Overcoming Internal Obstacles for Effective Leadership

Well, hello, hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm so glad that you're here. Welcome. I'm Kris Plachy. I'm your host. And this week, I'm going to do something I haven't done before. I actually usually am very extemporaneous on this podcast. I think you know that, but this week I prepared something and I wrote it and I decided that I wanted to share what I wrote with you as a means to sort of give you some things to think about in little short soundbites.

So I've been doing a lot of shifting in my own thinking and in the work that I do. And I love what I'm doing now, and I'm really giving a lot of attention and most of my attention as I go forward on my SAGE program, which you'll be hearing more and more about as we go forward.

But mostly what that does, when I start to get things in my brain that I want to think about is, it makes me have all sorts of really interesting ideas and downloads, and I write I start writing a lot. And so what I did over this past weekend is I started my morning writing with a sentence. And the sentence was, these are the 30 truths about how the leadership challenges that you face are actually within you and not because of quote unquote, them.

You know, so many of the women, all of us, so many of us, I just say us, not women, just us believe that the challenges that we face in the world, and in our day to day, and all the things are because of other people.

And while yes, there are things that other people do that are hard and challenging and unexpected and all the things. At the end of the day, our experience of them is, is defined by us, and we have a lot more agency over that than most of us have learned how to take responsibility for. And ultimately then we put ourselves in positions of feeling as far as victimized, but also just feeling helpless in terms of dealing with those, with those circumstances.

And so I started this, this idea in my brain of just writing down the 30 challenges that I know we all sort of bump into, but that are really not because of that. They're because of us inside. And what I want to do in this podcast is I want to read you some of them.

I'm actually going to be sharing those to my subscribers. So if you're not on my subscriber list, just go to thevisionary.ceo and you can join the list and then you'll be getting these as we go forward.

But for purposes of this podcast today, I'm just going to read them to you and I'm going to let you sort of sit with them. And some of you who are, I know, regular podcast listeners may find that these are really good for you to just write on the top of your journal. And write about them. Like, maybe you think I'm really wrong. Maybe you think I'm really right. Maybe you've never thought about something I'm going to say to you and it makes you kind of have other other thoughts.

I think if you've been hanging out with me for any short period of time or long period of time, you know that one of my favorite things to do is to just sort of ask myself questions that are hard to answer. I ask myself and make sort of suppositions in my mind and question them. That's just who I am.

Some people don't want to ever do that. I get it. That's fine. You don't have, you don't have to, but if you do want to, this is what this is for you. Here we go. I'm going to be reading these to you, giving you a little space to think. And if you love this podcast, I would just press pause and then, you know, move on to the next one. So they're not really prompts in terms of questions. They're really statements or I call them truths for you to weigh and contemplate.

Number one, how you live is how you lead. The decisions and subsequent actions you repeat each day are reflected in your personal life and in how you deal with your team. Who you are is how you lead, whether you are aware of it or not. Your house. Your car, your business, and your team all mirror the same person.

People pleasing leaders are the number one reason teams have performance problems. If you haven't learned how to mitigate this tendency and you run a business, you will continue to have poor performers in your business. Full stop.

How well you set boundaries in your life is reflected in how well you set expectation in your company. How you treat money is how money will treat you. Your guilt cripples your ability to have a thriving team. Business owners who don't learn how to manage their emotions will never be able to create high performing teams. The best they'll ever get are mediocre, good enough and capable, but people who work for this leader will always live in fear of what that leader will do or say, rather than perform out of their own personal motivation or engagement.

How are we doing guys? I told you these were quote unquote, you know, truths. They're a little bit kind of intense. Yeah. If you can't communicate with the people you love the most, you won't communicate well with your team. There are clear parallels between how your employees and your kids treat you. And how they act, nothing that happens to you in your life can be hidden from or masked over at work.

When you lead, you are completely on center stage every day. People who work for you, study you. They watch you to know what that will mean for you. For them, trying to hide from them just won't work, at least not from all of them. Every decision you are not making is rooted in your own fear. Fear can look like confusion, insecurity, waiting for more information or not trusting yourself or others and fear you have in life will translate to fear you have in your business.

Your relationship with risk is mirrored in your business and in your life. If you shut down at home, when you're upset, you're doing it at work. It's unacceptable as a leadership trait to emotionally blackmail people you pay because of how you feel. Full stop.

If you're always late in your life, you'll always be late at work. If you always say yes in your life, you'll always say yes in your business. If you hide who you are in your life, you are hiding who you are. And could be as a leader.

How you interact with your partner or spouse reflects how you think about yourself as a leader. I've observed countless women with super successful businesses only to defer their agency and competence to their husband. They don't trust themselves as much as they do their spouse. They don't want to emasculate him by ignoring his advice, or they have a life agreement that says he's in charge at home, which means they feel he is ultimately in charge of the business she created. The team sees this, and even if their spouse doesn't work in the company, they know who's actually in charge.

Disempowered women admire empowered women, but they perpetuate the disempowerment of all women when they stay in fear of learning how to listen and to trust their own voice. All of us need, all of us, to trust our feminine wisdom and to start to muster the courage to build approaches for leading and living that embrace our potential and not just what you see.

Difficult people are only difficult people because you believe that they are and you haven't learned how to move through moments or lead people who trigger your difficult feelings. Mastering your work with any difficult person in any part of your life will turn you into a super powered leader and woman.

If you don't know your business's numbers, you aren't leading a business. You are working in a job. Your lack of business acumen for the very business you own is a form of malpractice. Once your business is generating more than six figures, you have a responsibility to become a present well versed, custodian of the operational needs and results of your company.

If you defer this in your business, you are deferring vital life acumen to others as well. Look for the blind spots and stop ignoring them. I promise whatever you don't know that you think you don't need to know about how your business or your life is operating will eventually bite you in the ass.

Leaders lead. Lead yourself to get informed regularly about the vital factors of your business and your life immediately. If you don't know your profit, you aren't leading. If your business is generating a million dollars a year or more, and you don't have a clearly defined documented role, you just have a well earning job.

If you want to start taking yourself seriously as a leader, take yourself seriously as a key member of the company you've built. More companies started by and led by women could be eligible to sell if they would stop treating their little businesses like a family and start leading it like an enterprise. Women are missing out on massive wealth simply because it feels too hard to think about their business in this way.

So those are some observations that I have made through a lot of years of working with entrepreneurs and women. And they're not pretty. I wouldn't be surprised if you got mad at me while you listened to this, argued with me, think I'm wrong. Maybe some of you got offended. I don't know.

What I will tell you is if that happened in any way while you were listening it to this to me, that's just evidence that there was something in it that was true because if you don't believe it, it doesn't bother you. If you don't believe it, but you see it in yourself, it will bother you.

So, you know, I work with women who are willing to be curious about themselves and about others and be reflective and thoughtful, open minded. You can entertain an idea and let it go and not need to be right. You can entertain an idea, investigate it and think, wow, that might be true. I wonder what I can do about it.

But either way, to me, that's what leadership means is that ability to objectively assess yourself, people on the team, the needs of the business. All of it. And anything that feels off, it's just interesting to explore. Be curious. Curiosity is always available.

And if you want the rest of these, because I'm going to do 30 and that's only 23 by my count, go to my website and subscribe. I know you'll see the rest of them come through.

All right. Love. Thanks for tuning in today.

Remember that I asked you to be a part of my Catalyst podcast event, where I'm inviting you to become a visionary Catalyst, share the podcast link with women that you know. And as soon as you hit 20 shared links, clicks on those, we can measure that. I'm going to give you one of my bonus digital courses.

Go to thevisionary.ceo/catalyst. Get yourself registered. Grab the podcast link. Super easy, and please share it with women that you know that are leading in the world, because I'd love to be able to impact 20 million women. I know that when women feel more confident in who they are as leaders. It changes who they are in their lives.

Let's help women live and lead on their own terms. I can't wait to see how many clicks we get. Let's get it.