This will not be an analysis of the leadership of Jason Sudeikis’ character, Coach Ted Lasso. While I would debate that there is value in looking at this unlikely protagonist to guide leaders, this is a discussion on how media like “Ted Lasso” can be part of a strategy to enhance success in your life. It is how we can choose media to prepare our brain to be in an optimal place of functioning.
To rekindle love is to work on a mission statement. Many individuals know the mission statement for the organizations they work for, and they can tell me why a mission statement is valuable. But few couples have a written mission statement for their relationship. And how strange is that? We know mission statements help move an organization towards a defined goal. Keeps people aligned with the goal of the organization. Creates a sense of connection. But couples either have a vague idea of their mission somewhere in their heads, or don’t have one at all. Sitting down to write out a mission statement together can connect you, and can enhance communication.
Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Dr. Robin Buckley, Owner and Founder of Insights Group Psychological & Coaching Services and Dr. Robin Buckley Coaching, located in Rye, NH, USA.
Gender-affirming care refers to any treatment or procedure done to help people dealing with the effects of gender dysphoria, or the desire to be of another gender. And while this kind of care is exceptionally important for the health and safety of transgender and gender-nonconforming people, it can be difficult to access.
The road to queer parenting isn’t easy, but a support system can help you prioritize your mental health as you navigate the barriers.
Is it anxiety from the pandemic or is it OCD?
Over the past two years, the fear surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic caused a lot of us to take a closer look at our hygiene, where germs live in our home, and how illness might spread from person to person, even on a microscopic level. People without obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) might have found themselves wiping down groceries with Clorox wipes, fearing social interactions without distance or masks, and excessively washing their hands, for example. Some of those individuals are finding that even after the immediate threat of death or hospitalization is decreased, their behaviors persist. How do we know whether anxiety-based behaviors are OCD? Below are some initial questions to ask yourself.
Are your habits context-dependent?
If you found yourself wiping down your mail in March 2020, you are not alone. At the time, little was understood about how the virus spread or what we could do prevent exposure. Now, infectious disease experts have more information about risks to spreading the virus and provide specific recommendations regarding safe practices. If you are able to adapt to new standards of safety and shift your behaviors depending on the context, your health anxiety is unlikely OCD. Individuals with OCD experience intrusive thoughts (obsessions) and engage in compulsions (behaviors or mental acts) regardless of the context.
Someone with OCD might say, “I know the risk of spreading COVID-19 by touching something is not significant, but I still can’t stop wiping down my counters multiple times per day.”
If your habits are interrupted, do they take over your mental space?
You might have picked up some new habits during the pandemic that you continue to do and find helpful. Maybe you upped your cleaning routine and have tried to stick with it. Maybe you keep some hand sanitizer in your car to have on hand. These habits themselves are not enough to determine whether behavior is OCD related. The more important question is asking yourself what happens if you can’t do these things? Can you still eat a snack in your car if your hand sanitizer ran out? And, if you did, could you let it go? If you would spend your day thinking about the routines you missed, or the small possibility of the “worst case scenario,” then you might be experiencing OCD symptoms.
Do your habits get in the way of your values?
We have all experienced a universally high level of stress during this pandemic. Taking care of our mental health involves understanding what “refills our cup” and doing more of that. Could you skip a cleaning day if something more compelling to do came up? Flexibility is key to maintaining mental health. If you miss out on time spent with your loved ones to maintain a rigid routine, that routine might be indicative of OCD.
If you are concerned that your symptoms may be clinical OCD, there is hope. Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) is used to treat OCD and is one of the most effective evidence-based therapies available. If you or a loved one might be struggling, the International OCD Foundation (IOCDF) is a good place to start navigating your next steps. Visit their website for more information about OCD and treatment options near you. https://iocdf.org/
You might see a lot of posts this holiday season with lists of the perfect gift to buy for your loved ones. Somewhere in the spirit of being thoughtful, we can lose sight of the person we’re actually “buying for.” There is one thing you can give to everyone on your list regardless of age, gender, religion, or your relationship to that person; the gift of a mental health check in.
With mental health related hospitalizations on the rise both nationally and within our local seacoast community, it is clear that the mental health effects of this pandemic are still ongoing. Because mental health issues may not show up as visibly as a broken arm, we often assume that those affected are not the people we know and interact with on a daily basis. The strongest prevention tool we have for reducing the number of people needing to be hospitalized for mental health is connectedness. By strengthening our connections strong on an individual, familial, and community level, we can make a difference.
When was the last time someone asked you how you are truly doing? Not just a simple greeting, but a question that comes with the intention to listen. It can feel awkward and uncomfortable to think about talking with someone about something so personal, but it does not have to be! Below are some quick tips on how to check in with someone about their mental health.
Mental Health Check Ins: A How To Guide
Remember that you don’t have to be a trained therapist to be the one making the biggest difference to someone’s mental health. A mental health check-in from a friend, a neighbor, a colleague, or even a stranger can save a life.
If you or someone you know is struggling, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 800-273-8255. The world is a better place with you in it.
You’ve decided to work with an executive coach to help with your career goals or professional development. Now what? The platform of executive coaching is created from your goals and establishing these goals is the first step towards your success.
Executive coaching will often start with the creation of a three-tier plan. The first tier focuses on the question, “Where do you want to be?” The answer to this question creates your top-tier vision, the overall accomplishment you want to achieve, which coaching will facilitate. Once your vision is clearly defined, an executive coach will help you establish your goals towards that vision. The goals on tier two break down the vision into manageable pieces. As you focus on one or more goals at a time, you are moving forward towards the accomplishment of your vision. To move forward, however, you need more than the “what” defined by your goals; you also need a “how”; tier three addresses this. Each goal is analyzed to determine action steps to achieve the goal. You work through your action steps to accomplish each goal which will result in the attainment of your vision.
Goals must meet certain criteria to be successful:
• Your goals should be articulated in specific terms to help with the action steps.
• They should also be measurable to provide evidence of your progress or to reevaluate if the action steps aren’t working.
• Goals should be realistic regarding time frame and resources.
• Finally, successful goals are relevant in terms of your values and vision, and they should be based upon a timeline to encourage prioritization and to keep you motivated.
As part of goal setting, the executive coach may also assess your strengths and how these can be utilized in the action steps. The strength analysis will also help define how these characteristics and skills can help with any challenges hindering goal attainment.
There are different ways in which individuals set goals in executive coaching. Very often after a quarterly or annual performance review, an executive becomes aware of areas for development and the coaching goals are based on what the executive wants to work on towards self-improvement. In addition, an executive might already have an awareness of their professional vision for themselves or their organizations, and the goals can be structured from that vision.
Goals can also be established together with your coach. Information from the executive’s role, professional feedback or structured assessments can help you and your coach determine the challenges which resulted in the data. Goal setting is then focused on how to improve those areas directly connected to your vision.
Finally, goal setting could be company-directed. An organization might hire a coach to work with an executive. This might come after a poor review or as part of a performance improvement plan. In this scenario, the goals will likely be based on the organization’s vision versus the executive’s vision. The organization will then use the goals to ascertain the executive’s progress.
When you work with an executive coach, your experience is not going to be like past training or continuing education opportunities. Executive coaching is individualized. It is your time to focus on you and where you want to be. Articulating your ideal vision in coaching is an appropriate approach, not just a pipedream.
My daughter’s high school varsity volleyball team won the State Championships this past weekend. It was an amazing experience to watch, even more so because this group of girls are incredible. They support each other, LIKE each other, visibly and audibly have fun when warming up or playing together, and credit their success to being “14 strong”. They worked hard, enjoyed every minute and achieved their goal.
But while I am happy for and proud of my daughter and her teammates, their success came due to trickle down. The team achieved success because of their coach, the leader of this group. (Knowing the coach is a private individual, I’ll refer to her as Coach R.) It was due to this woman’s integration of powerful leadership skills that the team succeeded. There were four specific things Coach R did which made her stand out as a leader and brought her team to the championship level:
1. She created a platform of unity. Coach R made sure there wasn’t a spotlight on one or two players. There was no “star” of the team. Those on the bench were as valuable as those on the court. When she was interviewed after winning the State Finals game, Coach R said, “The U.S. volleyball team, their motto is ‘23 strong’. Even though only 12 players went to the Olympics, it took 23 players to get them there. And so that’s the model that we’ve embraced this year. It takes all 14 of us to earn the state championship, even though not every player was on the floor tonight.”
In an organization, this approach is also true. Is the success of the organization reliant on one member, or the team? And if the focus is on one team member, what does that do to the organization? The other team members feel devalued. They stop giving their all. They lose sight of the goal. And where does it leave the organization if that one “star” leaves? Left behind is a disjointed, disconnected and dissatisfied group of people. The unity Coach R created became the platform for the team’s approach to the goal.
2. She created a shared mission and vision. Winning the State Championship honestly didn’t seem like the sole purpose of the season. While going to States is a vision for most high school or collegiate teams, it seemed that for Coach R the vision didn’t smother the mission she created with the team. The mission was twofold: play their best and have fun. Watching the team the night of the Championships demonstrated that mission. The girls were singing and dancing the whole time as they waited their turn to warmup. They weren’t letting stress or anxiety get in the way of their fun. They were meeting the season’s mission even in what was the biggest athletic night for them. Coach R made sure the girls knew they didn’t have to do anything different than they did every game. She led her team in this mission which guided them to attain their vision of the state championship.
The same applies to organizations. Ensuring everyone within organization knows the long-term vision but buys in to the daily mission to get there…and then keeps the mission alive even in the face of the vision.
3. She recognized her players as individuals not just players. This was my daughter’s first season with this coach after transferring to the school. My daughter came home after practice one day and when I asked her what she did to kill time between the end of the school day and practice, she casually said, “I had my 1-to-1 with Coach today.” Huh? I had no idea what she meant. Turns out, Coach R schedules time to meet with every player during the season. She sits with each girl and while she certainly asks about the player’s goals for the season, more importantly she connects with each girl as a person. She asks real questions and they get to ask questions to her. They talk as people, not as coach and player, not as adult and kid, but as women and athletes.
Can you imagine what this creates and what the same practice could do within an organization? Coach R’s players feel a real connection to her and her to them. It builds trust. It builds commitment. It increases performance and retention whether in a volleyball program, in a family or in a Fortune 500 company.
4. She demonstrated the behavior and thinking to support the mission. Coach R never yelled other than in excitement. She never demonstrated frustration. She was either smiling, offering praise, giving motivating talks or offering coaching strategies for players to use towards the team’s mission and vision. Coach R’s team saw this every time they looked at her or heard her. Their coach’s attitude and actions became the standard they emulated. She became the model of how to be and they all adopted that model. There wasn’t room for negativity because it would’ve been an outlier, an anomaly, and in fact when typical issues came up through the season, the team quickly dealt with them and positioned themselves back in line with Coach R’s standards.
Leaders in any organization can do the same. Certainly there are times which are challenging, but does expressing anger, frustration or disgust move you close to your vision, or farther away? What behavioral, cognitive and emotional expressions help keep your team on track and focused on the mission and vision?
Overall, the leadership of Coach R worked for one reason: she led based on her own style. Coach R didn’t try to fit into a prescribed type of leadership. She didn’t base her behaviors on famous coaches in an attempt to duplicate their leadership. She created a leadership style based on her values, her strengths and her vision for her players, not the group’s State Championship vision, but her vision as the leader of a program in which each player grew, personally and athletically, because of the support they gave and received from their team. “It’s the buy in. They buy into each other so hard, it’s ridiculous,” Coach R said. “Their strength is in the group. We work really hard in the gym every day on our skills, but we know at this age level having that cohesion can bring you from a 5 to an 11. They buy into that. They work hard every day, but it’s because of each other … that’s what makes them truly special.” All due respect to Coach R, while it was due to the players’ connection and support of each other, even more it was because as a leader Coach R created and showed what it means to be part of a winning team.
My 16-year-old daughter walked into my bedroom this morning, seemingly angry. This is my kid who has always valued justice and kindness, and when she sees someone being hurt or attacked, it infuriates her. In this case, it was a teammate who had been cornered by two other players after she went to the coach regarding problems being created by the two girls. The girls were screaming at this girl in a team meeting room. Other teammates were standing outside the room, unsure of what to do, or walking away. My daughter walked in to put an end to the attack by reminding the girls it was time to set up for practice, and then waited to walk out with the girl who had been the focus of the attack.
In my opinion, a good approach and what seemed like a good resolution. Until my daughter started sobbing. Only then did she share with me that seeing that teammate cornered, a teammate who is nice to others and doesn’t stand up for herself, resonated too strongly with her. Two years ago, she had been that girl, cornered in a hotel room by half of her teammates. It was a stereotypical “mean girls” situation with a leader who wanted to be listened to and worshipped and followers who were caught up in her orbit. The coach held a team meeting but there was no resolution. “They never said they were sorry, Mom. It’s like it was no big deal to them but it changed me. I question everything I do to make sure I’m not doing something that might make people angry.”
I knew that had been a really harrowing situation for my daughter. She felt trapped and didn’t understand why these girls “hated [her]” so much. I had been furious by the way it was handled, but I hadn’t realized it had created such a lasting effect on my daughter.
This experience isn’t unique to my daughter. One of my clients began working with me because she had lost confidence in herself after being pushed out of her job. She confronted a co-worker who was being inappropriate with female employees, and then brought the matter to their supervisor, who also happened to be a friend of the co-worker. The environment became toxic, and my client’s role was “dissolved”. She was paralyzed with self-doubt after that happened, ruminating over the questions of why she was let go and not the offender, and what she did wrong?
How many of us have events in our life which resulted in negative changes in how we perceive situations, how we react to others or how we view ourselves? Some of these events might be overtly significant to others; those types of events that other people clearly see why they affected you. Other events might simply be significant to us, things that no one else might see as traumatic or major but were to us. These past events end up shaping us in ways we may not even realize.
So how do we stop the detrimental experiences of the past from influencing our future? We can start by identifying the situations that leave these long-term, unwanted effects on us. As we identify them, don’t discount them. “That was such a little thing; it shouldn’t still be bothering me.” “People deal with worse things.” “It happened so long ago.” These are certainly rational thoughts but if you don’t believe them, they only make you feel worse. Here is the reality. The event or series of situations happened. They left a negative effect on you. Now you get to decide if the result is one you want to hold on to or if it is time to employ strategies to counteract the unwanted effects.
It starts with your thoughts related to the situation. What replacement thoughts can take the place of the original thoughts? Instead of my client beating herself up over “what [she] did wrong”, we walked through an analysis of her values and compared her list to the values of her former organization. She discovered her value system contrasted with that of the organization. Her unhappiness and discomfort at her previous role started long before her whistleblowing because of this disconnect. When her brain tried to go in the direction of the habitual thought related to what did she do wrong, my client replaced that thought with “what was wrong was that my values didn’t align with the organization”. She had clear evidence of this in the organization’s support of the offender, a protocol my client was morally opposed to. She built on this thought, noting other areas which were in opposition to what she believed in. She used these additional, new thought to move her belief system away from the idea that something was wrong with her. The new thought ultimately provided her the opportunity to find an organization which shared her same values and in which she felt appreciated.
Once these replacement thoughts are implemented, practicing these whenever your brain strays towards past, detrimental thinking is the next step. Like all habits, it is challenging to break this tendency. It is easier to let our brains spin chaotically with the same pattern of thinking. At this point, ask yourself whether you want to feel the way created by these thoughts. By staying with the habitual thinking, you will continue to have the negative effects that come from the past situation and the thoughts originally created from that situation. If you don’t like how you’re feeling, then it is worth it to push back against the thoughts with your replacement thoughts to let these become your habit.
The key point to remember is that you can choose whether you want past events to shape who you are, how you think and how you feel. You can create a practice of replacement thoughts that make you feel happier, stronger, more confident and, most importantly, less cornered by your own thoughts.