Thick Skin or Strong Heart

Someone asked me the other day, “How can you develop a thick-skin at work?” My initial response, “Develop a strong heart.”

Growing up, I was often teased because of my over-bite. Called many names at school, I came home frequently collapsing into a pile of tears. My mother would tell me to ignore the bully’s hurtful comments and eventually they would stop. I did experience some truth in this, but what was even more impactful, were her words, “Maria, you are beautiful, they just don’t see it.” Of course, she was referring to my inner beauty. I knew my outer beauty would catch up once I got braces!

Why is it that as adults we still feel the need to toughen up and not let other people’s words hurt us? Could it be that we forgot our inner beauty?

If so, do not worry. Reclaiming our inner beauty and strengthening our heart is easy to do. Developing a strong heart begins with self-love.

Practice these ten steps and in no time, you will not need a thick skin because you will have a strong heart:

1. List your strengths. Next to each one, identify how you may leverage your strong points.
2. Create an action plan for personal and professional growth.
3. Reconnect with your intuition.
4. Do something creative every day.
5. Spend time in stillness each day.
6. Get enough sleep. Six to eight hours are recommended for optimum health.
7. Move your body every day. Some days it may only be walking to the mailbox.
8. Eat foods that nourish your body in healthy ways.
9. List at least five things each day for which you are grateful.
10. Find ways to help others see their greatness.

What are some additional ways you strengthen your heart?

With love,
Maria

Leadership Strategies to Unlock Your Passion

How do you discover, nurture, and live in your passion? It’s not as hard as you may think! Below are 12 exercises to discover and re-connect with your passion and purpose.

1. First, list your top five values so they remain in your consciousness as you proceed through the following steps. Your values will give you big clues about your passion.
2. Identify your strengths and those qualities about yourself that you recognize come easy to you.
3. Be open and aware of any emotional or physiological signs from your body. What excites you, gives you butterflies, or tingling in your spine? Oftentimes our passion is trying desperately to come into consciousness and body signals are a great way to move into awareness.
4. Recognize what attracts your attention. Are there certain hobbies or pastime experiences you enjoy and look forward to? When do you feel most content or happy?
5. What inspires and motivates you? Why? Journal your thoughts.
6. The next exercise to discover the why or purpose in what you do:
• Imagine it is five years from now and you just poured your morning tea or coffee, opened the newspaper and saw an article about you. What does the article say? Why are you featured? Write down some quotes from the article and other pertinent pieces of information.
• Make a list of all of your accomplishments or steps necessary to achieve the point of the article.
• Visualize yourself five years from now, looking back on those accomplishments and steps. How do you feel? Journal your thoughts.
• What were you most passionate about with those accomplishments? List the top five.
• Prioritize the list of five.
• Under each of your five passionate priorities, identify the necessary steps to achieve those goals.
• Find a coach or someone you trust to share this list and support you in the process.
7. As you start to uncover the answers to these questions, be aware of a possible need to seek the approval of others. Be conscious of the fact that you do not need approval to stand in your divinely crafted passion or purpose.
8. Be open to accept and dismiss the disapproval of others. Know that when you align yourself with your life purpose, you align yourself with God. For that, approval from others is not necessary.
9. While moving along in your purpose and vision, don’t focus on the outcomes, as the outcomes may look different from what you anticipated. The detachment from outcomes allows you to flow with the present and remain open to the possibilities of divinity. This practice allows you to enjoy the journey and not just the destination.
10. Like the well-known Nike advertisements, just do it! Don’t pass from this life with your purpose still in you. Our purpose always involves sharing our God-given will with others, always! Passion, happiness, purpose, and joy are realized through service.
11. Remember that when we surrender, we begin anew. With the realization of our passion, we surrender to its glorious divine order. The divine order is of God and we need to remind ourselves that God’s time is not necessarily on our schedule. When we surrender, we let go of the egoic need to control every detail. Believe that God can handle it.
12. You do not have to leap into passion all at once. Take baby steps to live in passion. Soon enough you will find the natural, authentic way to step into passion with full abandonment and still survive in this world. In fact, you will not only survive, you will thrive when you step fully into passion.

Let me know how these strategies work for you!  Can you add to the lists?

With love and excitement,
Maria

BTW - This is an excerpt from my new book!

Leadership Perception Shifting Exercises

Are you ready to experience one of the most powerful leadership tools?  Perception shifting opens up your leadership understanding and builds leadership prowess.  When we add tools to our toolbox of skill sets, well let's just say that perception shifting is plugging in and using a turbo charged tool.  As promised, here are some activities to help exercise your perception-shifting muscle:

1. Find a photo from a magazine. Study the photo and tell a story about it. Make it as rich and deep as you can, developing the characters, setting, scene, and dialogue. Now look at the same photo and create a new story, from a different lenses or perspective. Again, develop all of the same elements for a rich, deep story. Practice this activity often to develop your ability to perception shift with ease.
2. Another fun exercise in perception shifting are the images of the young lady – old lady or the candlesticks – faces. These images are found online and are fun easy activities to train your brain to look for more than one perspective.
3. Recognize that your feelings are a good indicator of underlying beliefs and perceptions. If you are feeling worried, anxious, doubtful, or fearful, your emotions are indicating the existence of a belief that may no longer serve you. Reflect on the feeling and accompanying thought. Identify this perception and make the choice to shift your perception to one accompanied by positive feelings of excitement, joy, gratitude, and love. Remember, the ego looks to separate, divide, and is steeped in fear. Err on the side of love and you cannot go wrong.
4. When you feel stuck and cannot quite figure out what is holding you back, sit in reflection and ask, What belief, or perception could be reinforcing my current state, creating this outcome? Remember to think of the iceberg analogy, only a small portion will be at the surface. You will need to dive deep to find the core, root cause of this reality.
5. Another effective technique for uncovering perspectives that weigh you down is to ask why five times. This process allows you to dig deeper with each response to why. If you find you are getting somewhere, don’t stop at five!
6. A fun activity to practice perception shifting is to think of a situation and look at it from other people’s perspectives. Pick three of four people you know and look at the situation from what you believe their perspectives may be. I remember several years ago on a Seinfeld episode, an event happened and the show depicted the event from the four different perspectives of Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer.

Remember that perspective shifting requires awareness, choice, and the willingness to be open to other possibilities.

With love,
Maria

BTW - this is an excerpt from my new book!

Open Leaders

Living with two bulging, herniated discs can be a pain (no pun intended), especially in our rainy season, when my back seems extra sore. During a family barbecue, my sister, a RN, asked if I was experiencing pain. When I asked why she inquired, she said that I looked like I was guarding. This is a medical term indicating when a person has pain somewhere in their body they become rigid as though to protect the area from further pain or injury. We do the same in our lives with our minds and hearts. We protect ourselves from perceived pain, we guard.

To be open, for many of us, means to be vulnerable. We’ve been open and been hurt; at least that explains some of the our experiences. Ego loves it when we stay closed and works over-time to ensure we do not enter openness. “Remember when you did that before and…” is one of the many voices of ego.

When we are open, the gates of Divine guidance, to intention, to the flow of Holy Spirit happen. Closing the gates of our minds and hearts is insanity. Why do the barriers to openness show up, guarding our sacred spaces? Ego, again is the answer. Blocks to openness manifest in the forms of negative voices cemented in our dialogue and culture. Evidence of this insanity in our workplaces includes statements like, Nice guys finish last, or when considering doing something nice for someone (a favor), If you do that for one, you’ll have to do it for everyone, or No good deed goes unpunished.

Opening our perceptions and inviting in the Holy Spirit through surrender, allows healing of the mind and heart to take place. Through healing, the ego no longer has hold on the barriers and blocks to the gates of openness. Just as a clenched fist cannot receive a gift, a closed mind cannot grow and a closed heart cannot receive love.

Steps to openness:

1. Always, the first step is reflection. In what areas of your life do you feel closed or blocked to openness? Work? Love? Spirituality? Journal your thoughts.
2. Practice random acts of kindness. These do not need to be grand, sometimes the smaller the better!
3. Another way to develop compassion is to let go of your need to be right,

What other ways can we practice being open?

With an open heart,
Maria

Intentional Leadership

For many, intention is defined as a motivation, a drive, or an ambition to succeed. It can be a demonstration of force, determination, or your immutable will to attain or accomplish something indicates that you have a firm intention. These are examples of our Western mental model of intention. A deeper understanding of the power of intention, described by Carlos Castaneda, suggests, “In the universe there is an immeasurable, indescribable force which shamans call intent, and absolutely everything that exists in the entire cosmos is attached to intent by a connecting link”. This is not a model of perseverance or a mindset where only the fit (determined) survive, but a realization, again, of the connection to each other and to our Source, God. What this model of intention describes for us, as leaders, is that we are not alone in this organization, community, country, or even universe: but we are together, linked to the energetic force of intention.

Why is intention crucial to our leadership? It is the purpose, the why we are here, our belief in something greater than we are. Intention is how we derive meaning. In order to create a vision for our companies, or even our lives, we must first ask, why? Tapping into the power of intention requires clearing space in our minds and allowing and trusting our intuitive insights to flow.

Here are some exercises you can do to lead with intention: 

1. Knowing your values helps bring clarity to what is meaningful to you. Identify ten important values. Narrow the list down to your top five and write a sentence or two explaining what the values mean to you and why they are important.

2. Look at your calendar and review how you spend your time. Do the activities on your calendar align with your values? If not, why?

3. Create a mind map on a clean sheet of paper, in the center of the paper write, “My purpose for living this life is…” and circle it. Now draw lines out from this circle with as many ideas that flow into your head and heart and draw circles around each one of those words or statements, always connecting the circles with lines to the center circle of your purpose for living.

4. Using the above information you have developed, write a purpose statement, including the activities involved in achieving that purpose, people necessary to support you, and the value you provide to others.

Enjoy the process and see what you discover!

Let me know what you unearth.

With love,

Maria

Leadership Awareness

“When you contain control of the internal direction of your attention, you will no longer stand in shallow water but will launch out into the deep of life”, as written by Neville in the Power of Awareness.

Recently working with a client, she was so joy-filled in her practice of awareness. Awareness, as she described was like opening gift after gift. She couldn’t wait to see what the next gift contained.

We went on to discuss how amazingly simple is the concept and practice of awareness, and how the gift of awareness is an incredible tool for leadership and life. Sure, becoming aware and practicing awareness may seem awkward at first, but it is like a muscle that hasn’t been exercised for a while. And with practice, awareness will become well-developed and second nature for you.

How do we practice the art of awareness? Below are a few simple steps to move from the shallow water into the depths of life: 

• Develop an awareness mindset. Think of awareness like breathing. Breath is required for life, just as awareness is required for living. Without awareness, we just go through the motions.
• Begin with self-awareness, going inward instead of observing outward.
• Just stop…thinking, doing, planning, and just be still (start with just a few moments and build your time each day).
• Write or journal every day. Don’t worry about editing or even what you will write. Just write whatever comes to you. You will see some patterns emerge.
• Sit with those thoughts and reflect on what you have written.
• Expand your inner, self-awareness to the external world; only this time, look and listen to the small things like the hum of the air-conditioner, the chirping of the birds, or the very tiny ant moving in front of you.
• Listen to what is not being said at the next meeting you attend. Observe the way your team members talk and move. What comes to light that you previously missed?

When you start practicing these activities, you will start to notice a completely new world. You will wonder when the birds moved into a tree near your back yard, notice how exquisite the mountains or sunsets look, and a host of other gifts that previously went unnoticed. You will find the beauty in new gifts arriving to and for you daily. You will find the extraordinary in the ordinary.

With loving awareness,
Maria

Intuitive Leadership

Intuition is a power tool that successful leaders use. I found through work with my clients that many of these leaders have to re-learn how to use intuition. In most of our corporate and work experiences, we learn how to not listen to our intuition. I remember years ago in my early corporate career, the president of the company asked a question and I eagerly responded, “I feel that…”. He quickly cut me off and said, “Maria, I don’t care how you feel, tell me what you know”.

I am sure you too, have had similar experiences. These types of experiences shape the way we work. Many times over the years, I spent massive amounts of time creating spreadsheets to provide empirical evidence for what I intuitively knew.

I am not advocating throwing logic out the window. I am advocating that we use all of the tools in our possession to make the best possible decisions. We move into a danger zone if we hinder our decision-making process by not using both intuition and logic. Why would we want to stifle ourselves?

So how do we re-learn intuition and develop this amazing power tool?

Just remember the acronym, I N T U I T I O N and follow these simple steps: 

Imagery › Allow the intuitive mind to use the images and symbols of the right brain. 
Non-judgment › Suspend judgment and honor the flashes of knowing from the intuitive mind. 
Thankfulness › Practice gratitude and thankfulness. Gratitude is the portal through which abundance flows. 
Uncomplicated › The intuitive mind is uncomplicated and brief. The logical mind is long-winded! 
Impressions › First impressions are usually correct – honor those intuitive insights. 
Time › Take time to relax and quiet the mind. Intuition flows more readily in a space free of tension and stress. 
Instant › Intuitive insight can come to you in an instant. Recognize this phenomenon and do not dismiss it. 
Open › Be open to new insights through free association. Allow your intuitive mind to take you on this journey. 
Namaste › Honor the soul knowledge of others.

What are your experiences using intuition? Again, thank you for sharing your insight!

To your intuitive success,
Maria