Lessons - You Need To Be Your Own CEO | Sarah Gibbons - Coach to Execs & Entrepreneurs

In this lessons episode, you'll learn how to redefine leadership as a way of being rather than just a title. Discover practical tools to align your actions with your values, improve communication, and shift from reacting to co-creating a more fulfilling life. Explore strategies to lead with intention in every aspect of your day-to-day experience. So what is fulfillment? This course you took, this two-year course, was this identifying what actually drives you? In life, is that what the end result is? Yeah, that's a good way of looking at it. I think from what I, one of the biggest lessons I got out of it was that most people are look at success as very horizontal. So you go to school, you get a job, maybe you get married, maybe you buy a house, etc. When I went back and got my masters in spiritual psychology, it started to introduce to me a way of leading that used practical tools, particularly around communication that helped me realize, okay, the way in which fulfillment works is through exponential growth, not through doing this thing that's on a horizontal line, which is what we're trained. And so when I started to play with that and I started to look at things like what does it mean to live from my values? What does it mean to really connect with my own intuition and start to make choices, the honor, what I want versus these expectations that I had for myself based on parental influence, society influence and all of that? I started to realize that I was relating to life in a very different way. And I think more than anything what I got out of it was that I was, I don't like the word control, but that I had a lot more influence over my life than I thought. So in most of us, human beings, and I still very much have moments of this, we are very much at a factor, we are at effect of our circumstances. Whereas when I went through my grad school program, what I got was there's an opportunity for me to really co-create my experience, whether it's with the universe, whether it's with God, every year belief is, but it was so empowering because I realized, my gosh, I can create what I want. As long as I get clear and I'm paying attention to my mindset and my intention and I'm taking action, what I know to be true is that then the universe meets you at a point of action. So it was just a very different way of experiencing life, but I gained very tangible tools that I now teach my clients really around communication and leadership. And so they're having very similar experiences. It doesn't mean that they're by no means does it mean that they are getting out of their current job. So I mean, so much, but many of them are staying in their current roles, but they're experiencing a level of fulfillment and impact that they didn't think was possible. So it's a very long way of saying answering your question. It was a good answer. And the reason why I was digging into that is because there's a lot of a lot of wisdom there. And I wanted to highlight that because I knew I knew that you were going to go in this direction. But that's something, that's something that I think over the past two years that that feeling of losing control when we saw we had everything figured out in career, in life, gone, right? Completely gone. That's a very, very practical example would be people that have been in careers for 30 plus years that thought those careers were stable and laid off furloughed whatever. And that's no longer things. So I appreciate what you're saying. And it's been, and I also, I've never heard it described the way you've described it just now, but I subscribe to a similar outlook on life about control. I say control, I guess a little bit more freely because I like to think that I I can't have some control over the outcome with the, you know, if you have a certain amount of input, then you can have some sort of control over the output. But that's I like that a lot. And that's that's what you teach. So that's that's a perfect segue. So that's what you work with individual and this is this is what you do. This is what you this is what I do full time. You know, at the end of the day, the only thing we have control over is how we show up and relate to people, situations, events in our lives. And so I am fascinated with that because what that where that got me thinking was, all right, that what we're really talking about is leadership leadership as a way of being, not leadership as this position as a hat that we wear as a title as a, you know, as wake up in the morning. I'm a leader and then I come home from work and I'm not a leader anymore. I realized it was like a pistony, but that if I start to look at leadership, like we're all in leadership, yes, some of us have titles where we manage people, but when we wake up in the morning, we show up and how we lead throughout the day and how we impact people, how we how you and I converse, how I talk with a barista, how I speak to my children, how I work with my clients, that leadership is really my legacy. And so if it all were to end, I love knowing that your legacy doesn't have to be, you know, building a water well in Africa, your legacy is how you show up and lead throughout the day. And so that got me really excited because I thought, well, I have an opportunity here to really help people grow their leadership, even if it's just by four percent, if we just shift it by a tiny amount, they're going to create different results. So I work with people, I have a boutique one on one business, so I work with a handful of clients there, and then I have several corporate groups, and then I have my own groups that I've put together based on, you know, I work with a group of dads, which I love, I work with a group of moms, and then I work with a group of executives. But it's all based on a principal and foundation that I said that I've created that's unique to that's unique to my business called the board, called the boards. I have different boards groups for depending on who the audience is. I saw that I was checking our website, and okay, so let's, so I want to dig into that point, you just have shown leadership, and obviously, so great points, leadership is not CXO, leadership is how you conduct yourself in your life. And I think that that mental shift or that lens that you look at leadership through is an important distinction. So what are some practical steps just for us, we can be a lot of people here are obviously executives, but also moms and dads. What would be some overarching step that people should try and take to be better leaders in their life and vision and understand their impact? Yeah, I love that question. So one of the first think about leadership as who you be informs what you do. So if you are disgruntled overwhelmed and anxious on the inside, then as you are doing whatever it is you need to do, that's the experience you're going to have. So one of the best ways to get really clear on who you are is to define your values. And it's amazing Scott, I'll start working with clients. And also, okay, let's talk about your values, do you know your values? And I say, yeah, yeah, I know my values. Okay, great, tell me your values. You scratch the surface a little bit, they don't know their values. So for anybody who's watching, actually you can go to my website, you sign up for my email. I have put together a super simple turnkey guide to help you figure out your values. Everyone has around, you know, five to seven values. And once you get clear on your values and you define them on your terms, then you have a very different experience because if you think about it, if you start to make decisions from your values, rather than expectations of what you think you should be doing or what you think your family should doing, already you're going to have an experience that is much more in alignment with what matters to you. So for me, one of my top values is connection. So as I'm moving throughout the day, as well as impact, I'm asking myself, what value does this lie with? If I need to make a decision, okay, is this an accordance with my values? That's a very different experience than, all right, what does it need to get done today? What should I be doing? And so it allows people to feel so much more empowered. So I would say for anybody who's watching the very first thing you could do if you did nothing else was get, get clear on your values, define them and start to play with what does it look like to live from your values? What is it like to make decisions from your values? And you'll be amazed at the different kind of results you get both in the workplace and at home. And I guess my question because everybody, he said things they know their values. And even if they, they, even if they do have an understanding of what their values are, we slip, we slip all the time. Yeah, me. I slip probably, you know, 200 times a day on, on, on, on, I think I'm a good person. I think I have good values, but something, you know, rouse me the wrong way. And then I react, or the conversation after the thing that rubbed me the wrong way is now, you know, that the emotion that's gone to that conversation is a negative emotion. Even though the person had no bearing on what actually triggered me in the first place, these are very common human tendencies. They are. So how do you get rid of? How do you? How do you? Yeah, what's the answer? Tell you. So really great point what you said. So one of the biggest principles I got out of my master's program in spiritual psychology is that if, if we get triggered as human beings, it's an unresolved issue of the belongs to us that's getting triggered. It actually has nothing to do with you. So if you are being disrespectful to me, it doesn't mean that you got a hall pass for me that way, but it's on me to look at, okay, why did that trigger me so much? So as a coach, one of the things that I do is I invest a lot in my own mentorship. So I work with a true team of coaches, which by the way, for anybody who's looking at a coach, you want to make sure you're the coach that you're working with is actually investing themselves. One of the best tools is called the completion. And it's a process where you are getting complete on your side of the sense of what you're bringing to the table. So the ultimate goal is if you've got energy on you, Scott, about something, that is going to carry over into how you show up and relate to someone. So you want to take on a very practical exercise, which is called completion. It involves writing three different letters. It takes no more than 20 minutes. But what it does is it helps you first and foremost, express what's there for you, whether you're mad, you're frustrated, you're upset, whatever it is, get it all out. Then it's about taking a look at, okay, what's there for me to, oh, what can I be responsible for? And then the third piece is around what can I acknowledge both the other person and both for me? And sometimes I have to do completion multiple times around the same situation with the same person. But it is truly the only tool that I have learned that my coaches have taught me if I want to be able to come into a situation and feel neutral so that I can approach it from a very clear leadership, then that's on me to get complete. And it doesn't require anyone to apologize to me. It's really on me. And I think that's, you know, if people went around in the world getting complete on their own stuff so they weren't lobbying their own stuff over to other people, we would have very different experiences throughout the day. Because you're right, we're human beings. It's not that we're, we go through the day and it's not that we're in leadership 24-7. It's that we fall out of leadership and when I always say to my clients, it's like, how quickly can you get back into leadership rather than withdrawing for a day or getting into it with a colleague and, you know, going down that rabbit hole?