News BlogThe Latest News For You!

A major problem impairing an executive’s performance are his Emotional Blind Spots. Emotions, whether we like them or not, have a significant impact on one’s decisions. An example is the Enron case where executives ran into severe ethical and legal consequences after falling prey to the destructive negative emotions of greed and self-interest. It is perplexing how many success driven executives, choose to fear addressing the impact of negative emotions on personal and organizational performance.

Assisting executives become aware of the Emotional Blind Spots that cause them to steer into perilous decision making territory helps them make better decisions and feel powerfully more secure in themselves. To help achieve emotional self-awareness sometimes new alternative approaches can allow executives to succeed.

This can be illustrated with thr following case:

Following an economic downturn the CEO of a mid-sized public company was faced having to outsource some of the company’s services and cut back on staff in order to reach annual performance goals. He felt extremely torn as he valued his staff’s potential. Not meeting annual goals meant seriously risking losing shareholder confidence. Deep within he knew riding through the storm with staff on board would make the company stronger in the long run but his fears urged him to think short because he might not be around in the long run. Afraid to make a decision he might live to regret he contacted us.

Addressed with him were some key emotional issues that were preventing him from navigating the storm with peace of mind. These included the following:

1. The fear of losing his job

2. The sadness around having to let staff go

3. The fear of regretting a bad decision

4. Worries of how a bad decision would affect staff morale.

Of those addressed was 3) first, as it was the most incapacitating. This fear was addressed directly by having him look at two aspects of it:

a) What was the fear doing to him?

b) What did the fear suggest it was doing for him?

The Analysis:

A) By helping him feel the effects of this fear, he realized it was paralyzing him in his ability to make any decision. In other words the fear was ruining him.

B) By helping to uncover what he thought the fear was doing for him, he realized that it was “supposedly” helping him to avoid making bad decisions and carefully thinking through the consequences of the options available to him. In other words the fear was supposedly making his life smoother.

The analysis revealed:

1. A and B were contradictory and could not be simultaneously true

2. That A felt true and B felt false for him

3. He was unknowingly accepting B as true i.e. was lying to himself about

the benefits of the fear

4. Acceptance of the lie allowed the fear to remain anchored in him, paralyzing his ability to make confident detached decisions.

We helped him

1. Relinquish the lie

2. Relinquish the fear

3. Create a vision of him as detached and confident.

Following the process he calmly and confidently made decisions he could live with and his resilience to stress increased immeasurably.

Other benefits he experienced were:

- Improved leadership abilities and performance.

- Opened up his creative and intuitive potential

- More able to confront challenging ethical issues.

- Reduced stress and improved health and overall well being.

To learn more about this approach or to request a free 1 hour introductory telephone consultation kindly visit the web site below.