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Good morning and welcome. Well, it's morning for me. Hello and welcome along to another episode of Management Matters. I'm Fiona, your resident professional development coach. I say professional development, maybe I should be saying management development, because that's really who I'm interested in speaking to.
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So I'm Fiona, your resident management development coach, and in today's episode, I wanted to talk a bit about the experience of threshold crossing. So you'll know the last few episodes have been.
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Well, there's a whole series of episodes that are about the threshold moments, or the sort of identity and behaviour shifts that managers typically go through as they progress in the evolution of their, management practice and towards leadership.
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And I realise that perhaps the way I've set it up makes it sound sort of easy. And you might all be thinking, but, Fiona, it's not that easy. And you'd be right, it's not that easy.
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Some of it is easy. Some of it you're just, it's like clicking your fingers, right, I've decided I'm doing something different. For some of them, it will take persistence and courage and practice and all of that good stuff in order to really embody this new identity or sort of level up that happens when you cross a threshold and to keep practising the new behaviour that comes along with that.
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And I think sometimes that can throw up some feelings, inconvenient feelings. But what I want to encourage you is not to let feelings derail you because feelings are, information.
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And I think what normally happens, not just think, but believe from the research, what is often going on is we contemplate doing something new or different. And then our, subconscious, the part of us that is responsible for sort of scanning our environment and checking if it's safe and if what we're doing aligns, with our, sense of pattern recognition, that part of us is whoa, whoa, whoa, this is different.
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Let's not do this. It might be risky and it might be like that time when. And then it will sort of go through and give you, it will pattern match what you're about to do with every experience of everything bad that's ever happened to you or the disappointments, the conflict, the rejection, the complexity.
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All of those things that have happened, along with all of the messages that you've received throughout your lifetime from family of origin and the school system that you took part in, and early employment experiences and recent employment experiences, and friends and family and the media.
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And your subconscious is like, whoa, whoa, whoa. This thing we're contemplating doing is looking a bit risky. Let's stop. But because it's your subconscious, it doesn't have any vocabulary. It can't really directly communicate with you.
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So it sends a nervous system response, which is, you might get a feeling of no. Or you might get a feeling of guilt, or you might get churning in the stomach. You might feel confused. Any of those types of things that, are sort of, we typically think of them as negative experiences so that our conscious mind reads that emotional or physical experience and goes, hold on, something feels bad, let's stop.
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And so the subconscious has done its job, it's communicated this is risky, we shouldn't do it. And then it's gone through this process of communicating with conscious mind to make you stop. What I want us to do is think differently about what those signals are really telling us.
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It may well be that it's not a stop signal. It may just be a signal that actually we need to attend to some part of us that finds this risky and to gently encourage ourselves to start practising.
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Because when you start practising, what's happening is you're building new evidence for yourself of what you're capable of and giving that subconscious filter some new data to assess your behaviour patterns, reality, experiences against, so that it can start going "Oh yeah, I've done this before, that was fine.
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On you go." And that is the experience of confidence. You ever noticed that once you've practised something, a lot of times, then all of a sudden you feel really okay about doing it again. So we want to kind of retrain our conscious mind to think differently about those experiences.
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And one experience in particular that I think we can get a bit confused sometimes is the feeling of guilt. So a lot of people, when they start managing differently, particularly around things like the boundary threshold where you're moving a conversation from supportive and based on feedback and encouragement more into a boundary conversation where you're saying, okay, this actually can't continue.
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If this happens again, there will be these consequences and actually then following through, or in the delegation threshold where you're starting to pass more of those things that you've traditionally done onto your team in a totally appropriate and sensible and proportionate way.
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Those times where you're starting to act differently, manage differently, and it has an impact on somebody else, we kind of feel really guilty about that. I think often that's not true guilt.
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And I talked about this in a video yesterday on my LinkedIn video series about delegation. I don't think it's necessarily true guilt, because guilt is where you feel like you've done something wrong or against your values.
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But most often when I work through this with my clients and I cheque with them, is this actually wrong? They're like, no actually, I really should be delegating. I know that. So it's not guilt. And so we need to have a consideration of what that experience is.
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And I think, again, sometimes it's the mislabeling of that experience, of stretching out our comfort zone, of doing things slightly differently. And particularly if that process of doing something differently rubs up against our people pleasing tendencies or our sense of value in our self and what it is that we bring to work, where we're letting go, we've talked about in several of the thresholds, we're letting go of doing the do and being really heavily involved in the detail of operational stuff so that we can free up more of our time and attention for the bigger, chunkier, strategic pieces of work that we know we really should be doing, but sort of procrastinating productively about by being in the detail of everything.
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When we start making those shifts, it can feel like guilt, but actually it might be that we're really worried about the fact that we have this people pleasing tendency and we're gonna, might have to piss people off for a little bit as they get used to the fact that we're not going to answer every tiny little question for them or that we're not going to do all of the things for them, that we are starting to hold them accountable for the things that they haven't done or the deadlines that they've missed, or for senior managers, that we are not personally going to be running around after them and that sometimes it's appropriate for us to say no to them, particularly when they're trying to break the rules.
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I don't know about you, but in my own experience and a lot of my clients experience, part of this growth in management and leadership is speaking some truth to power and stepping in and making ourselves heard when there's something unethical or at the very least against process happening.
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And so that might not be guilt, that just might be the experience of doing something that feels scary and unknown and risky because that senior manager might very well say, well, who are you to be laying down the law, you know it could create a conflict, it could create rejection, you know all those kind of things.
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So what we want to be able to do is to refocus ourselves as we're going through these processes or through these shifts in the way that we're seeing ourselves and the way that we're working, as we're developing this sturdy, grounded approach to management and leadership, so that we can come to those conversations really robust, really sturdy in our knowledge that we are doing things in the way that is aligned with our values, that is aligned with institutional policy and practice, that is on the right side of ethics, all of those things.
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So that even if it feels scary, even if a part of a, sort of nervous system and subconscious team is flaring the alarm and going whoa, whoa, whoa, let's not do that.
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The healthy adult part of us that really knows what is the right thing to do can do a bit of risk assessment, check out if that's true, can reassure that part of us that feels very uncertain or frightened even, and then keep going in that direction so that we're ultimately building that new body of evidence of what we're capable of and all of that good stuff that we're really aiming for.
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The other thing that I think is really important to consider when we're thinking about going through these kind of level ups or changes in how we're approaching management leadership and the way that we're working and how we're viewing ourselves, is that there's often a significant lag time between the changes that we make and the comfort of the people around us or even the recognition of the people around us.
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So often I will work with clients where they're looking to progress in their career or just become more sturdy in their management and leadership practice and they will make changes, even if it's changes that for example, senior managers have recommended.
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Senior manager might give you feedback and say something like, wow, really need you to step up and be taking more of a leadership role here. In truth, they might not like it when you actually do that and when you start doing that, it might take them a while to realise that's what's happening.
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So there can be quite a lag time between your self-concept, how you think of yourself, how you're acting, how you're responding to different situations, how sturdy and robust you are, how well you're looking after yourself, that all might change faster than how the people around you are receiving you because they are also operating from their own pattern recognition mechanisms.
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And so if you, if you just think about the pattern recognition, if I say apple, apple, apple, apple, apple, apple, apple, apple, apple. Your brain probably went, apple, apple, apple. Right? But actually the options, the available answers to that, are massive, huge.
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You could have responded with any other word, any other word, even any other word within the fruit category or the food category. So an adjacent word. So see how well our brains are attuned to pattern recognition.
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So when you start doing something that's outside of your normal pattern, other people will still be expecting apples, but you might be morphing into pears or bananas or whatever the thing is. And so it's going to take them a few repetitions of the new behaviour or if you showing up in a different way for them to go, oh, hold on this person's not talking about apples anymore or, metaphorical apples.
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Oh, this isn't apples. This is pears or bananas or whatever it is. Right, okay, well, how, how do I feel about pears and bananas? Maybe I feel differently about that than apples. And so they are then going to go through their own recalibration process where they consider your new pattern of behaviour and showing up and see how they like it and see how they want to respond to this new version of you who's showing up.
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And you see this often, particularly around the boundary threshold. So when you start exiting the repeating conversation loop, so you're saying to somebody who maybe you've been stuck in a loop with them for months or years of them behaving poorly in some way, and you going, that wasn't really okay, can we talk about how I can support you to do it differently next time?
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And they go, oh sorry. And then the pattern basically continues when you step out of that loop and go, okay I see this has happened again and I want to draw our attention to the fact that this is now a pattern where you keep apologising, but actually the pattern persists.
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And if that continues to happen, there will be consequences and then you explain what the consequences are. They probably won't like that. They probably won't like that. And so you're part of going through this change process with ourselves is also going through the change process with the other person and being able to tolerate their discomfort with your new pattern.
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Being able to tolerate their discomfort with your new pattern because it requires something different of them which they didn't ask for. They were doing quite fine with whatever their behaviour was and then half heartedly apologising and then thinking they got away with it and just carrying on whether that was a conscious thought process or a subconscious pattern.
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But this is going to require something different of them. So you can see how going through all of this change might feel a bit gross. What I want you to do though is bear in mind what the end goal is.
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So yes, it feels gross. Yes, we're developing the sort of fortitude to stick with it even when it feels gross, and to consider the result on the other end, either the result of reverting to original pattern, which for most people that I work with around these themes is something akin to overwhelm, probably some form of exhaustion, if not active burnout and career stagnation.
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If you want to leave those things behind and set up a new future for yourself where you're jumping into this different life, or even just sidestepping into a life where actually you are holding accountability, where you're delegating appropriately, where you're reclaiming your leadership bandwidth so that you can get on with some of those chunkier projects or objectives or untangling some of the gnarly problems that are affecting your team and be able to progress in your career more quickly, then you have to figure out how to go through this bit.
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A friend of mine who's a change manager, she refers to it as the valley of despair. We really need to be able to keep encouraging ourselves and to keep in mind that ultimately the goal is that uplevelled version of us where we're no longer going backwards and forwards over this threshold and trying a new thing and then getting scared and retreating.
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The shift between someone who's never exercised and then someone who joins the gym. That's not enough. You've got to show up and actually go to the gym on a repeated basis. So then you can have that identity shift of being somebody who exercises regularly or being somebody who's really strong and dealing with the fact that sometimes on the mat you might have a little cry because it's really hard.
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I know that's what I've done, for sure. But, on the other side of that little cry, I was like, whoa right ok, well that's reset that stress response. Now I feel I can go again, do another set or show up on the next day or whatever that looks like and to be able to do that in that same way.
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But with the development of our management and leadership. All right, I think that was all I wanted to say about this one. The huge encouragement is don't be freaked out if it feels a bit gross, because at the other side of that, once you've put in the reps, once you've updated that identity, then loads of stuff opens up for you.
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And one day you'll just wake up and go, I feel so confident about this thing that I used to hate doing. I feel so confident about it. Or if not confident, I at least feel okay about it. And then you'll be getting on with the stuff that you always used to think you could never do.
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And then career opportunities open up, all of the rest of it. And you suddenly are in that position of being a really well respected leader who people think of as firm but fair, is doing stuff in a really effective way. His team, often people who manage in that way have built teams that people don't want to leave.
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What greater, sign of respect is there than that? Alright, so that's it for today. Take good care and stay cool in this hot weather. And I will be back with another episode very soon. Bye.
