A quick check-in. Remembering a personal detail. Giving specific praise instead of a vague “Great job.” These may feel minor, but they build trust, deepen loyalty, and inspire people to perform at their best.

The Power of Small Leadership Moments

I once worked with a leader whose team would walk through walls for him—not simply because of his strategic skills, but because he noticed.

• He paused in busy corridors to ask, “How’s your mum doing?”—and remembered the answer weeks later.

• He noticed when someone was unusually quiet in a meeting and followed up privately.

• His praise was specific, personal, and heartfelt.

None of these moments took more than a minute, but together they created a culture of connection and trust that no strategy slide could match.

At Optimist Performance, we see the same truth: when leaders combine vision with presence, they don’t just manage—they inspire.

What the Experts Say About Leadership Presence

“Trust is built in very small moments.” — Brené Brown

“Leadership is not about being in charge. It is about taking care of those in your charge.” — Simon Sinek

“Leaders establish trust with candor, transparency, and credit.” — Jack Welch

“Trust is like the air we breathe—when it’s present, nobody really notices; when it’s absent, everybody notices.” — Warren Buffett

💡 Quick Tips for Small Leadership Moments

(Optimist Performance recommendations)

1. Ask with intention — Put your phone down, make eye contact, and listen fully.

2. Follow up on details — Show you remember what matters to your team.

3. Be specific with praise — Replace “Great job” with exactly what you valued.

4. Notice the quiet ones — Reach out to those who seem withdrawn.

5. Celebrate effort — Acknowledge resilience and problem-solving, not just results.

Why It Matters for Business Performance

High-trust cultures consistently outperform low-trust ones in engagement, retention, and innovation. Embedding small leadership moments into your daily habits is a practical, repeatable way to strengthen trust and inspire excellence.

At Optimist Performance, we coach leaders to balance strategic clarity with human connection—because that’s how you go from great to world-class.

Further Reading & Resources

If you’re ready to explore more ways to strengthen your leadership presence and build high-performance cultures, check out our latest insights:

• Team Transformation – Read the Harvard Business Review on the Seven Transformations of Leadership

• Optimist Performance Insights – Our growing library of articles, tools, and ideas to help you go from great to world-class.

The post How Small Leadership Moments Build Trust and Performance – By Optimist Performance appeared first on Optimist Performance.

The post Unplug & Recharge Experience – Dates Available Upon Request appeared first on Optimist Performance.

This is where knowing your and your team’s Spotlight profile can help. In addition to using a coaching leadership style, you can also adapt it to each person in your team. In this article, we will give you some pointers about how to adapt your coaching leadership style to each profile to make sure your team thrives. 

What’s a coaching leadership style? 

First, let’s talk about what a coaching leadership style is and how it can benefit both your team and business. 

Coaching leadership is a style of leadership that is characterised by collaboration, support and guidance. It involves and facilitates people’s engagement by drawing out, understanding, and empathising with their specific and individual motivations.

Coaching leadership aims to bring the best out in teams by guiding them through their goals and challenges. The ultimate purpose of this leadership style is to develop people and create a continuous learning environment.

You can read more about the coaching leadership style here. 

Learn a bit more about Spotlight Profiles 

Spotlight and other diagnostic tools are not new. They are widely used in organisations, and when used effectively, they can be incredibly beneficial for everyone in the team. 

A Diagnostic Profiling tool helps you identify your personal preferences (how you behave, how you prefer to communicate, etc) and it can deepen your understanding of yourself and your team. Even more, you can use this knowledge to get the best out of each person on your team. 

Read more about Spotlight and how it can help you and your team here:

• Styles of communication in the workplace. 
• Enhance team performance using personality profiles. 

How can you adapt your coaching leadership style to each profile?

Let’s start by reaffirming that every person is uniquely different, even if they have similar profiles. Each of us is a complex individual and this is not about putting people in ‘boxes’, but rather about better understanding each other and how we can work more effectively together.

Red/Forceful Profiles

Tend to be goal-oriented, direct and to the point, determined, unfiltered and assertive. 

People with this personality preference tend to focus on action, they want to get things done and like to communicate directly. 

As a leader, you can adapt your coaching leadership style by:

• Being direct and to the point in your communication. Make sure conversations are fast-paced and practical in nature. 
• Giving consistent feedback and supporting them to move forward. 
• Helping them to consider more options before deciding what action to take. 
• Helping them to consider that not everyone moves at the same pace as them. 

Yellow/Expressive Profiles

Tend to be people-oriented, enthusiastic, expressive, persuasive, and sociable individuals. 

People with this personality profile tend to be big-picture thinkers, they prefer to talk about the why rather than the how and can struggle with details. 

As a leader, you can adapt your coaching leadership style by:

• Supporting them in creating a stimulating and dynamic environment. 
• Asking about their thoughts and feelings on the topic. 
• Helping them frame their big ideas towards practical action.
• Staying authentic and open-minded in your interactions with them, allowing them to voice their true concerns. 

Green/Empathic Profiles

Tend to be amiable, encouraging, and relaxed. They also like collaboration. 

People with this personality profile tend to be team players, they like for everyone to be heard before making a decision and they can struggle with change for change’s sake. 

As a leader, you can adapt your coaching leadership style by:

• Demonstrating sincere interest in them as a person. 
• Helping them focus on the impact of their actions on their future goals and other people. 
• Ensuring they feel supported when tackling a challenge. 
• Giving them time to think through important decisions. 

Blue/Logical profiles

Tend to be detail-oriented, analytical, cautious, and deliberate. 

People with this personality profile tend to be analytical, they like details and they want to make sure that things are done correctly even if it takes longer. 

As a leader, you can adapt your coaching leadership style by:

• Giving them enough time and space to process information and articulate their thoughts. You may want to give them directions or information ahead of a meeting. 
• Helping them look at the big picture. 
• Being ready to provide data and details when talking to them. When giving feedback, make sure you have enough data to corroborate your feedback. 
• Supporting and encouraging them to stand their ground on important matters. Don’t disregard their attention to detail, or their risk and rules assessments. 

The Optimist View

As mentioned above, there are so many nuances to each individual. There is no black and white when it comes to people. However, the tips and pointers in this article aim to support you in making the best out of each interaction with every person on your team. 

If you’re ready to learn more about Spotlight and about yourself and your team, get in touch with us and find out how diagnostic profiling can help you become the best leader you can be. 

The post How to adapt your coaching leadership style with Spotlight profiles – By Optimist Performance appeared first on Optimist Performance.

“The ideas that coaching is a spend rather than an investment, or a nice to have, not a need to have, are two of the biggest misconceptions about executive coaching.” – Lara Milward. 

This month, we talked to Lara Milward, one of our Eternal Optimists, about executive coaching and our unique Optimist approach. So, if you’ve never done coaching and think it’s not for you or your team (another misconception), keep reading. We’ll discuss the benefits of coaching and why coaching is now more important than ever for leaders and organisations. 

About Lara Milward:

Lara is a NeuroLeadership coach who works with individuals and teams to strengthen their mental muscles. Just like physical muscle, your brain needs challenge and fuel to be stronger. 

Lara loves supporting people to achieve what they didn’t believe was possible. As a former athletic coach, she understood that by knowing how our body works, we could improve our performance, and she wanted to do the same with our brains to enhance our personal and business performance. 

“I don’t believe in a self-made man or woman, we all need at least one other person, a coach or mentor or a team. I love being that trusted advisor who helps individuals and teams go from great to world-class.” – Lara Milward. 

How would you describe coaching? 

“Coaching is fuelling performance and confidence through improved thinking.” As coaches, we create a safe space where people can work things through, think out loud, gain insights, and create new habits & behaviours. We help them by being their trusted advisor and thinking partner. 

“There is no more thrill for me than seeing someone achieve more than they thought they could.” – Lara Milward

Coaching is also about transformation. As coaches, we help our clients reframe their view of their situation, their abilities, and their agency in order to play to their potential. During our sessions, we turn obstacles into opportunities and challenges into learning, which in turn supports their behaviours and performance. 

Why is coaching more important than ever for leaders?

71 % of CEOs in the US have reported feelings of imposter syndrome. Being a leader doesn’t mean you aren’t human! We live in a world where we are all dealing with constant information overload and the pressure of being constantly online. This is overwhelming for the prefrontal cortex of anyone’s brain, including leaders.

They are not only dealing with that overwhelm, but they are also the ones who everyone looks to for answers, solutions, and clarity in an uncertain world.

Additionally, leadership positions can be lonely at times. The fact that leaders want to show their best selves to their teams means that they might not have anyone they can confide in and who can help them sort their own challenges out. 

This is where executive coaching becomes invaluable for leaders because it gives them the space and time to think things through, work on problem-solving, and enhance the confidence they need to lead their teams in the best way possible. 

It’s important to note that we don’t come to new insights and ideas when the brain is in gamma wave, on task, at the computer. We only come to insights and new thinking when we are in the alpha wave. This makes coaching time even more valuable for leaders as it diarises space to slow down and work through their challenges and struggles. They can also work on themselves and how they want to show up for their teams, which in turn, allows them to be better leaders. 

What are the main benefits of coaching you’ve seen in your clients?

We asked Lara about the benefits of coaching. These are the ones she mentioned as the most valuable for her clients: better solutions and better thinking, transforming fears into confidence, clarity of thinking (seeing a way through), validation (understanding they are not alone and that it’s ok to feel the way they fell), ideas generation and dissolving stress 

Other benefits identified by our clients are improved communication and feedback, reduced stress and feeling less anxious, increased self-awareness and learning to manage themselves and others better. 

The link between executive coaching and well-being. 

It can be easier to think that our personal lives don’t have a space within executive coaching, but there is nothing further from the truth. The reality is that we are all humans and it’s impossible to separate our personal and professional lives. 

When we go to work, we are still the same person. This is why, as Optimists Coaches, we take a holistic approach and work around the full individual and not only their professional lives. If we want to achieve our full potential, it’s important that we look at ourselves and our lives as a whole and deal with it accordingly. 

Part of this holistic approach is to work on emotions and more specifically “affect labelling”. This is the process of identifying and labelling our emotions to be able to deal with them better. 

Research shows the importance and benefits of labelling our emotions. By naming our emotions, we can understand and work through them. It also allows us to cope better with stress, adversity and negative emotions. Some of the benefits are reduced emotional reactivity, enhanced problem-solving skills and improved emotional intelligence. 

Read “The Human Behind the performance” here.

What makes the Optimist Performance approach different from other executive coaching programmes?

At Optimist Performance, we use experiential learning and coach the whole person, physically, personally, and professionally. . . Through our other services (group coaching, leadership training and experiences), we support both the individual and the team to shift mindsets and behaviours so that they play to their strengths and enhance their adaptability to change, challenge and opportunity. As we know from high-performing athletes, the ability to adapt is what will help you thrive in a VUCA world. 

“I love that our way is right there in the name – Optimist. With the mindset and behaviour of an Optimist you can play to your potential whatever life throws at you.” – Lara Milward.

Another unique characteristic, according to Lara, is the mature and experienced team of coaches or Eternal Optimists (as we call them). At Optimist Performance, we bring our sports background into our coaching and the business world. Additionally, all our Eternal Optimists have been through coaching themselves (both in their sports and business careers), they have been there and understand the power of coaching and the impact it has on performance. 

“We have all just seen it at the Paris Olympics and Paralympics none of the athletes were alone. They all have coaches.” – Lara Milward.

The post How can executive coaching help leaders? Talking to Lara Milward – By Optimist Performance appeared first on Optimist Performance.

In this article, we delve into this distinctive feature, unravelling the synergies between high-performance sports and business. With insights from the recent Forrester Tech & Innovation Forum 2021, we’ll uncover the valuable lessons applicable to high-performance team development.

Parallels Between Business and Elite Sports Leadership: A Unifying Thread

Leaders in both business and elite sports share commonalities in creating vision, strategy, and assembling successful teams. The defining link is understanding people—an element crucial for inspiring and empowering individuals to achieve outstanding results. Great leaders, in sports and business, act as connective tissue, pulling together diverse talents into a team that produces extraordinary results. Authentic leadership, fostering an environment of trust, loyalty, and empowerment, is paramount.

The Public Eye: A Notable Distinction

Unlike executives who operate behind closed doors, athletes, team captains, and coaches face constant public scrutiny. They navigate media attention and criticism, a unique challenge absent in the corporate realm. This distinction highlights the need for resilience and confidence, qualities crucial in dealing with external pressures.

Leadership Parallels: Navigating Two Worlds

In both business and elite sports leadership, a shared goal emerges: understanding people and inspiring collective success. Join us as we navigate these parallels connecting seemingly distinct worlds.

The Leadership Factor: Drew Povey’s Blueprint

Drew Povey introduces the “leadership factor”—a blend of curiosity, changeability, charisma, connection, confidence, collaboration, and courage. In the upcoming sections, we’ll delve into each characteristic, uncovering its role in fostering exceptional leadership.

Curiosity: The Cornerstone of Effective Leadership

Leaders in sports and business continually seek new ideas, making curiosity a cornerstone of effective leadership.

Changeability: Navigating Organisational Fitness

Effective leaders navigate change, ensuring organisational fitness by fostering resilience and adaptability.

Charisma: Beyond Inherent Quality

Charisma involves practices aligned with one’s personality—focusing on a positive demeanour, caring about others’ opinions, and being influential.

Connection: Paramount Purpose Alignment

Building a connection with the team’s purpose is paramount. Business leaders can draw inspiration from sports, focusing on values, heritage, and the team’s role in a wider context.

Confidence: Instilling Belief in Strengths

Leaders build team confidence by removing internal barriers and instilling belief in strengths with a motivational style that inspires confidence in others.

Collaboration: Building a Culture of Trust

Success in sports and business demands collaboration. Empowering team members to make decisions builds a culture of trust and collaboration.

Courage: Mark of Authentic Leadership

Courageous leaders stand by principles in high-pressure situations, embodying authenticity, resilience, emotional intelligence, and commitment to purpose.

A Conceptual Playbook for Effective Leadership

To achieve high performance, leaders must be intentional, consistent, and continuous in their efforts. Success lies in inspiring, motivating, and encouraging teams.

While this article provides a conceptual playbook, Optimist’s coaching methodology goes further, creating highly individualized playbooks tailored to each team’s unique needs, challenges, and goals.

Ready to Elevate Your Performance? Explore Your Leadership Playbook with Us.

Are you ready to transition from great to world-class performance? Reach out to us, and let’s embark on a journey to explore your leadership playbook and kickstart your high-performance ascent together.

The post Unlocking High-Performance Leadership: Insights from Elite Sports – By Optimist Performance appeared first on Optimist Performance.

As a people-based business, we’ve looked at different approaches and the science behind setting goals. In previous articles, we’ve looked at how to change your habits to achieve your goals – establishing new habits and breaking the unhelpful ones.  We’ve also covered setting SMARTER goals and some of the questions you might ask yourself to reflect on where you are now and, looking to the future, where we can improve.

This month, we turn our attention East to the Japanese concept of ikigai and consider how we can use our own individual sense of purpose to influence and set our goals. Ikigai is a word with no direct translation to English; it roughly equates to “that which makes life worth living”, “reason for being”, or perhaps what gets you out of bed in the morning. 

Purpose is profoundly personal

Ikigai is concerned with a focus on a particular sphere of life, activity or social role which offers a real source of identity or meaning. It can be defined as something that truly makes life worth living for a particular individual. This could be aspects of social identity such as work or family or found within a sport or hobby.

Your Ikigai does not necessarily refer to your working life, nor does it need to be something grand or monumental. While one person’s Ikigai might be building a multi-million-pound business, another’s could be volunteering on a particular project or looking after their pet.

Your individual definition of success will be just as unique as you are.

Your goals will be interconnected

In previous articles, we’ve talked about siloed working within companies where departments fail to communicate with each other. Similarly, to ensure your goals are achievable, don’t fall into the trap of not considering your life as a whole when you start to define them. Writing in Forbes, the CEO of BodeTree Chris Myers, talks about Ikigai’s intersection of the spiritual with the physical, which connects all aspects of life. 

He explains: “There’s a difference between the things that are important in your life and your life’s work. Ikigai is about finding joy, fulfilment and balance in the daily routine of life.”

Myers warns against compartmentalising important aspects of our lives, such as our jobs, families, passions and desires.

Striking a balance between goals across different life areas is key.

Write your narrative to success

Writing your goals down and articulating what success in achieving them will look like is advocated in a paper on how Ikigai can optimise human performance and happiness by Prof Dr Michaela Schippers of the Erasmus Research Institute of Management.

Schippers cites the book ‘Redirect: The surprising new science of psychological change’ by Timothy Wilson. He recommends describing the goals you set in “concrete rather than abstract terms” and describes how you can create a new life story by rewriting it, which can help you break free from self-defeating patterns of thinking. 

According to Wilson, writing a ”more optimistic story …will energise you to take action”.

Make your goals positive – and public

In her paper on Ikigai, Schippers describes a study where students were asked to reflect on their goals, which could be academic or non-academic, within their first term of university. They were then asked to commit to one overall goal, which was published, along with their photo, on the university’s website. 

The students were asked to frame these intentions as “I will” commitments. These included statements such as, “I will work as hard as possible to achieve my goals” and “I will sustain the world for future generations,” which were published alongside their name and photo.

Schippers’ study showed an increase of 22 per cent in academic performance compared to previous cohorts who had not taken part in the “I will” intervention and decreased drop-out rates.

Focus on random acts of kindness, along with your goals

Within Optimist Performance, we always talk about the importance of cultivating an ‘attitude to gratitude,’ not just during the season of goodwill, but all year round. According to Schippers’ paper on Ikigai, having an altruistic purpose in life may be particularly helpful for optimising happiness. 

Random acts of kindness were found to be particularly helpful to their benefactor. The study also found helping others, especially in socially engaged ways, was more beneficial to a person’s well-being than providing treats for themselves.

The Optimist View…

At Optimist Performance, we believe that we all can find our Ikigai and achieve that balance and success. However, you don’t need to do it alone, our Optimist Coaches can help you with it, they can support you in fulfilling your potential, clarify your goals and plan your route to success in 2023. 

Learn more about our Optimist coaching here or get in touch with us for a free touchpoint first call with one of our coaches.

The post Look East to set your goals for 2023 – By Optimist Performance appeared first on Optimist Performance.

Contrary to the airbrushed and edited curations of Instagram influencers, life and work can be messy. Best laid plans can be brought down in seconds when life throws a curveball your way.

Comparing your insides to other people’s outsides can lead to some profoundly unpleasant psychological discomforts. As well as FOMO (fear of missing out), these can also include dissatisfaction, frustration and perceptions of inability – all categorised as deficiencies of the self. They are all types of suffering that stem from a non-physical origin. The bad news is that they are also widely believed to be an inescapable aspect of being human.

While physical pain is often localised and frequently explainable through injury or disease, psychological discomfort is harder to define and describe. It includes a range of subjective experiences, which are all characterised by an awareness of negative changes in the self and functions accompanied by negative feelings.

Psychological discomfort appears ingrained within the human condition but changing our mindset to stress is one way of turning a negative experience into useful lessons. This can help us to build a sense of resilience and even wisdom for when life throws you the next lemon. 

I’ve previously written that we make memories from the good days, but we can also flip the experience of a bad day on its head and reflect on the learning that we’ve gained from it. You can read more about eustress, a positive perception which can help us to use stress as something that can be beneficial to us, in the Optimist Performance’s blog.

The Optimist View…

Finding the meaning or reason behind a stressful situation and gaining a motivation or lesson from it isn’t easy, but it does provide a pathway that can help you move forward and push past those feelings of discomfort.

An “attitude of gratitude” remains the mantra I live by and is still something I am cultivating. It will always be a work in progress… and I’m comfortable knowing that it’ll never be perfect.

If you feel like you sometimes need that critical friend to help you gain perspective and find your way, get in touch with us today and learn more about our Optimist Coaching.

The post How to be comfortable with feeling uncomfortable – By Ollie Phillips appeared first on Optimist Performance.

According to studies, half of CEOs report feeling lonely, and of these, 61% report that feeling lonely has an impact on their performance. It also impacts their well-being and mental health. This year’s theme for Mental Health Awareness Week is loneliness, so we’d like to devote our post to discussing how lonely it can be at the top.

Who has invited the boss?

Many leaders are making mental health and well-being a priority for their employees, which is obviously a great thing. Creating a culture of caring for employees is essential, and many companies are investing resources to promote team-building activities, building great offices to incentivise collaboration and teamwork, and other perks and benefits in order to create a sense of belonging for people in their teams. 

However, while leaders devote time to creating a healthy and positive environment for their people, they do not always reap the benefits. Many leaders are now reporting a sense of loneliness, especially on occasions such as team lunches and not being invited. 

Furthermore, even if you are the lucky one invited to lunch, how authentic and comfortable really is the situation?

An executive stated: “They’re stressed about being with the boss, and that generates a certain distance. I think for them, it’s important to have a space to be relaxed, and when the boss is present, they’re not relaxed.”

Even if you build a great relationship with everyone on your team based on trust and authenticity, the reality is that there will always be a difference since you are the one who has to make the tough decisions. This is another reason why leaders report feeling lonely. They admit that being close to subordinates can result in making these decisions even harder. 

Don’t go it alone

Admitting to stress, mental health issues or even feeling lonely is not easy for anyone, but it becomes even more challenging when you are the person that everyone looks up to. 

Read our post “What I have learned about stress and mental health since quitting rugby – By Ollie Phillips” here.

Cultivating a culture of trust and authenticity requires being honest and vulnerable with others. However, there are still many challenges and circumstances that a leader cannot communicate to others, whether because of confidentiality issues or because they do not want to alarm and bring others down.

It’s also crucial to remember that leaders are looked up to not only by their teams but also by their boards of directors or investors, who seek answers.

“The Board usually thinks that I should know everything and anything about the organisation and that’s impossible. Sometimes I get frustrated with what they say. With whom can I share this with? I cannot say this to anyone, because this is about my relationship with my superiors, and also, I cannot share organisational issues. I have to deal with it on my own.” – mentioned another executive in the study. 

In addition, leaders in large and medium organisations are not the only ones who feel lonely; entrepreneurs and founders must also be considered.

Starting your own business is exciting, but it also presents many challenges. We know that building a successful business can be daunting at times. It takes time and effort, and most of the time (at least at the beginning), you don’t have the support of a team around you. It also makes it even more difficult to disconnect, as you’re living and breathing the business 24/7.  

Fortunately, most entrepreneurs have a greater sense of purpose, an invaluable strength to help fight loneliness. 

Having a purpose can help you feel less lonely 

Having a purpose has been shown to reduce stress and improve mental health. Additionally, studies show that helping others can help reduce loneliness and isolation and enhance our sense of purpose. So why not take advantage of the very thing that makes you feel lonely and use it to build connections and purpose?

“In the face of adversity, people with a stronger sense of purpose in life tend to be more resilient because they have a clear sense of goals that motivate actions that are aligned with personal values,” says Yoona Kang, PhD, lead author and a Research Director of the Communication Neuroscience Lab.

Whether you are an entrepreneur or a senior leader in a big organisation, you could potentially use your experience and knowledge to help others by becoming a lecturer, a teacher or a mentor. This allows you not only to benefit from helping others but also to create more meaningful and deeper connections that will in turn help alleviate your feeling of loneliness too. 

“As a teacher or mentor, I can share the lessons that I have learned with no negative consequences.”

Many aspiring leaders seek mentors who can answer their questions and whom they may look up to. Furthermore, it doesn’t necessarily mean investing a great deal of time; the important thing is to find a structure that benefits both of you. 

Why do leaders feel lonely even while surrounded by people?

We can feel lonely while surrounded by people and be absolutely content by ourselves. The difference is in the connections, so even though leaders spend a lot of time surrounded by people at dinners, social gatherings, and so on, that doesn’t guarantee the interactions are significant enough to produce a sense of connection, hence exacerbating loneliness. This is where developing stronger bonds with your mentees can be advantageous, but time management is also necessary.

Leaders spend most of their working week in meetings, and we must also factor in the amount of work-related social duties they have to fulfil. All of this takes up the majority of their free time, which isn’t spent with individuals who could help them feel less lonely and disconnected.

Leaders of large corporations, entrepreneurs, and founders also work longer hours, which means they are devoting time away from their personal lives to work. As a result, their work-life balance, mental health, and stress are all affected.

So while the top job may seem great from the outside and it’s a goal for many people, it’s important to consider that it comes with many sacrifices too. That said, we’re not trying to discourage people from aiming high; the reminder here is to take time to reflect on the price of success and how best to protect your mental health and well-being at the top. 

The Optimist view…

While it may appear that feeling lonely is an inevitable component of the top job, it doesn’t have to be. Fortunately, there are a variety of resources available to help leaders access the support and connections they need to flourish.

Whether you’re a big company executive, an entrepreneur or a start-up founder, there are plenty of networking groups and events where you can meet individuals in similar situations.

You can also get help from others who have been in your shoes. We’ve already discussed how being a mentor can be beneficial, but you can also find a mentor for yourself — someone who has “been there, done that” and who can provide a sympathetic and supportive ear. 

Last but not least, you can hire a coach to act as a sounding board and confidant. Having a coach is beneficial not only because you have someone with whom you can share your thoughts, issues, and concerns but also because it allows you to devote a specific amount of time to yourself.

Our coaches at Optimist Performance have been there, and they understand how valuable an empathetic ear and a trustworthy relationship can be, not only in terms of professional development but also in terms of mental health and wellbeing. Our goal is to help people reach their greatest potential, and we realise that feeling alone won’t help you get there, so we offer the support and guidance you need to succeed.

Get in touch with us today and find out how our executive coaching can help you. 

The post Who cares if leaders feel lonely? – by Optimist Performance appeared first on Optimist Performance.

As Optimists, we believe we can do anything we set our minds to, but we know that just thinking about it won’t get us very far, and because we like to pray what we preach, we have tried a variety of accountability methods. 

These are what we have found to be the most effective ways to keep accountability.

Tips to improve your accountability:

Plan in advance

“A goal without a plan, it’s just a wish” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

For every single thing we want to achieve, there are a thousand ways to do it, so having a plan or strategy is essential.  Whether you want to drop 20 pounds or grow your business, you need a strategy. 

Goals are (the majority of the time) big and long-term. They are the outcome you wish to achieve, but you’ll need a plan to get there. It’s also valuable because it provides you with clarity and focus. Most people don’t know where to start without a plan, which causes them to delay actions and lose motivation.

At Optimist Performance, we love goals, but we love planning just as much. We set up daily, weekly and monthly plans, and they are as detailed as possible. 

For example, instead of simply preparing to exercise the next day, a team member decides the day or week before, the exercises she’ll do, when and for how long. So, she knows beforehand what she needs to do and when the time comes, she is mentally prepared for it. 

You wouldn’t go into a meeting without an agenda. The agenda is your meeting plan to keep you on track and make sure you make the most out of your time.

Set short-term goals

Short-term goals can help you maintain your motivation, enable you to take small and immediate actions and assure your success. 

Even if you start super motivated, the chances are that it will wear off eventually when we talk about long-term goals. Furthermore, big goals can make us feel overwhelmed. 

Setting short-term goals is a part of the planning process, and it’s a great way to boost confidence. Breaking down your long-term goals into smaller ones gives you the satisfaction of achieving them while also allowing you to see progress and increase motivation. (Check out our interview with Miles Lowry, Strategy Business Partner at Formula 1, where we talk about short-term goals)

In addition, don’t forget to celebrate the small wins. Incentives are one of the most effective ways to ensure goal completion, so pat yourself on the back and congratulate yourself on your accomplishments. It feels amazing to complete a marathon, but you can only take one step at a time.

Find an accountability partner 

You are 65% more likely to complete a goal if you commit to someone. That number increases to 95% when you set up an appointment to review your progress, according to a study by The American Society of Training and Development (ASTD).

Having someone with whom you can share your goals and progress will help you become more accountable while also increasing your motivation. 

No one likes to admit defeat or fail, so we’re more likely to follow through when we have to show our progress to someone else.

If you don’t have someone close to you who can be your accountability partner, search for it elsewhere. When we were testing this method, we joined a group on social media.

You can also find a group in your area, search for your tribe or ask for professional help depending on your goals. A personal trainer or a coach can be an excellent resource for planning and accountability.

Learn more about our executive coaching.

Keep track

Once you have your plan and your short-term goals, it’s critical to keep track of them. You can use a variety of methods depending on your preferences; to-do lists, journaling, or a goal-tracking app.

• To-do lists: Did you know that our brains release dopamine when we complete a task? As a result, when we utilise to-do lists, we associate task accomplishment with crossing it off our list, resulting in dopamine release. We know now why one of our team members is obsessed with to-do lists.

• Keep a journal: Not only can you use it to track your progress, but you can also use it to make notes and other observations about your day that will help you review and reflect afterwards. We use it to review our weekly progress and keep track of good habits, for example.

• Goal tracking apps: We tried an app called Strides, and we can assure you that it works. It provides you with the same sense of accomplishment as a to-do list while it holds you accountable with notifications. It’s amazing how these small reminders can impact your accountability. We tried Strides, but there are many other options. (Check out this article for more info)

Keeping track not only improves our accountability but also makes us feel more productive since we can see what we’ve accomplished and how far we’ve come.

Review & reflect 

“Reflective thinking turns experience into insight.”  – John C. Maxwell

Last but not least, we have to review & reflect on our progress and adjust our plans accordingly. 

Even when we plan, we are bound to make mistakes or forget things. Also, things are constantly changing, so we need to be flexible and be able to adapt our plans. Taking the time to review and reflect allows us to identify challenges and improve our future planning. 

Within our team, we review our progress on a daily and weekly basis. Then, every six months, we do an in-depth review to ensure that we are progressing toward our end goals.

The Optimist View…

We can achieve everything we want if we hold ourselves accountable.

Unfortunately, accountability is the most challenging aspect when it comes to goals, which is why outside assistance can be quite beneficial. One of the things that most of our executive coaching customers appreciate is the added help with planning and accountability.

If you’re serious about achieving your goals this year, get in touch with us and discover how our executive coaching programmes may help you.

The post 5 proven tips to improve your accountability – By Optimist Performance appeared first on Optimist Performance.

Last week we talked about the importance of self-reflection and taking time for yourself. This week we spoke to Zoe Williams, executive leadership coach. She explained what mindfulness is and how to start practising both in your personal and professional life. 

What’s mindfulness?

“Mindfulness is focusing on fewer things, one thing or nothing, depending on how much you practise it.”

The majority of us rarely focus on just one thing; on the contrary, we are always carrying a lot of thoughts at the same time in our minds. This can lead to exhaustion and stress. 

“Mindfulness is about reducing the number of things that we focus on at a time.”

We are not our thoughts

The first thing to understand is that we are not our thoughts. As Zoe explains, we can think about our thoughts as a radio station. It’s something separate from us, and we can decide whether we listen to it or not and when. 

“Sometimes, at the end of the day, I talk to my friends, and we joke about the wild radio station we had in our minds that day. But then the next day, you will tune in to a different radio station, and your thoughts will be different.” 

And the beauty of it all is that you can always decide how much attention you pay to the “radio”. 

Mindfulness and meditation

Meditation is one of the techniques to practice mindfulness, but it’s not the only one. (More about this below)

When meditating, you usually try to sit very still and slow down the number of nervous system responses being sent to your body. This is why we should preferably sit on the floor, in silence and with our eyes closed. This way, we reduce the amount of sensory input we send to our brains. We also focus on our breathing. 

What meditation does is help slow our nervous systems down and allow our brains to relax. It’s about getting our minds into a restful state without going to sleep. 

“It’s actually better than sleep because you are conscious, and your nervous system is still alert.”

Our nervous system is the one that causes our minds to race, and through our breathing, we can regulate that response. (We talk more about breathing below)

What are the benefits of Mindfulness?

The main benefit of mindfulness is that we allow our nervous system to calm and rest. This is essential because it’s in this calm state that our nervous system focuses on healing.

Our bodies are constantly in a state of restore and repair. If our nervous system continually focuses on the outside and not on healing our bodies, we will suffer from more illnesses and diseases.

Therefore it makes sense that the more we allow our nervous system to focus on the inside, the better we will feel. 

“Practising mindfulness helps to slow our ageing too. I certainly look younger now than in my twenties.”

How can we start?

As mentioned above, meditation is not the only technique we can use to practise mindfulness.

Mindfulness practice is any activity that helps you focus on one thing and stop paying attention to your thoughts. This can be reading, gardening, sudoku, crosswords, baking, sewing, knitting, in essence, anything that helps you turn the volume of the “radio” down. 

Zoe recommends starting with an activity that we already enjoy. “It’s really difficult to create new habits and break old ones, so do something you already enjoy.”

Even going for a walk while listening to a podcast can be a way of practising mindfulness. 

Another great thing about Mindfulness is that once we have mastered it, we can practice it with other people. For example, many people practice it with their kids. You can use any activity and do it together while in silence.

She explains how beautiful and memorable her experience was, living in Tibet with Buddhist monks who practise mindfulness almost all day long. The great thing is that they do it as a community and thrive off of each other, as well as themselves.

Breathing Exercises

We asked Zoe to gives us some advice and exercises to help with our breathing. She mentioned “the box breathing technique”. 

The ideal way to practice this breathing technique is by lying down with your back flat on the floor and your hands on your stomach. The main focus point is that you start centring your breathing from the belly instead of the chest.

We breathe in through our nose and count to 4, hold in for 4, exhale through our mouths for 4, and wait for 4 until the next breath. 

This can make us feel lightheaded initially, which is another reason why it’s good to be lying down. 

We need to understand that the more oxygen we can get into our nervous systems, the safer and calmer we will feel. When we only do diaphragmatic breathing, which is breathing from our chest, we only fill 30 to 40 % of the capacity of our lungs.

This is a shallow type of breathing, usually the one we use when in a fight or flight situation. This sends a signal to our brains that tells it we are in danger and need to be alert. 

When we breathe through our stomach, we take in more oxygen into our lungs, which sends a message to our brains that it’s safe to relax and focus on healing. 

Doing this exercise just ten times has a tremendous effect on our nervous systems and the number of stress hormones that we get rushing through our bodies.

What are some of the biggest challenges when starting with Mindfulness?

“The biggest challenge is getting used to the discomfort of the brain not being able to switch off.”

Actually, when we start practising mindfulness, it’s pretty normal to have more thoughts and find it even more difficult to relax. According to Zoe, this is one of the reasons many people quit mindfulness at the beginning. But this is just the resistance from our brains because they don’t want to be without a job. 

If we think of our brains as a tool, it’s easy to understand that it wants to be helpful. Our brains are designed to solve problems, but most of us, in our everyday lives, have covered the main issues our brains are designed to solve; finding food, for example. So our brains create problems, issues and things to think about. 

“We are addicted to thinking.” 

The most important thing is accepting the fact that our thoughts will always be there, but we don’t need to focus on them. Instead, we can practise mindfulness and focus on something else. 

If we think about watching TV, our thoughts are still there, but we are just not engaging with them. They are running in the background. Our thoughts are there even when we sleep, which is why we dream. 

Zoe uses the example of the “parents filter”. “When you are in a birthday party with many kids shouting and screaming around you, parents can turn down the volume. It’s the same with our thoughts.”

Another big challenge for some people is to set boundaries. It’s quite normal for parents, for example, to feel guilty or selfish if they take time for themselves. Nonetheless, we all need our time just to relax and heal; this will also make us be better in our connections and relationships with others. 

Mindfulness in the workplace

Zoe works with many companies where she implements mindfulness practices. This can be very beneficial for innovation, creating psychological safety and deeper connections between team members. 

The first thing Zoe recommends for companies that want to implement some of these practices is to think about when it’s appropriate to practice mindfulness. 

There are many moments where we need to be reactive, fast in our thinking. This varies depending on the industry too. 

A good time to practice mindfulness within your team is before starting a meeting when you need people to be ready to listen and communicate effectively or when they need to be innovative, creative or feel safe. 

Some of the companies she works for use the box breathing exercise before starting a meeting. She calls it “setting the tone or intention”. As a leader, you need to set the tone and communicate to the rest of the team that now it’s the time to feel safe, relax, and be comfortable in bringing your best ideas and the best version of yourself. This simple exercise can have a dramatic impact on our team members, their confidence and their outputs.

It’s also a good idea for people to use this technique when they have back to back meetings. Taking the time to do 10 or 20 deep breaths between meetings can help our concentration and focus. 

The Optimist View…

Whatever activity feels comfortable for you, there is no doubt that practising mindfulness is beneficial and available to every one of us. 

We should never forget to take care of ourselves. Think about the instructions on the plane “put your mask on first”. The reason is that we need to be safe to help others. 

We can extrapolate the example to our daily lives. If we want to serve others, do our jobs properly and have a fulfilling life, we need to first focus on ourselves. 

Unfortunately, this is not an easy task because the majority of us are hectic and busy.

At Optimist Performance, we help people to overcome their challenges and achieve their full potential. Learn more about how our executive coaching programmes can help you readjust the balance and focus on you and how you fulfil your potential by clicking here. Alternatively, get in touch today and find out how we can help.

About Zoe Williams

Zoe Williams is the Founder of Luminary Mindset where she helps leaders to elevate the Emotional Intelligence (EI) culture of their organisations.

Learn more about Zoe and Luminary Mindset here.

The post How to start practising Mindfulness – Interview with Zoe Williams appeared first on Optimist Performance.