Energy leadership: transforming your workplace and your life
Try though we might, there’s just no way to do it — we can’t fully separate our work life from our home life. The two overlap so much, especially now that so many professionals are working at least part of the time from home.
And that might sound discouraging. After all, none of us wants to bring a bad work day home to our families, or let a silly argument at the breakfast table affect our performance as leaders at the office.
But here’s the good news about work and home being hard to separate: When you improve one, you improve both. When you take the time and make the effort to raise your energy as a leader, you’ll experience the benefits at home and in other parts of your life.
To understand how leadership skills apply universally, let’s start with a high-level look at what leadership is.
How Leadership Energy Works Everywhere
When we think of leaders, we often think of bosses, coaches or respected voices in our companies or industries — people we associate with generating results in the ways we’re used to measuring them, like sales totals or company growth.
While leaders certainly shine in those places, leadership isn’t limited to the boardroom.
Leadership is the qualities you possess that earn you respect, influence and trust. It’s how you conduct yourself anywhere you are, with your spouses and children, your friends and family, your colleagues or complete strangers.
Most of all, leadership requires being authentic, enthusiastic and confident, and it happens in many settings. Leadership coaching can help you build those traits.
How Coaching Elevates Your Energy
Photo by Kevin Gonzalez on Unsplash
1. Creating Awareness
Leaders have the power to change the energy in the room just by entering. That’s why it’s important to bring high energy — and establish an environment that’s fun, collaborative and low pressure, where those around you (whether it’s employees or friends and family) don’t feel afraid of falling short of your expectations.
But to know where you need to take your energy, you have to know your energy starting point.
As I wrote a few months ago, the invaluable first thing leadership coaching will do is create awareness of how you’re showing up, personally and professionally, and where your energy ranks.
From there you can use various tools to make changes and progress.
2. Starting Transformation
Leadership coaching will work to elevate your energy by making changes to both your behavior and your mindset.
First, the right actions: You’ll learn effective techniques for setting reachable goals for your employees and building a culture of teamwork and collaboration — the kind of culture increases productivity, satisfaction and retention.
By taking those steps, you’ll greatly improve your outlook. You’ll learn to see people in a positive new way, to ask for (and count on) their input and ideas, and empower them to do their jobs.
Think of it like this: If I’m a leader and I think the people around me are inept and lazy, I’ll push them to achieve unrealistic things, and ultimately push them away. That’s a culture of pressure.
But If I see my group — whether it’s my employees or my friends — for how incredibly capable they are, I’ll inspire and encourage them. I’ll create a culture of support.
3. Spreading the Lessons
The best leaders want to bring out the best in everyone around them. To make employees, family members and friends feel their most confident and productive.
That’s something that makes energy leadership so special: it’s not just a methodology to help you access your highest levels of leadership, it’s also a template for how you can help other people raise their energy.
Energy leadership coaching is transformational more than it’s informational. In some cases coaches struggle to help clients to transform because the information is purely academic. I take a different approach to coaching: I apply concepts to your real-life experiences.
When you’re ready to elevate your energy and become the best leader you can be both at home and at work, I’m ready to help.