Have you ever thrown a pebble into a still pond or lake and caught the moment perfectly? By that, I mean as the pebble hits the water it creates a series of concentric circles that ripple out from the centre.
It is beautiful when you get it right and that’s what Julia and I call the ripple effect.
As we all go about our daily lives, whether it be at home or work, each and every one of us creates a ripple around us. And the thing is, most of us are pretty unaware of that.
We call it the impact ripple and it aligns with the imagery of the pebble causing all those ripples.
Now we have created the image in your mind, it is easy to see how it effects our relationships.
If we think about where the stone actually touches the water, that’s the effect of the ripple on ourselves. We are the centre and what we radiate out needs to be thought about from a leadership perspective.
Meaning we are impacting ourselves. If we extrapolate that to the next level, in a business sense with your teams, or your family, you are directly impacting the people directly around you and now we know we can think about the consequences both positive and negative as the potential of the cascade to influence our colleagues, customers, clients or suppliers, maybe even your shareholders, should not be underestimated.
In this podcast we discuss the importance of understanding your personal ripple, the emotions and how to adapt your leadership style by being self-aware about your personal style.
We consider what happens if you’re unaware of the impact you’re having and how it manifests itself, which could be a fall in productivity across your organisation.
It is about connecting and understanding the ripple and we then introduce what we can learn from the horses. They are perfect teachers.
Have you witnessed a boss that suddenly decides to walk the floor wreaking havoc causing a trail of negative emotions? In this podcast, we describe it as a wake and turn to the horses to demonstrate how leaders can improve their personal ripple effect by getting to know their self.
We then move on to talk about being in the present. What does that mean?
When a leader is in the space of being really present, that’s really important because it’s the space where one can really connect. The horses are very good at doing it as they live in the present moment. Horses don’t walk around wondering, oh, I wonder what happened yesterday or, you know, I wonder what I’m having for dinner tonight. They’re actually living right now in the present tense. So the first part of awareness for any leader, is really noticing and sensing how they’re feeling in that moment.
It comes down to instinct and gut feeling and knowing that once you are aware of how you are feeling and being really good at understanding the present, then you move into the next step.
That means we have to know how we communicate and show our gravitas and how to channel emotions.
When our clients come and work with the horses, they really get in to the present with the horse immediately.
Some maybe nervous but as Paul Ekman, an emotion researcher thinks, being self-aware is such a powerful skill to have and is influenced by the way we breathe and the horses powerfully demonstrate this. Another way of getting immediate feedback in the moment is the 360° feedback as well as doing a personal SWOT assessment.
Any nervous energy has to be channeled we consider techniques for breathing that will really help you as a leader. Julia explains how box breathing helps her.
We have to make sure that we remain confident, trustworthy and show we are in control. We discuss the need to build rapport and understand body language ensuring that if, in a Covid-19 world, we can’t use our hands to shape we use our eyes, we use smile, we use our heads. We look at how to break down the barriers that body language causes, such as having good eye contact – that’s vital. It’s building rapport.
By listening to the podcast we would ove you to walk away with today, knowing how to make a positive impact.
Do you know if you leaving people with a great impact – or are you leaving them with a negative one?
Show Notes:
Here are the highlights from this episode
- The Impact Ripple Concept – what is it? (1:04)
- How the impact ripple is felt on ourselves and in our organisations (1:32)
- The importance of understanding self-awareness (2:27)
- Impact of getting your gravitas right (3:43)
- The leadership wake concept (4:24)
- How to influence (5:25)
- How the horses help (7:00)
- The Awareness Wheel (7:36) Email us for a copy
- The importance of being present (8:00)
- Gut instinct and intuition (9:14)
- Being present with the horses (10:50)
- Who is Paul Eckman (11:28) https://www.paulekman.com/
- The importance of breathing (12:14)
Julia Felton (aka The Business Wrangler) is the founder of Business HorsePower. Business leaders, entrepreneurs and executives hire her to accelerate their business performance by harnessing the energy of their people to work more collaboratively together. By aligning purpose with actions the team achieves exponential results as everyone starts pulling in the same direction.
Julia believes that business is a force for good and through designing purpose-driven businesses that leverage the laws of nature, and the herd, you can create businesses founded on the principles of connection, collaboration and community that make a significant impact in the world.