relationships with consistent satisfaction within your home, communities, companies, etc. You are the only one responsible for your personal growth and professional development.
This exercise will help you build rapport with someone, enrich work environments or ease tension in personal relationships. Remember situations in the last two weeks when you behaved inappropriately, and answer the following questions:
You (and others) deserve to have happiness and success in life and work.
You (and others) deserve to do what you (they) truly want - unless it’s not against the law or other human dignity.
You (and others) deserve to be what you (they) want and dream to be – successful, happy, full field and satisfied.
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