What is unconscious leadership and how can it help your business? Making tough management decisions is an unavoidable part of being a business leader.
To lead and manage a team of house cleaners, you need an effective decision-making process. Check out today’s topic and learn how to run a business and improve your team management skills.
Listen: Unconscious Leadership
Watch: Unconscious Leadership
Hey there, I’m Angela Brown, and this is Ask a House Cleaner. This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question, and I get to help you find an answer. You can find this and 400 other answered questions in this series on our YouTube channel.
What is Unconscious Leadership
What is unconscious leadership, and can you use it to run your cleaning business? I got a call this last week, actually, it’s three or four calls that I’m combining together to bring you this information.
There are people that are seeking information on how to run their businesses and how to lead their teams. But what it comes down to is unconscious leadership, because when we have a group coaching call or an individual coaching call, I’m picking up phrases from the leaders of the business.
And they’re saying things to me like this. “I don’t know if I can trust her.” Or “I don’t feel like she respects me. I don’t know if this employee is worth my trouble.” And they want my advice.
You Already Have Unconscious Leadership
Firstly, the answer is you’ve already answered your own questions. It’s called unconscious leadership. Now in our world, our brain, our unconscious mind picks up a whole bunch of things, small nuances, eye twitches.
You’ve heard these studies of you can tell when someone’s lying by the way that they look, where they look or where their eye position is.
There are a Lot of Things Your Unconscious Mind can Pick Up
There are a whole bunch of things that your unconscious mind can pick up on. It could be a fluctuation of tonal quality in their voice, little tiny things that make you say, “Wait for a second, maybe I’m being tricked right now, or maybe I’m being lied to?”
And so, when you come out and you actually vocalize these things like, “I don’t know if I can trust her.” That did not randomly appear somewhere.
Your unconscious mind has been mulling this over, and that is the conclusion you’ve come to. You don’t know if you can trust this employee.
House Cleaners Have to Trust Their Gut
The reason for this is when we are in a bind, and we are often in a bind as cleaning business owners. We have to trust our gut instincts and trust the information that our brains have picked up.
So how do you tap into that and how do you know what that information is? There are a couple of exercises that you can do as a business owner that is highly recommended.
What I Learned From The Artist’s Way
One of them is a technique that I learned almost 30 years ago, and it has served me very well. I learned it from a book called The Artist’s Way.
Now, The Artist’s Way is a series of writings that you do every morning and they’re called morning pages. Basically what you do is you sit down with a note pad and paper and you just start writing. You don’t judge what you’re writing. You write. It can be anything you want. It doesn’t have to be about anything in particular.
But what you’ll find is when you start writing and you don’t stop and you write three pages (if you write three pages). So, what happens is you start to tap into your unconscious mind and things start flowing out of you that your unconscious mind has already picked up on.
You Don’t Have to Hire a Coach or Be Unsure
One of the reasons this exercise is a good one is because instead of you hiring a coach, or being unsure of your decisions, the things that you say, “I don’t know if I can trust her. I don’t think she respects me. I don’t know if this employee is worth the trouble.”
Those things start to come out, then they are right there on paper and you can look at them and you can say, “You know what? It looks like I’ve already made my decision. I already know the answer to this question.
The answer is, I don’t trust this person. They’re not worth the trouble that they’re causing me right now.”
Don’t Second Guess Yourself
That is the conclusion, but yet we second guess ourselves because we’re desperate to make it work with that employee. We need help from that employee. Therefore, we wish things were different, but your unconscious mind knows if it’s no different.
When things start popping out over and over again, these are not surprising signs. Nobody ever woke up one day and said, “Well, that employee didn’t work out suddenly.” No, it was a series of errors in judgment that you kept ignoring to lead you down the path where you ended up firing them.
There are a series of telltale signs, its unconscious leadership, you have to be willing to go down and do the work.
Talk to Yourself Like You’re Discussing the Situation
Another way to do this exercise is, to grab your phone and put it on a recording app and then go walk around the block a couple of times and start talking into your phone.
As you talk into your phone, discuss as if you were discussing with someone else, discuss the situation that you’re experiencing. And again, those phrases will come out and you can play it back and you can listen and say, “Wait a minute. I said this, this, and this.” And as you go through those, you will realize it is your unconscious mind giving you those clues.
Making you aware this is a problem, and then only then can you address the problem because now you are aware. At a conscious level, you are aware of what your unconscious mind has already been mulling over.
Unconscious Leadership is the Key to Survival
So you need to think about this because unconscious leadership is key to the survival of your business. Because oftentimes, we are desperate. We are strung out. We are highly emotional and we’re trying to make logical rational decisions.
But the reason we are stressed out and frustrated is that we are ignoring the signals we’ve already received.
So, think about this because, right inside your mind, you already have the solutions that you need. Think about it. Try the exercises, try the morning pages. Try recording your thoughts and understand how you already feel about some of these issues.
Resources
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Smart Business, Stupid Business: What School Never Taught You – https://amzn.to/3etJnrG
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Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting out of the Box – https://amzn.to/2A0L7cN
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