Suit Yourself

“Suit yourself” was a saying my mom used when we were growing up. When I was young, I never really understood the meaning of it. I recall mentioning it to my sister and discovering at one point we both thought it had something to do with us getting ourselves dressed! I never really got the meaning of the expression until many years later and it took me awhile to understand exactly what she was trying to do.

Mom didn’t see the value in yelling or threatening us. She was never comfortable with that type of environment and felt it would only make matters worse. She believed in talking things through, always taking the time to listen and be empathetic. Her way was truly a way of teaching and promoting openness by asking good questions, taking the time to listen and provide guidance… even when the choices we made at times were not such great choices.

I know ‘suit yourself’, was Mom’s way of saying, “I wouldn’t do what your about to do, but you need to decide for yourself”. She would try to help us understand the consequences of our choices, but at times we didn’t listen, and she would say “suit yourself”. When things backfired, which was almost every time, Mom was there. Never saying ‘I told you so’, or giving us a stern lecture, but to support us and talk through the situation, always being very open and honest about what we did and what we learned. We didn’t need to be yelled at or grounded. It was punishment enough knowing we let her down. It was enough to make us think harder about our choices next time. However, I still made bad choices… it took me a little longer to catch on, but she always stood beside me!

In my business, I spend time working with all levels of leadership, coaching and influencing each leader to truly show up and be the best possible version of themselves. Always fostering an environment of honesty and transparency even when mistakes are made. Always understanding and practicing empathy as we all have things that affect us in different ways. Being the leader who creates accountability through fostering and learning from failures. The ‘suit yourself’ type of model can easily be applied to leadership. A good leader’s job is much like my mom’s. She allowed me to venture out places I had never been before to help my growth and development, without fear of punishment or reprisal, always coaching and helping me along the way.

When a new person starts, take your time to teach them, promote an environment of learning, where mistakes are opportunities. When your kid comes home with a failed test, you don’t decide to put them up for adoption, you work with them to do better and learn. It’s no different when someone on your team is struggling, you take your time to help and coach them to do better and learn. Focus on what went wrong rather than who went wrong.

Some may have thought Mom was too easy on us and maybe we got way with too much. We like to think Mom stayed true to her belief in allowing us to make our own decisions and was never really concerned with what others thought. Mom passed almost two years ago, and like any loss it requires time, reflection and a whole lot of sharing of memories to help ease the pain. Mom’s passing personally saved my life…but that’s a whole other story!

Thanks Mom, for believing in me and always being there!

Empathy

The ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

When we talk about empathy, we often refer to the term ‘walking in the other person’s shoes, but it’s much more than that. Empathy and Leadership go hand and hand, the better the Leader understands and embraces empathy the stronger the connection he or she has with their team. Empathy comes in 3 different forms of attention and each one of these holds a very important part within Leadership.

Cognitive Empathy enables the leader to explain themselves in meaningful and sincere ways, a skill essential to getting the best performance from their team. Applying cognitive empathy requires leaders to think about feelings rather than to feel them directly. Being inquisitive and curious about people fuels cognitive empathy.

Emotional Empathy is effective for mentoring, coaching and understanding team dynamics. Accessing your capacity for emotional empathy depends on combining two kinds of attention: a deliberate focus on your own opinion of someone else’s feelings and an open awareness of that person’s face, voice and other external signs of emotion (AKA body language).

Empathetic Concern, which is closely related to emotional empathy, enables you to sense not just how people feel but what they need from you, it’s what you want in a leader. We intuitively experience the distress of another as our own. However, in deciding whether we will meet that persons needs, we deliberately weigh how much we value his or her well being. Those whose feelings become too strong may themselves suffer. In the helping profession, this can lead to compassion fatigue, it can create distracting feelings of anxiety about people and circumstances that are beyond anyone’s control. But those who deaden their feelings may lose touch with empathy. Empathetic concern requires us to manage our personal distress without numbing ourselves to the pain of others.

We all have some level of each type of empathy. Contact me to learn more about empathy and how Simply Advanced can provide your leaders with tools and methods to help them foster each type to strengthen relationships, personally and professionally.