In this episode of the My Kinda Leader® podcast, Anna is joined by Darren Putt - the founder of Motus Training - a health, fitness, lifestyle, and performance consultancy business.

Darren (and the team at Motus) work with both individuals and organisations (including businesses and schools) and are involved with anything to do with how to improve performance using health as the mechanism to do that.

A lot of their work at the moment is around helping people manage stress better, and then how that then affects behaviours in the more mainstream areas of health such as nutrition, exercise and sleep.

Darren shares how the health and fitness industry are aware that the struggle to be healthy and fit is mostly in being consistent. In fact the health industry is built knowing that the gym would never be full, and it couldn't cope if every member stayed consistent and turned up! Just because it is a struggle to keep consistent, perhaps the 'trick' is to stay consistently getting back on track. If weight loss is your aim, but for whatever reason you cannot stick to your dietary regimen, stick instead with getting back into it as quickly as possible.

Anna and Darren touch on what's in the way of people doing the self-care even when they have the knowledge. We've all been their with the plan, the project, the programme and the focus (initially) so why is looking after ourselves still so hard to keep going?

For many committment to self-care is a struggle because they fall out with themselves and then don't allow themselves to forgive the falling off the diet, or falling out of the gym. That then turns up as a 'What's the point?'. Failure is not an option. What if failure wasn't even possible in self-care...and it's just healthier to think it's a bumpy journey that never ends?

Darren shares his challenge of finding what people prescribe in the health industry is often not what is done behind closed doors. This can come across as insincere, double standards and yet massive profits are made. Anna asks Darren what's the main question we should be asking ourselves as human beings right now, whilst we face coming through this pandemic and also face a health crisis mental and physical health.

You can discover more about Darren and Motus Training through the following links:

www.motustraining.co.uk

www.linkedin.com/company/motustraning

www.instagram.com/motus_community/

www.facebook.com/motustraining/

www.youtube.com/channel/UCr8fbgBZgguZRUYA2dv-CDw

To watch and listen to more episodes of the My Kinda Leader podcast, and for more information on the MKL Methodology® books, trainings and workshops:

www.mykindalife.org

In this episode of the My Kinda Leader podcast, Anna is joined by Tara Nolan - a Master Certified Coach who works with C-Suite Executives and Senior Leadership Teams to disrupt thinking and invite change for a renewed sense of Purpose, Clarity & Ease.

Tara's extensive business experience includes investment banking, headhunting, and most recently coaching. She also hosts The Game of Teams Podcast, exploring the thoughts and thinking of others who have a role in making teams great.

Tara courageously shares her personal background as well as her life in the financial industry. She discovered from her hardship as a child that it had created a resilience and tenacity in her that she then developed into her coaching to support other people's growth. She also shares that deep experiences create deep sensitivities and these can be 'triggered', in other words; create emotional and behavioural responses in us that we often not in control of, and not proud of.

Tara goes on to share how becoming self-aware as a leader was important to her. She describes an event where she was triggered by someone's behaviour and she behaved in a way that she describes as volatile. She went on to de-sensitise some of these triggers and worked purposefully to discover the types of behaviours and types of environments that she found and still finds triggering.

Anna & Tara discuss how permitting and having one's emotions as a leader creates robustness and empathy for others. They discuss how thwarting our emotions doesn't make them disappear, it only squashes them down for a time. Hence leaders finding they may well 'boil over' with anger for example; particularly if they're unaware of how they feel and why they feel that way.

This discussion illuminates how contrary to popular opinion, squashing down emotions for too long doesn't create strong leadership, it inadvertently weakens the leader and deems them less able to control/choose their behaviours.

Tara rightly brings to the table the extraordinary challenges leaders have faced and still face bringing the unprecedented times of Covid19 Pandemic, Brexit, invasion of Ukraine, political extremes, the new workplace, hybrid working, mass resignation. The level of uncertainty is de-stabilising, and leaders face the demand to stabilise the people, the workplace whilst they face the same uncertainty themselves.

Thousands of leaders around the world faced the turmoil and torment of a pandemic with no rule book, no guide, each had to create their own. Many did this with ease, many did not and are not through to the other side of it as yet. Tara & Anna discuss the uncertainty this now requires where care, and trust will need to be built again, or perhaps for the first time.

Tara, as a team coach talks about her three C's of Collection, Context & Co-creation all keys to leading and building trust in teams. She talks frequently about this in her podcast The Games of Teams.

You can discover more about Tara Nolan through the following links:

www.taranolan.ie/

www.thegameofteams.com/

To watch and listen to more episodes of the My Kinda Leader® podcast, and for more information on the MKL Methodology® books, trainings and workshops:

www.mykindalife.org

In this episode, Anna returns to one of the common themes in leadership; that of bullying. This comes up time and time again with discussions with leaders wanting to improve their leadership and those embarking on trying to understand their own emotional scars of being victims of bullish behaviour. How does the experience of bullying now affect their ability to lead.

Anna is often consulted by people in leadership roles who are trying to deal with their bullish behaviour and by organisations who are trying to deal with bullying in the workplace. This subject is one of the central issues that inspired the My Kinda Leader® podcast and why it focusses on kindness in leadership. Kindness must be both within the person and so shared within the organisation. This podcast tells you why.

The effect of bullish behaviour is not only challenging and distressing it is traumatising. Victims of bullying can suffer years of torment, and then post-trauma symptoms. Some leaders come to realise later on that their leadership is affected by their early experiences of bullish behaviour.

Bullying cannot be acceptable, but it can be understood and addressed. We cannot continue to bullying is inevitable in the workplace. We, therefore, have to understand why this behaviour is happening, not condone it, but to understand it and so be rid of it.

Leaders who resort to bullish behaviour must be encouraged to take responsibility and become self-aware enough to adjust this behaviour and to not have to rely on it to make themselves feel better. Anna explains how a leader in good relationship with themselves will not need to bully another person be it a direct report, an assistant, or anyone within their life.

Anna describes trying to find ways to manage this issue for the greater good of people in small and large organisations. Nobody deserves to be bullied abused traumatised in their workplace. We therefore must find ways of understanding what's happening why and what we can do about it. There's no point in having a zero policy on something unless we are going to find a way to address it.

Just because it's difficult doesn't mean to say we shouldn't try. We must appeal to people taking responsibility for their own emotional and psychological experiences and take responsibility for their recovery and healing from them so that they do not go on to devastate someone else's life.

Anna describes how bullish behaviour can sometimes be cyclical (but often not) in that if people are bullied, they feel bad about themselves they are often appalled that they were not able to stop the abuse. They often turn it against themselves that they did not make a stand for themselves. If these things were possible bullish behaviour/bullying wouldn’t exist.

People who feel bad about themselves will often advertently go on to use bullish behaviour against others as a poor attempt at making themselves feel better. Of course, this rarely works, and so the cycle continues.

To watch and listen to more episodes of the My Kinda Leader® podcast, and for more information on the My Kinda Life Methodology® books, trainings, and workshops:

www.mykindalife.org