Change Your Leadership Future - Challenge Your Perspective

Perceptions are the stories we tell ourselves regarding what we see and how we interpret the world around us.

Les Brown, one of the great 21st century storytellers said, “How people live their lives is as a result of the stories that they believe about themselves.”

What are your stories?

Do they serve you as your aspire to reach your highest potential?

Do your stories lift you up or do they bring you down?

Do your stories represent who you really are, your true essence?

Let’s look at a possible story: If you greeted someone in the morning at work and he or she did not return your greeting, what would you think? Are they mad at you? Do you wonder all morning what you may have said to tick them off? Do you toss and turn that night because you’re afraid that when you laughed too loudly at something they said two weeks ago that you thought was a joke, but it turned out it wasn’t?

Or what if the answer is simply that they didn’t return your greeting because they didn’t hear you? Or perhaps, they were distracted replaying a discussion they had with their teenager the night before.

What are the stories that you tell yourself?

These skewed perceptions can sabotage our relationships with others and our relationship with our self. If your stories no longer resonate with who you are, it’s probably time to create a new story.

Change your perception and you change your world.

The uncomplicated beauty in this lesson is that by standing in awareness and looking at our beliefs and thoughts, we can simply make a choice to keep them or release them.

When we release those beliefs and thoughts that no longer serve us, we take back our power from fear to love, from negativity to positivity, from ego to Spirit. We see and understand perceptions and stand in our power to change those beliefs to experience miraculous shifts in our reality, lives, and work.

As always, I love to hear from you. What story are you proud to tell?

With Love,

Maria

Leadership Basics With Maslow

Abraham Maslow’s well-known and highly respected Hierarchy of Needs theory describes five level of needs. What does Maslow’s theory have to do with leadership?

If we don’t understand peoples’ needs, we don’t understand people. Let’s look at the needs beginning with the basic needs:

  • Physiological needs – basic needs of air, food, water, shelter, sex, and relief and/or avoidance of pain.

  • Safety needs – after the basic needs are met, safety and security must be met.

  • Belongingness or Social needs – after safety needs are met, we want to feel connections with people.

  • Esteem needs – after social needs are met, we desire self-respect, status, and recognition for our accomplishments.

  • Self-Actualization needs – the highest level of needs is the development of our full potential. To achieve this sense of fulfillment, we seek to understand and grow, to find meaning in our work and our lives.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is based on three assumptions:

(1) Only unmet needs motivate.

(2) Needs are hierarchical in nature, basic to complex.

(3) Lower level needs must be met before moving to a higher-order need.

We can see how the first two tiers, our basic and safety needs are met, just by having a job and a paycheck. The pay affords us the ability to meet our basic and safety-level needs.

The third tier, belongingness and/or social needs, are the connections with others we crave. Often, after a certain period of time on the new job, we seek relationships with those with whom we work. Going to lunch, taking coffee breaks with each other, or perhaps a cocktail after work are all ways in which we fill these belongingness needs.

It is not unusual for someone to say they "hate the job, but love the people they work with". This is an important sign for leaders to notice. As soon as those employees get their social needs met outside of work...they are gone!

Our esteem needs are when we seek outside approval from others. We want to know we are valued and appreciated. Employees always remember leaders who are good at this. We often remember how we felt when someone said something to or about us, rather than the specific words uttered by the person. How we felt about those statements or actions, has a much longer duration and more deeply affects us than the actual words.

I remember while growing up I often heard my mother repeating one of her favorite mantras, “Actions speak louder than words.” How true mom, how very true! This is often the place that we lose “good people” at work, because they don’t feel valued and honored.

The highest level of needs Maslow presented was the need for self-actualization. This is where we seek, with a ferocious hunger, to find meaning and purpose in what we do. OK, we may start a new job and begin the quest of the hierarchical pyramid all over again, but we will eventually be right back to this higher order of need. Meeting this need is the fulfillment of meaning.

People leave organizations when they reach this need level because their work is not a conduit to their meaning-seeking behavior and need.

As always, I love to hear from you. What level are you at currently? What is one immediate action you can take today, based on this knowledge?

With love,

Maria