Leadership Lessons: How I Learned to Care Less

I am very interested in self-development and last year I took the Barret Values Centre personal-values assessment, which I had heard was a good tool to work out what is important and motivates you, as well as the areas that require development.

My results showed that my only fear-based value was ‘being liked.’

Upon reflection, I agreed that this was something that was holding me back. My company had scaled quickly from 20 to over 100 people in a short space of time and I was making difficult, often unpopular, decisions on a daily basis.

Dick Costolo, who served five years as CEO of Twitter, said that “as a leader, you need to care deeply about your people while not worrying what they think about you”, but this was a balance I was finding difficult to manage at that time. I was second-guessing and qualifying myself too often and was distracted by worrying what people were thinking, rather than being able to focus solely on what had to be done.

Taking Action

On a friend’s recommendation, I visited Fiona Nicolson, a cognitive hypnotherapist with experience working with business leaders.

Cognitive hypnotherapy differs from traditional hypnotherapy because it also draws on recent discoveries in psychology, cognitive theory and neuro linguistic programming (NLP). It works to unlock potential through pinpointing and positively changing the negative beliefs that can hold individuals back.

It appealed to me because it focuses on identifying and responding to the actual root cause of my reaction to situations rather than just generically treating the symptoms. I began to realise that my worrying about whether people liked me had arisen from a range of beliefs that I had accumulated through my life and experiences.

A huge percentage of our daily behavior is driven by our unconscious mind and the unconscious uses past experiences to give context to present situations and controls our behavior during times of strong emotional response. Anxieties or worries in adulthood are mostly driven by the perceptions and beliefs established in childhood that we hold about ourselves and the world we live in.

It is very common for people to have a belief system that is in some way holding them back from reaching their potential. These belief systems can range from worrying whether people like you, to a strong fear of getting things wrong.

Strong fear can be paralysing – a fear of getting things wrong can manifest in not making decisions at all or an inability to delegate.

Changing Perspectives

When we started the sessions, Fiona asked me to calibrate out of 10 how much I cared that people liked me – my answer was eight. We agreed we would be aiming to get it down to about four.

I believe that caring a certain amount about what people think about you is really important as a leader – being empathetic, open and sensitive to other people is how I like to manage my businesses – the key was to ensure that it never became a driving force.

Fiona explained that some negative beliefs or feelings should optimally be a level zero – like feeling not good enough. Other fears—for example, a fear of failure—can be counter-productive if it is high, but it can be useful and even motivational for some business leaders if it is around three or four.

The change was not instantaneous for me. Fiona had warned me that everyone is different in how they process the changes, and how quickly. For some the effects are profound; for others the difference is subtler.

However, over a few months I began to notice micro-changes in how I was feeling in certain situations.

When I was dealing with a relevant situation at work, I would actually hear a voice in my head saying, “Who cares what they think?” I found my head began to feel clearer because I was no longer being distracted by my perception of whether they liked me and what I was saying.

Lasting Impact

After my sessions, I decided to roll out cognitive hypnotherapy as a company benefit for all of my employees in London. Everybody went with different issues, ranging from travel anxiety to fear of failure, low self-esteem and financial instability.

I believe that everybody is disproportionately held back by anxieties that may appear insignificant, but can have a huge effect on everything that an individual does. We should always be focused on removing friction, such as any type of anxiety, as a crucial part of unlocking potential in all talent.

(This article is written by Callum Negus-Fancey, CEO, Lets Go, and a YPO member since 2014)

(Image: Thinkstock)