Prepare Your Leadership: Visualization

Hello Cadre crew. Happy Monday. Happy that you're joining me right now or if you're joining me later on on the replay. I'm happy to share this time with you. I'll wait for a couple minutes to get folks started, but as the title suggests, we're going to be talking about some visualization kind of tying back to last week if you were there with me. So I'm Matt Tappe. I'm actually I just graduated with a master's in industrial Organizational psychology. I do some consulting work all over the Twin Cities, mainly focusing on leadership.

So right now we'll start the live stream how I always start with a quick reflection and uptime time to pause be get to where get to where your feet are with the three things of three so it's three list of three things. So the first is what are three things that you're feeling right now? What are three things Sensations that you have Just be right where your feet are. Think you know something's been you've been carrying something all morning or from the weekend. What are three things that maybe you're carrying with or maybe anxious for Anxious of or something coming up.

So what are three things that you're feeling right now? And it could just be sensations like I'm cold right now. So what are three things that you're feeling? Just get right here in the present moment. And then what are three intentions that you have for the rest of the day? So this could just be something on your to do list. Maybe it's you've been carrying something so you want to let that go. So you have an intention to maybe do something to to be able to let that go. What are three intentions that you have for the rest of the day?

Energized? Anxious. Yes A lot of emotions a lot of different emotions probably in this room right now. Swear. And then the last list what are three things that you're grateful for? So what are three things that you maybe from the weekend maybe going forward if you're in Minnesota it's been really hot. Maybe you're grateful for the the weather is finally getting nicer. So what are three things that you're grateful for? Hungry? Yes Is it is about lunch lunchtime so this may can maybe be a a good start to your lunch hour or lunch break.

So then you can maybe hungry and then intention is to eat something simple as that. Grateful for my mom. Me too. I'm grateful for her too. Got to spend a good weekend with her as well. So as you reflect on those three Things with three again, what are three things you're feeling sensations carrying right now? What are three intentions that you have for the rest of the day? And what are three things you are grateful for rooted in some positive psychology? Everything I bring is evidence based and researched.

So and going back to the title of this visualization. So last week we talked about self leadership and the idea of self leadership is influencing one's own thinking and behavior to reach a goal. It's similar to self management but instead of just managing our emotions or how we go into a situation, we're actually going to lead ourselves. So it's going to be more of a positive shift, be more authentic, get to where we want to go and not just get to what we need to be able to do. So this article that I'm looking at is, it's called Learn to influence yourself Full range self leadership training.

And so they took a group and to a training that lasted four weeks, five hour initial session and then an hour session after that focusing on the three principles of self leadership which we went to over last week. If you want to learn more about that, you can go and watch the replay from last week. But I'll just cover it briefly which is behavior focused strategies which is like self goal setting, self reward, self observation. So that awareness piece naturally reward strategies. So building up that intrinsic motivation and then constructive thought patterns.

So self talk and then visualizing success which we'll go into. So what they really found was that the training group significantly improved in their self leadership. So this is all the ideas about intrinsic motivation, feeling more confident in leading themselves and in leading others. And what they really found were the most helpful strategies was self talk. So this is not, this is positive affirmations that we see to say to ourselves, you know, what we think turns in what we do, what we do and what we believe.

So having that positive self talk and really just the first step is always being aware of our self talk. As I say with baseball guys that I work with is the first, the easiest part is just being aware of when you have negative self talk. It's easy to change that or stop that once. You kind of just build that awareness of when that happens because we often get lost in that self talk. But then the hardest part also is believing in our self talk and that takes a lot of practice. Self reward was another thing they found to be successful which is their self reward and self punishment.

So everybody you know might know the behavior technique of getting rubber band and hitting and snapping yourself if you do something, but they Found that, you know, finding more positive reward rather than positive, then the self punishment was more successful. Another thing they found was self cuing. So this is, you might see in sports, athletes do a lot of rituals before they go, you know, up to the, up to the plate to hit or maybe before a game. This does a lot of self queuing, which is mental cueing, priming your brain ready to perform.

So this reminders that they do can help remember to behave a certain way and to think a certain way. One example in leadership, and that pertains to the workplace and may, you know, you can probably use it anywhere is putting your watch on the different, on your other wrist. So then when you're in a meeting, you kind of feel, you know, annoyed by your watch being on a different wrist. But then that can, you know, that can help you remind yourself to present yourself a certain way. So adding in, you know, or a post it note next to your computer to help remind yourself a certain way.

So these self cueing behaviors can be, can be used in the workplace to help lead yourself. And then the last one is visualizing successful performance. And so that's what I'll talk a little bit more on right now. And you know, we do this a lot in sports where before every practice we have the baseball team visualize that practice, visualize the next game and see themselves having success. And there's a lot of work done in sports to mentally prepare, however, for work and for leading and for leading yourself and leading others.

There's not a lot of that preparation time as we're just constantly doing that. So we need to take time and practice it. And you know, you could do this when you go to bed is maybe if you have a big meeting the next day, visualize that meeting, visualize what you want to talk about, how you want to show up to that meeting. What are some challenges that may you have to overcome? The general rule of thumb is 75% seeing yourself having absolute 100% success. And then 20% is you seeing yourself overcome challenges.

There's a famous rock climber, I forget the name, but he visualizes, you know, a rope breaking or maybe his, one of his tools breaking while he's on the side of a cliff. So if you can visualize that and help him get through that situation, if it happened in real life, he's more prepared. So seeing yourself maybe in a meeting and something doesn't go right and prepare for that, maybe prepare with the humor that you want to use. And so priming yourself to be ready to overcome challenges can reduce some of that stress going into it and help you be prepared for it.

And then 5% so 75% just absolute success knocking it out of the park, 20% overcoming challenges. And then 5% of the time that you spend visualizing feel yourself afterwards, how good does that feel to maybe be done with it or having it be really successful, what does that feel like afterward? And that can help build that motivation to improve, to see yourself succeed. And so by visualizing, just by lying down, closing your eyes and putting yourself in the situation, we can help ourselves prepare by knowing what it takes to have the success, by knowing how we can overcome challenges.

And it helps reduce the stress of the event because we already played out in our heads and we go through the situation already. So if you keep going through the situation in your head and you get good at visualization, you can really go into that situation with 100% confidence knowing what to do to succeed. So that's more about visualization. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. Just look me up on LinkedIn. Feel free to connect. I'm happy to answer any questions and anything at all.

I hope you have a great rest of your Monday. Excuse my sunburn. I got a little burnt this weekend so it's a little red. But I hope you have a great rest of your weekend. Get some sun. I know I will be getting some more and I'll see you next Monday at noon. Bye.