Soft Skills: The Complete Guide to Become a Respected Leader

Learn the difference between anxiety and frustration. The first step to identifying what gives you anxiety and frustrations is to assume that you don’t even know what it means to be grounded. You need to start by assuming you don’t know what being grounded feels like and you don’t know what being grounded even means.

Track what you feel obligated to do, identify when you can't turn your mind off, and solve your anxiety with gratitude. If you’re open to growth in your life, this section of the chapter is one of the easiest things to implement right away. That’s because it is impossible to have anxiety when you have gratitude. That is a very powerful statement. You can harness that power by asking yourself one of the best questions you could ever ask yourself.

Solve your frustrations with "the work." Do you have any negative thoughts that cause you frustration in your life? These frustrations often represent things that are not realistic or even healthy to do all the time. What if you could create space for curiosity that would allow you to explore another way of viewing each of your negative, frustrating thoughts?

Identify where you're getting self-esteem from others. Are you looking to get attention from other people? If you are, then you may be trying to get self-esteem from others. This is a trap that a lot of leaders easily fall into, and it all starts with attention.

Show how getting worth from others in counterfeit. Getting worth from others is not always counterfeit, but most of the time, it is. You can tell if something is counterfeit if it made you feel good, but you didn’t actually grow. The legitimate areas in your life that help you grow are the areas that will increase your self-esteem. The others are counterfeit.

Replace worth from others with worth from yourself. Are you struggling to replace worth from others with worth from yourself? You may have been stuck on this for a long time. What can you do tomorrow to go replace worth from others with worth from yourself?

Getting your self-esteem solely from yourself is the only way to truly get self-esteem. You have to build the self-esteem within yourself. You must constantly challenge yourself to grow realistically. It could be little things, but you have to follow through, and you have to do what you challenged yourself to do.

Get out of survival mode. When you’re in survival mode, you simply cannot listen very well. Whether you are a new leader or have been in a leadership role for a long time, you can probably remember that time in your life when you were just trying to make ends meet or get your career or business off the ground. That’s survival mode.

Put on your curiosity hat. What makes somebody feel like he is working with a great leader? If your staff members say they love working for you, there’s likely a strong sense of loyalty there. The real question may be, what makes people loyal? The answer is that people feel loyal when they feel understood.

How do we help people feel like we understand them? The answer is we listen to them. We learn from them. We connect with them. Are you going to be loyal to someone you don’t feel really cares about you? That’s not going to bring loyalty. Are you going to be loyal to someone you don’t feel understands you? That’s not going to bring loyalty either.

Develop a listening action plan. You know you need to listen well to be a great leader. Let’s say you’re now out of survival mode; you’re relaxed and ready to listen. You’ve got your curiosity hat on. You know why you want to listen to someone. You’ve walked into the room, and you’re focused on one person. You’ve even complemented the person’s body language.

Develop a listening plan for ad-hoc interactions. There are other listening situations that just sort of happen. You may have gotten thrown into the situation, and you need to use listening skills to get through it with grace. For example, you may be on a plane, at a restaurant, or having cocktails at a networking event. All of the sudden, you’re in an unplanned conversation with a “Mr. Big.”

Leaders who struggle to earn respect also struggle with people pleasing. When we talk about people pleasing, we’re talking about spending time in other people’s business. It’s worrying about how they feel, how they’re going to react to things.

People pleasers take other people’s power away to make their own decisions and to stand on their own two feet. People pleasers actually hinder people. If you are hindering people, guess who the burden falls on? The burden falls on you as a people pleaser. By contrast, non-people pleasers empower people.

Set assertive expectations activity. Set assertive boundaries. Once you learn how to detach yourself from the end result and not be in other people’s business, how do you actually set and enforce boundaries to stop being a people pleaser? Remember, expectations are what you expect others to do. Boundaries are what you are going to do with them.

Set assertive boundaries activity. Enforce expectations and boundaries. We’ve now gone through all these expectations and boundaries, and now it’s time to enforce them. Hopefully, your staff and others would be proactive and come to you. However, they may not. When that happens, you will need to enforce the boundaries and expectation.

Identify what the other person needs. What if you were instrumental in helping the people around you identify what it is they want or need to feel like they’re living a life of purpose? You can do this by asking them questions that they have never been asked before, or even thought of before, to help them get more comfortable, build a trusting environment, and discover what they need.

Identify what the other person wants or needs activity. Distinguish things they can and can't handle. Once you have found out where the gap is between their current reality and their most-amazing future, you can start to look at those things in the gap that you can handle internally and the gaps you need to fill with external resources.

Help them solve it on their own or with guidance. We’re now to the point where we need to help the other person either solve the problem on his own or give him guidance. In Lisa’s case, she’s given three things that are causing her score and energy to fall lower:

• She’s not feeling energized running from appointment to appointment.
• She’s not liking the preparation timeline for each meeting.
• She’s struggling to understand what the systems are.

Create a safety net for yourself. A successful entrepreneur once said that to be a success in any business, you have to be willing to fall backwards, knowing there might be a net below you, but not knowing how far off the ground the net is. Have you ever felt that way in your business when you take risks? By creating a safety net, we’re creating a safe environment for you to take a risk.

Conduct a risk audit. In the first section of this chapter, we dealt with the more intangible risk items. This section will help you make the decision to make a risk more tangible. For example, suppose after the first section of this chapter, you now feel like if you hire a new staff member for nine thousand dollars for three months and you lose the money, that you’ll be OK. Now, you’re proving it to yourself.

Execute on the risk. It’s not that people don’t know they should stay in shape, eat healthy food, and save money; it’s just that they don’t do it. Executing on the risk falls under that same category. It’s the accountability piece to actually make it happen.

Execute on the risk. Create an accountability plan with your partner. Your job as a human being is not to change. Your job is to stay the same. You’re going to naturally want to let yourself off the hook on this whole idea. You wouldn’t be creating an accountability plan with an accountability partner if you weren’t susceptible to this.

For you to make changes and set yourself up for success, you don’t want to leave it to chance. Therefore, as soon as you have made the commitment and have come up with your execution plan, you need to have a time frame to execute that plan.

It’s not enough to get great information on how to gain the respect of a true leader. You need to make it stick. To really understand this, you need to understand the five stages of adult learning:

• At the first stage, a person is skeptical: “What are they talking about?”

• At the second, he is receptive: “I can see what they’re doing.”

• At the third stage, he is engaged: “I can do it with help.”

• At the fourth stage, the person is sold: “I can do it by myself!”

• And at the fifth stage, he has mastered it: “I can teach this to others.”

It feels amazing when you get to levels three, four, and five in your practice. There are a number of activities, readings, your-turns, examples, role-plays, and much more to go along with this program to help get you to the point where you can do this on your own. The real results happen back at your office with your own clients and prospects. Once you have mastered the material, and committed it to your long-term memory, then you will start to see results. To help you get there, we have designed a comprehensive review (and Q&A session) for each section of the program. It’s time for you to recall and synthesize information to take your practice to another level.

Test your knowledge with the Respect exam.