To future-proof yourself, your career, your business, your workplace and community, we look to building skills, furthering our knowledge, increasing our connections and continue to squeeze in doing a bloody good job at our current role, or should I say, roles.
Taking on additional roles, for women, is just in our DNA; we need to boost our resilience and our emotional intelligence to maintain the momentum and tuned into our mind, body & soul.
We need to consciously build our muscles and skills in these two areas, resilience and emotional intelligence, to enable us to lead our life, business and a workplace.
These 20 tips, which I’ve gathered through observation, my reading, research, my own practice and through the many conversations with women on my The Female Factor Leadership Program.
I’ve categorized these tips into three levels:
PREPARATION – start with the internal; think and feel, don’t rush in too quickly, get yourself mentally and emotionally prepared
PRACTISE – share the practice by practising together, creating a movement by being a role-model and holding yourself accountable; people will begin to expect what you expect and more likely to follow your lead
PERMANENCY – consider achieving a habit status of being resilient and emotionally intelligent.
PREPARATION
Principles: re-evaluate your principles and consider how these align with resilience & emotional intelligence. Being principally minded means saying “no” when necessary if you find you are hurtling down the old familiar track of saying “yes” to please, when behaviours are disconnected from what’s most important to you.
People Person: have a mindset that you are a ‘people person’ with the intent to set your team up for effective, happy and positive work experiences. With a desire to achieve this goal, you know that you need to be more mindful of how you work and lead people.
Picture of Shared Success: move from being self-centred to a place of shared success. Continually visualise how ‘we can do this together’, remind yourself that you’re not on your own, that asking for help is normal and that asking for others’ point of views is sharing the load.
Perspective: a critical element of emotional intelligence is gaining perspective about what’s important and what’s a waste of your energy. Recognise that you are human and that it’s tough to keep focused. Humans are social beings and appreciate social connection, not just pumping out volumes of work.
Permission: give yourself permission to be vulnerable and apply a new approach to how you operate – give yourself permission to talk about how you’re feeling and how you want to feel. The Female Factor is about celebrating your feelings.
Ponder thoughts: question yourself about your feelings. Have an internal conversation and journal your thoughts about your feelings. This is one of your first emotionally intelligent practices to make a change in your leadership style. Insight and hindsight open the door to foresight – the aim to use your X factor in The Female Factor.
Purpose: remind yourself of your purpose of being resilient and tuning into your emotional intelligence. Write yourself a mantra or put a reminder on your phone – let it be the purpose of your day.
PRACTISE
Passion: pour your passion into exercising your resilience and emotional intelligence and it will do the heavy lifting.
Presence: your presence captures the hearts and minds of the people in the room in which you walk into; it’s how you converse, approach people, engage and leave the room. How you hold yourself and communicate, is determined by your resilience and your emotional framework.
Pause: before you react to something or with someone, PAUSE and consider how you could respond better, knowing what you know about other people, your PAUSE is your weapon of choice.
Partner with your Team be their coach, help them learn and increase their performance. Be sincere and humble. Don’t be a ‘know all’, rather partner up and practise and learn together.
Power: know that your power can be perceived positively and negatively; be in control of your own power, in your language and actions. Being ‘right all the time’ and your status can damage the resilience and relationship with others. Use your power for the force of good. Apologize when you wouldn’t to value your relationship over your ego.
Positive Interactions: look for opportunities to find positive interactions with team members which you can provide positive feedback. The biggest disconnect in business is feedback – we don’t reassure and reinforce what we expect.
Point of View: leaders need to be trusted, quickly, and what engenders this trust is being heard, empathised with understood. Your point of view is secondary. It’s paramount to hear your team and colleagues’ point of view to reduce fear, anxiety and create hope and joy in the workplace.
Protect your feelings: become more aware of how you respond to feedback (verbal and your body language). Flip how you react and respond and welcome any feedback as being helpful feedback – whether that be about yourself or a ‘window’ into understanding the other person better.
PERMANENCY
Perfection: this is the enemy of the good – don’t believe it will happen overnight and don’t believe it will have an end – you’ll always be aiming to practise to be perfect and the goal posts will move, and you’ll be tested to the core. Focus on practising, not perfecting.
Personal Plan: sharpen your Emotional Intelligence by making time to purposely behave with emotional intelligence and record reactions and responses. Plan to maintain your resilience by equipping your resources into the categories of emotional, physical, mental and social which you can tap into when needed.
Practise the Practice: continue to share with your team that you’re practising resilience and emotional intelligence to heighten their awareness of the behaviours which make the difference.
Persistence – keep at it, keep practising, keep experimenting, keep tweaking and above all, remind yourself why you’re doing what you’re doing.
Permanent – as James Clear said in his book, Atomic Habits, it may take 10,000 hours to form a new habit. Good Luck to make your resilient and emotional intelligence, permanent!
Please connect and contribute to this list of my tips to practise and in particular, lead others in Resilience and Emotional Intelligence. There so many wonderful practices practised by people which I haven’t captured. Your sharing will boost the resilience of other women.
For details about The Female Factor - CLICK HERE
To connect with me and discuss how we can potentially work together - CLICK HERE
