The Brazen Podcast
Brazen is a weekly podcast that aims to help ambitious women question societal norms and make deliberate choices that support their success and fulfillment.
Each episode will cover topics that will help you break free from the mindsets, thoughts, and behaviors holding you back in life and business and embrace your main character energy.
The podcast also brings Calley and Valerie's unique perspectives to the table. Calley is a nurse practitioner, a mother, and runs a business with her husband. Valerie is the CEO of a multi-million dollar company, a business coach for women, and is childfree by choice.
Join us every Tuesday as we explore everything available to us when we brazenly take accountability for our lives.
The Brazen Podcast
5 Simple Ways to Embody Positive Leadership
Want to lead in a way that genuinely makes an impact? What if we told you that the secret lies in positivity and focusing on strengths rather than weaknesses?
Join your hosts, Calley and Valerie, on an enlightening journey into the realm of positive leadership. Learn to harness the innate power of your team members, foster constructive problem-solving, and limit negativity. We'll show you how to incorporate the growth mindset philosophy of Dr. Carol Dweck into your leadership style to build a more productive, harmonious work environment.
Navigating challenging conversations and setting expectations can be tricky, but fear not; we've got you covered. Discover effective strategies to communicate with those who may have defensive personalities and maintain a positive vibe even during tough conversations. We also shine a light on the importance of seeking mentorship and coaching to level up your leadership skills. Whether you're a seasoned leader or just beginning your leadership voyage, we've got insights to help you create a more resilient and successful team.
Be prepared - listening might transform your work life like never before!
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If you’re interested in monthly group coaching with Calley for just a few dollars a month, check it out here.
If you’re interested in private business or career coaching with Valerie, visit valeriekingmallar.com.
Welcome to Brazen, a weekly podcast where we get down and dirty on how we can live a more bold, curious and vibrant life. We are your hosts, callie Hughes, a self-care coach and nurse practitioner, and Valerie King-Mowler, a business growth and mindset coach. In this podcast, we are helping women stop people pleasing and perfectionism, awaken their inner badass and discover what can happen when we take the lead in our own life. Join us as we explore everything available to us when we brazenly take accountability for our life and well-being. Let's get started. Welcome to another episode of the Brazen podcast. We are your hosts, callie and Valerie, and today we want to talk about five basics for positive leadership. We talk about positive leadership a lot, but we still haven't done an episode on the basics of what it actually is and how to incorporate it into your own leadership style in your environment. So that's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to give you five specific things and you can kind of use that to bring it into your leadership this week. So, val, why don't?
Speaker 2:you kick us off. So number one is to focus on innate skills of your teammates. So if you are leading a team, really trying to get to know what they are really strong in and it's not to say that you totally disregard things that they could improve on but people tend to be more fulfilled and perform better when you focus on something that they're already really good at doing, as opposed to trying to kind of push them into that area that's not as strong for them. So if you know that someone has really good attention to detail, trying to shape a job that capitalizes on that attention to detail will not only help your company but will help them feel very valued and also feel like they're kind of in their zone of genius, as someone has mentioned before. And so just really trying to focus on the positive and strong leadership skills.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and this really is kind of plucked from the growth mindset philosophy of Dr Carol Dweck. You know she has a book called Mindset the New Psychology of Success, and I do recommend that if this is something that you want to learn more about. It really goes into this concept of, like you know, focusing on the things that you're really strong in and not spending all of your time trying to make yourself fit into a specific mold by like oh, most people are good at this, so I should get better at it. Like, at a certain point you're kind of just going to be spinning your wheels and your time might be better spent focusing on the things that you're naturally gifted in. So that's kind of the basic idea and concept behind this first point.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and Carol Dweck also talks a lot about, like you know, the growth mindset where, if it is a weakness, like not just being like I can never do that.
Speaker 1:Like I'm not good at it.
Speaker 2:I was not born to do that. And positive leadership doesn't say that you know, if you aren't naturally good at something, you're not able to do it. But it is understanding that there is a balance between spending time in your strengths and also recognizing that just because you're not great at something doesn't mean you can't ever improve. But that doesn't need to be where you focus all of your time. Number two is constructive problem solving over things like venting, and this is a big one for me, because I think I get very influenced by venting and I can go from a very positive mood to sort of negative space if I'm spending a lot of time in that venting period.
Speaker 2:And one thing that's been really helpful for me personally in encouraging this is to start every meeting or kind of every session with a coaching client or you know whatever it is, with a positive like what went well this week and that kind of shifts meetings, because I know that in every job I've had and every time we've had a staff meeting it's been like Ah, these are all the things that went wrong this week, and it basically sets the tone for the meeting. But if you're like what was one win this week. Or you know what went really well for you this week. You naturally are in a more creative, collaborative, positive place and I get 100% say anecdotally from my perspective, that it has made a huge impact on the nature of the meetings that I hold and also just my sessions with different clients. So I highly recommend that.
Speaker 2:And then just when venting happens, kind of putting it back on the staff members to say, well, what would you have most wanted to see in that situation? Or you know how could we have done that differently? And just encouraging the venting to stop at a certain point and there are always going to be times when someone needs to just they've had a really bad customer or client interaction and they just need to kind of offload that a little bit. But I think capping it at like five minutes or whatever, and then just start to say, well, like what could we have done differently or what could we have done to prevent that encourages them to switch to problem solving mode.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that tip of kind of putting a time limit on it if you do have to vent, because Brene Brown, she kind of talks about this concept of counterfeit connection and she specifically talks about it in the context of gossip, where it makes you feel like you have this like bond or friendship with the other person, and I don't have any specific data to back this up.
Speaker 1:But I think a really similar thing happens with venting, because, you know, typically venting kind of like you know it puts people into this more like negative, complaining kind of a mindset and if you're not careful you can really feed off of each other and then it just becomes this, like you know, toxic snowball of negativity that isn't really focused on how to improve things or how to fix things. So, putting a time limit on it and then being able, as the leader, to redirect and be like OK, well, let's talk about like how we can keep this from continuing to happen or how to fix this for next time, it kind of lets them let off some steam and then shift their mindset from like just talking about the problem to thinking about solutions. So that's a really good tip.
Speaker 2:I like that. I also really recommend it for your personal life too, because what you were saying about the connection it can happen too with like friendships or with your partner or whomever Like. If that becomes your relationship of just complaining like, it can have a profound effect on your just well-being in general. So just also not leaving work and then spending you know an hour talking with your partner or friend about how bad your day was, like it is just it is something that is really detrimental to both parties and you know you think you're going to feel better when you're done, but it doesn't really work that way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I can speak from experience on that. When I was really deep into my burnout I would just spend all evening complaining to my husband, like giving him the play by play of every shitty thing that happened that day, and it was like I was just miserable while I was at work and then I was just reliving the miserable all evening when I got home. So, yeah, I found that being like OK, I need 10 minutes to just tell you about all of the ridiculous things that happened today, and then I would like shift gears and be like OK, I'm not talking about work anymore the rest of the night. And that was really helpful to kind of get me to shift that mindset.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think having a clear cutoff time where you can kind of decompress after that is really helpful. And I was just thinking that I have the opposite thing, where I don't talk with my husband about work at all and I realize, like you know, positive or negative, I think I tell him more about the positive stuff but I realize that we don't really talk about our jobs that much. So I'm like I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but like Chandler, Bing, nobody really knows what either of you do Exactly.
Speaker 2:Putting each other. Number three is to fail up, and we've used this term a lot in previous podcasts, but it's the idea that you take any sort of issues that pop up in your company whether it's a customer related issue or something internally and you use it to shape future policies or systems to prevent that happening again. This is, honestly, I think, the secret to growth in a company is your ability to do this, because your company is just going to be consistently evolving and we know that, no matter how perfectly run your company is, you're always going to have issues that pop up. So being able to turn those into something positive that moves your company forward just encourages you to consistently be growing.
Speaker 1:Yeah and this is kind of taking the micro concept of personal growth and expanding it into like a macro version, you know, for like your team or your company. So you know this has a lot of mindset aspects to it as well, where you know you want to be accepting of like your mistakes and kind of instead of seeing them as like a failure and like the end of the road or like a terrible call, like you screwed up, shifting that mindset and being like, okay, well, that didn't work, what can print next time? And just allowing yourself to be humble and vulnerable enough to admit that something did not go well and then talk about how to change things for next time. That's a really helpful skill to practice.
Speaker 2:Number four is to be very clear with expectations and then to offer consistent and helpful feedback, and there is no way that your team is going to grow and improve if they don't know what the expectations are and if you're not giving them feedback. And so I know that every time I meet with a new manager or leader, the first thing I say is you have to get comfortable giving feedback, and you just owe it to employees to give them the feedback so that they have the opportunity to take that information and improve their performance. And I think what happens, unfortunately, is there tends to be a lot of discussion behind the scenes, but not with the actual person, so you feel that you've, like, solved the problem of X person, but you've never actually given them the personal feedback. And so just getting really comfortable having conversations with your team about what you'd like to see going forward, or you know some things that they might be struggling with and some tips that you have for them, and it's something that's like crucial to their growth.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we've done a lot of episodes on communication and providing feedback, so we will link those in the show notes Because you know, if this is an area that you might struggle in or you might be nervous about providing feedback, especially to certain personalities like I know that you know people who tend to be naturally defensive, are notorious for not receiving feedback because you assume that it's going to be a really painful process. So if this is something that you struggle with after this episode, check out those other ones that we're going to link, because it's going to help you get more comfortable with you know different techniques for how to de-escalate situations and handle different types of reactions from whoever you're speaking with, so check those out.
Speaker 2:And that's a really great lead-in to number five, which is open and vulnerable communication.
Speaker 2:And just as you were talking about giving feedback, I was thinking about those people that you've had at certain jobs who you know, if you give them even the smallest amount of feedback, it's going to affect how they feel the rest of the day, and or they're going to make it a miserable day for everyone around them, or you're just going to know that they're like in a really shitty mood the rest of the day.
Speaker 2:And I was just thinking about like how I would react to that. And I think part of the open communication is going back to the person and saying it's a really important part of this job that I'm able to give you feedback, because I do want you to succeed. So, like, how can I give you feedback in the future so that it doesn't create this like day-long bad mood? And I think that's kind of like the bottom line piece of like open and vulnerable communication is being willing to have hard conversations, and I know that we've spent many podcasts talking about fear of conflict and just fear of the kind of harder conversations and the communication, but that is such an important part of being a leader is being able to just really address things, and they're often uncomfortable. They can be very like wide topics or they can be very specific to a certain person.
Speaker 1:But like you've got to be comfortable, like having some of those uncomfortable conversations, yeah, and something that I've found is really helpful if you know, you are somebody who struggles with this, because I am one of those people.
Speaker 1:I hate conflict and confrontation and it used to make me feel like physically ill Just the idea of having a tough conversation with certain types of personalities.
Speaker 1:So one of the things that I found that was really helpful is trying not to really kind of like ruminate on what I think the reaction might be and focus on keeping myself like open and curious and reassuring myself, so that this is kind of like coming across that I'm only having this conversation because I care about them as a teammate and I want them to succeed. I'm not trying to antagonize them or make them feel terrible about themselves or like trying to get them fired or anything like that, you know, just trying to keep myself in that positive mindset of like I'm trying to be really helpful and I'm curious and I want to know how to kind of make this situation work for you as well, like I think having that kind of conveys when you're having that conversation and it kind of lowers the stakes a little bit and helps them to kind of not be so reactive and defensive. So that's just something that I've learned is helpful.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we talk a lot about just it's two people in a room, you know, and just remembering the humanness of the fact that you're having a conversation and, I think, also just getting to know your own needs in this situation.
Speaker 2:I was thinking back to a leader I've worked with and she would need to like basically rehearse in the mirror kind of the conversation, whereas, like I know, for me I need to go in with a couple bullet points that I know I need to cover, but then I need to just not prepare, which sounds awful. But I think the more prepared I try to be, the less I'm in tune with the person I'm sitting with, and for me it's more important, like you said, to be curious and to ensure that I'm reading their body language and kind of being able to answer their thoughts on the situation. But this other leader, I think, did an amazing job, kind of basically almost memorizing what she needed to say so that she could focus on the other person, because it was kind of naturally sort of in her brain at that point. And so just getting to know like how much preparation you need for this type of conversation and also like what you need to be able to be confident in that situation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I just want to highlight one thought and that all of these different skills that we've just talked about, there's a lot of different moving pieces to each of them, which is why it's really helpful to get some coaching or some mentoring in this area, because, you know, one week you might be really struggling with how to have these open and vulnerable hard conversations. The next week you might be struggling more with, you know, how to have more of a growth mindset and be more positive, and so if you have a good coach or a good mentor who can help you talk these things out and sort of navigate with you through these different challenges, it really helps you to elevate your leadership skills and your leadership style that much faster. What I refer to coaching as is kind of like getting to skip past all of your coach or mentors mistakes because they're ooh, I've had that issue. Here's how you might want to like approach this, so you don't have to do that whole learning curve that they did. You can learn from them.
Speaker 1:So if that is something that seems like you would really benefit from, please check out our coaching resources, because we do offer one-on-one coaching packages and we do offer just one-off coaching sessions and if that is maybe a little outside your budget right now, we also have lots of different super affordable options on our Patreon where you can get some group coaching for just a few dollars a month. So make sure that you're checking that out, because getting some help as you're navigating all of these different skills you're trying to build it's going to help you integrate them and put them to use that much faster. So that wraps up this episode on five different basics for positive leadership. I hope that you have enjoyed it and let us know if there's a topic that you're wondering about or you have a question and we can do an episode on that. Just send us an email. Until next time, keep being brazen and we'll see you next week.
Speaker 2:Keep being brazen.
