leadership coach — Blog

4 Things That Good Leaders Are Good At That Prevent Them From Being GREAT Leaders.

Good leaders are good at grinding out those difficult weeks that come with big decisions and many business critical things outside of their control. The trouble is that the grind creates survival habits and a survival environment that serves to make these weeks more stressful and the rest of the time recovery for leader and company.

Great leaders step back and find the perspective shift required to embrace what ever comes allowing them separate their choices from their current level of certainty about the future. Whether chaos or calm, it’s chop wood carry water.

13 Inconvenient Neuroscience Based Leadership Truths

9. People will infer all possible meanings of the leaders communication. If the boss is being mis-interpreted it’s on them to get more skilful at communication.

10. If you interrupt people at their desk to ask for 5 minutes or for help NOW, task switching that is the culture you have chosen and it’s a stressful one to operate within.

11. When people don’t experience their own competence throughout the day their general state is anxious and overwhelmed. It’s on the leader to create that for everyone in the company.

STRESSEd Ley16 August 2022neuroscience, coach, leadership, lead, leading, boss, ceo, coo, cto, cpo, coaching, leadership coach, start up, founder

A workaholic boss is a big red flag 🚩

Guilt often seems to be the thing we’re talking about when we say work life balance

When we are at home we should be at work when at work we should be at home and that’s without considering fitness and friends.

Sometimes it seems like a pursuit of being good enough. Avoiding too much conflict or criticism.

Like we live to make other people happy.

11 Things To Quit If You Want To Get Off The Energy Rollercoaster

More than anything else your energy is contagious.

Enthusiasm and passion are great and I’ve seen leaders carry themselves on it for incredible lengths of time.

But wired energy, nervous energy, hyper vigilant energy, afternoon energy slumps and home energy crashes take their toll on your health, ability to focus, and your significant relationships while also setting the tone for the type of energy running through the business.

The best part is, that these changes don’t require massive investments in time and energy outside of what you’re already committing to.

They just require a change in habit. The reward will be more energy, more focus, more clarity, more calm and more presence.

The potential of where those things will take you and your business are impossible to measure and limited only by your imagination

HEALTHEd Ley12 July 2022energy, wired, sleep, stressed, anxious, anxiety, worry, adrenaline, dopamine, leader, coach, neuroscience, ceo, cto, cpo, coo, cfo, hr, stress, leadership coach, performance coach

Have you mastered the most Important Skill in Growing a business?

Without this skill stagnation is GUARANTEED

When you think about it, incompetence really just means a skill at which you are not yet competent.

Which is all of us at most things right?

If I put together a list of the things that I am competent at and those at which I am incompetent my incompetence list would dwarf my competence list in a very big way.

That’s normal of course, we can’t master everything like we can’t know everything.

11 Questions Great Leaders Must Be Able to Answer in Order to Navigate the Ups and Downs of Business and Life

Well I say must, it’s more if you want to be happy and health and have a fun life.

Answering these questions will REALLY help.

I am yet to meet a good leader who recommends chancing or hoping their way to success.

They want a predictable and repeatable process for success so that they can better predict the future while ensuring that things move smoothly in the present.

Often though I find that there are clear systems for the business but there are rarely clear system for maintain themselves as well as some of the most challenging human aspects of business and life.

This means that business often becomes the safe haven FROM life.

Those leaders who manage these things MOST skilfully have a clear answer for each of the following questions.

3 Things that Guarantee Even the Best Leaders will Struggle with Energy, Time and Mental Presence

1. ADDING MORE ACTIONS

2. Using FORCE and WILLPOWER

3. Expecting MOTIVATION to be enough

It doesn’t matter how much you have had enough of your, low energy, constant phone use or working into the evening, ADDING more actions to an overwhelmed system will always result in more overwhelm.

FORCING in the new actions you THINK will help will always result in dropping it when motivation is low or something more critical comes up.

8 Questions that will Determine Your Success as a Leader

Your success as a leader will be determined by how you deal with people.

It won’t be defined by your ideas, problem solving, charisma, or brilliance but by how people feel in your organisation.

Do they love working with you and for you. Do they feel valued, inspired, fairly treated, well supported?

This is not just about your current project but will echo into your future.

Are you an Impostor?

Do you find yourself making things up on the fly trying to sound like you know what you’re taking about even when you aren’t sure?

Do you find yourself avoiding new approaches even when the current approach isn’t working so well?

Do you feel like you always have to be the smartest in the room?

Do you hate having your ideas challenged?

HABITSEd Ley6 January 2021impostor, imposter syndrome, fake, faking it, leader, ceo, coach, coaching, ed ley, Denmark, copenhagen, leadership coach

10 things that STOP people getting what they want that my clients don’t experience anymore

I absolutely LOVE working with leaders who are inspired to build something amazing while also uniting a group of people behind that cause. The truth is that they are highly competent individuals BUT in MOST cases the skills that got them to where they are are the exact same skills that are causing their struggles in health, energy, communication and relationship.

Through my REINVENTION programme I support them to adopt the skills of understanding and embracing their brain to use it more to their advantage. Using prediction and response to create calm in themselves and others and using curiosity to give themselves and others the clarity they need to become autonomous and happy.

STRESS, LEARNING, HABITSEd Ley12 December 2020learning, leadership, coach, copenhagen, Ed Ley, coaching, leader, leadership coach, ceo, c-suite

14 things I’ve Learned In My 14 Years of Working with Business Leaders

Business leaders tend to wear ‘hard work’ as a badge of honour. Arriving first, leaving last and then continuing to work into the evening often stay up til midnight and beyond.

They do this despite the fact that they aren’t being paid to work hard. They are being paid to keep the business in high performance mode and the best way to do that is to keep themselves in high performance mode. A tired and overwhelmed leader will soon start making decisions based on their own limited bandwidth and will quickly create a tired and overwhelm business. I help my clients to find and protect their own high performance mode so that they can better support the business to locate and maintain high performance mode.

LEARNINGEd Ley3 December 2020ceo, cfo, cto, cro, leader, leadership, focus, coach, coaching, Ed LEy, leadership coach, business owner coach, ceo coach, stress, overwhelm, people pleasing

The 12 most effective conversations of your life

We seem to have created a way of thinking that tells us that time is a more primary part of change than it is. We might say that it takes a lot of time to build a house or it take a long time to build a business or a relationship or a life.

But really those are all process driven. It takes the time those processes take, the quality of those processes, multiplied by the speed of execution.

Warning: do not hire a coach until you read this

How much do you charge? It’s the instinctive first question, it’s also the least informative. Coach is their label, what they are to you is a problem solver or rather a solved problem(s) is the side effect you’re looking for.

Your job when selecting a coach of any sort is to ascertain if they can facilitate that.

How to move from fear to clarity

STRESS, HABITS, ACTIONEd Ley13 April 2020absolute health, coaching, coach, Copenhagen, English, perfection, performance, perform, business coach, ceo, leadership coach, leader, founder coach, start up coach, stress, behavioural change