Do you ever find yourself feeling really frustrated? In particular, frustrated with other people who seem to be making it harder than necessary to do your job well. If so, this is the episode for you because I'm going to share with you one really simple shift which will make it much easier to navigate internal politics and to influence the people around you that can sometimes be i Interesting to work with.

Welcome to the influence and impact podcast for female leaders. My name's Carla Miller, and I'm a leadership coach who helps female leaders to tackle self-doubt, become brilliant at influencing and make more impact at work. I've created this podcast to help you to become a more inspiring and impactful leader.

And I want to become the leadership BFF you didn't know you were missing until now. Now, before we roll the episode, if influencing is something on your agenda, if you are feeling frustrated by internal politics on a regular basis, um, then there are ways to dive deeper with me. The first is a workshop we have coming up, um, very, very soon on the 5th of July called influence for success.

It's the first time we have run this as an open workshop. It's a two and a half hour virtual workshop and we dive really deep on influencing on building strategic relationships. On my six-step model for influencing absolutely anyone on influencing senior stakeholders and getting your voice heard. It's all in there and I would love to see you on that.

So head over to my website www.carlamillatraining.com and you'll be able to find that on the home page. page. The other, um, way that you can work with me to increase your influence is if you're looking for something longer term that also looks at how do others perceive me? How can I communicate more powerfully generally?

How can I deal with this really annoying voice in my head that frequently tells me that I'm not good enough or who am I? to do something I want to do. In that case, the best way to work with me is on my Influence and Impact program, which is a three month program. We have up to 20 women in the group, amazing women in the current group, and the next one is starting in September.

And we cover all of that. That's my signature program, and again, if you head over to my website you'll be able to Find out about that then, but let's roll today's episode

So I wanted to start by talking about frustration if you had asked me before I really learned to influence effectively, what was the number one negative emotion that I experienced at work? I would definitely have said frustration. Now, since then I've done some reflection and I think frustration is just the socially acceptable form of of anger.

It's rarely socially acceptable for women to be angry. Amazingly, sometimes men can be angry in the workplace and completely get away with it. In certain workplaces, it almost goes in their favor, which is It's super interesting and super annoying, um, but women cannot openly show anger without being negatively judged for it, but we are allowed to express frustration.

And I think I internalize that, so I think I would have described myself as someone who never feels angry, but I certainly felt frustrated a lot, and now I can see there's a very close link between the two. Now some, uh, a survey has just come out from Gallup, it's a global survey where they look at how often.

People frequently feel anger during the day at work and how often they frequently experience stress during the day. And it looks at it country by country. Um, for, so for those fellow Brits, 19 percent of Brits say they feel anger daily at work and 38 experience stress almost constantly. Um, so there's a lot of, let's call it frustration going on in the workplace at the moment.

And for me, it was things like colleagues that just seemed to be quite obstructive. Most of my colleagues were fantastic, but every now and then there was one that I really had to work with that was just unhelpful. Or my frustration came from things like not being involved in making decisions that impacted my ability and my team's ability to do our jobs.

Wow. It happens all the time. Um, and so what was really, really useful for me as part of my journey towards becoming good at influencing and when you have mastered influencing, Honestly, most of this crap kind of goes away because you know how to navigate it successfully. There's still the odd person, um, that is unreasonable to deal with, but most people are not unreasonable.

And we're going to talk through why we might see people as unreasonable when actually they're being perfectly reasonable. It just doesn't feel like it to us. So we're going to start that journey towards influencing. As I said at the beginning, that influencing is, it's, it's relatively complex when you do it at an advanced level.

When you do it well, it unlocks so much. And it's not, certainly not something that I can go in depth on in one episode. But for me, the absolute key to starting to unlock it is this one shift I'm about to share with you. Okay, so what is that shift? Well, we all see things from our own perspective. So we look at things through a filter or a lens based on our experiences in similar situations, based on what's going on for us at the moment, based on the knowledge we have and information about a situation and based on the emotions that it brings up for us.

So we will look at any given situation through that filter or lens and that distorts the reality. of that situation. But we look at it and we think we're seeing it factually. If we're not aware that our perspective is just one of many different possible perspectives, then we start to believe that it's factual.

Now there's some great kind of very visual examples of this where if for example, you look at a three, No, sorry. If, for example, you look at a six from one angle, you would be completely convinced it's a six. If you go around the other side of it and look at it, it looks like a nine, not a six. So, you can have two people looking at the same symbol and it means completely different things.

We've also seen those visual illusions where people are, you can see one of two different images or one of two different colours, um, and people find it impossible to see the other one. We have it within our house, we have a, a bag that we take away on holiday with us. I am convinced it's an orange bag. My son is convinced it's a red bag.

So when I say go and find the orange bag, he comes back and he can't find it because it's not there as far as he's concerned. There's only a red bag. Honestly, I have no idea why he sees it as red, but he is completely convinced it's red. I am completely convinced it's orange. Now we are doing this. In the workplace all the time.

We are looking at situations and going, surely, it's obvious what the right thing to do is. Surely, it's obvious, um, that this is what's happening here, when actually it's not obvious at all. We are seeing things from our perspective. Now, why is that an issue? Surely, it's just part of being a human being to see things from your perspective.

Well, it becomes an issue when you do become very narrow focused and can only see your perspective. Because when that happens, we become very entrenched in our position. We become certain that we're right and invested in remaining in fact, one of the core human addictions that many of us experience is the need to be right.

And we will fight to the death to defend that. And we are closed to other perspectives, which means it shuts down our ability to truly listen and observe and analyse the situation and to be able to influence effectively, you absolutely need to listen. You absolutely need to observe, and you absolutely need to be able to take a step back and analyze the situation.

So that's what happens when we become convinced that we're right, when we only look at things from our perspective. So, it might be we only look at things from our perspective as an individual. It might be we only look at things from our perspective as the leader of our team, and how this is going to impact our team.

It might be that we only look at one particular angle, so there's all sorts of criteria going on to make a decision, but we are utterly convinced that this one criteria is the key thing, and the rest is irrelevant. Now from a leadership perspective, stick, sticking strongly to your one perspective means that people will not view you as an open-minded leader.

So there is something called cognitive flexibility and cognitive flexibility is basically the ability to go into a situation and be able to hear, um, multiple perspectives before.

It's actually advanced level in terms of leadership skills, because it's not what we naturally do. We naturally go in having thought through what we think is the right move. And then because we know that we need to consult and listen and engage our team, we ask other people what they think. But really, we're just seeing if anyone's got anything at best, we're seeing if anyone's got anything better than we've got.

In our minds that we already think is the right thing to do. That's very different from going in. Yes. Having thought things through ideally from different perspectives, because then that helps you recognize from the start, there's more than one perspective. There's more than one option here. The idea would be to go in and completely open minded to hear all of the different perspectives and then to formulate.

Now these ties into this idea, um, that Simon Sinek has of leaders speaking last, which again, is not something that happens as often as it should. So often we like to take the lead and take the lead means setting things off. And so we usually end up speaking first. We might not necessarily share our conclusions first, but we're, we’re already sort of dominating the discussion first when actually if we speak last, it means that people are able to express what they think.

There's less of that group think going on and there's less of that bias towards solutions that they think we will like. Um, and less of that sort of, yes, I'm going to agree with that because my boss said that and that's probably what they're going to go with anyway, or they're my boss and I just like to.

Agree with my boss. So it's really useful to be able to start developing your cognitive flexibility. So how do we do that in practice? So to start unlocking this really core influence skill, the first thing you have to do is just be open to the fact that yours is just one perspective and the other equally valid perspectives.

exist. So just opening the door to the fact that there may be better solutions, better ideas, better approaches, better ways of thinking about this than the way that has come naturally to you. If you can just kind of try to step away from that idea that you're right and you've already come to the right conclusion and just be open to the idea that There may not be one right solution, there might be a variety of different solutions.

And then the second step is to get curious about those perspectives. And getting curious is just a really nice mindset to be in because it takes you away from the right and wrong, black and white, um, and takes you to a place of being really interested, listening, being thoughtful. So get curious about those other perspectives.

So if you are in a situation where you and someone else are disagreeing on something and you're reaching a bit of a stalemate or you're experiencing tension around that, it might be between you and an individual, it might be between your team or department and another team or department. The best way.

To start to improve that relationship and work towards a solution is to try and put yourself in their shoes. So we don't do this enough. We go around thinking the world revolves around us. As I've said, we go around with our own unique perspectives, convinced that we're right. But actually, when you humanise them.

Um, so they become less of a job title or an annoying person, um, and more of someone who's also experiencing challenges. Like you are different challenges probably, but actually their sole purpose in life is not to make your life harder. Even though the occasional person might feel like that, they're actually probably, like you, just trying to do their jobs as well as they can.

And it's probably either not set up so that both of you can easily do your job well, or there are areas of tension, um, that make it harder. So, how do you put yourself in their shoes? Well, one simple way is to, to just think about what's going on for them at the moment. So, what's going on? in their world?

What are their priorities? And where does this fit within their priorities? What are their worries? So what keeps them up at night? Who are they getting pressure from? And what is that pressure about? Um, what concerns or opportunities might they see in this area that you're talking to them about how do you think their day is going today.

Build up your empathy for them. Just doing that will help you to shift your energy and approach to things. Now there's an exercise we do sometimes within influence and impact around how you can see things from a different Perspective. So what we do is we look at the situation. So this is where you've got tension with another person.

We look at the situation and we choose an object in front of us to imagine represents that situation. And we sit there in our chair and write down, how do we feel about this situation unedited? How we actually really feel about this perspective about this situation, our genuine perspective on it without trying to be open minded.

So it might be that person's being obstructive, it might be they're not being reasonable, or they don't listen to me, um, or they don't understand what's important here, we just get it all out. Then, we get up, we take our chair, and we put it on the other side of that object, so we're looking at that object from a different angle.

And as we sit down in that chair, we imagine that we're basically stepping into their position and their perspective. And from there again, we look at how do you really feel about this? What do you think is going on here? So, as that person, what do they think about you, and your approach, and your behavior, and your communication style here?

Now, that's not always easy to do, because most of us aren't practiced at doing it, but the whole point of this is to practice, and to build up. And then finally, we move our chair again and we put it back, we put it further away where we can see the whole situation and we think about what is the dynamic that's happening here.

So you go into sort of coach mode or neutral mode and you look and you see well there's one person and this is what they think is going on. There's another person, that's what they think is going on. What's the dynamic here? What's the relationship? What are the communication issues? Another way to do it is to imagine you're going up, up, up in a helicopter and you're looking down.

Um, so you're basically stepping out, literally giving yourself perspective by taking a step back and looking at the situation and saying, what's happening here? And it's really interesting when we do this. Exercise because people have real light bold moments in terms of I did not realize that was happening or I imagine from their perspective I'm looking quite unreasonable here or they might be really bored of having this conversation or it's just not a priority or they set, they step into that coach neutral view and they go, Oh, actually these are two people with the best of intentions that have got a communication issue and we need to think about how we can respond.

Solve that so you can try that exercise at home or you can just try either putting yourself in their shoes and thinking about what's going on for them or try going up in that helicopter view and Looking down and analyzing the situation, taking, so taking your emotions and feelings out of it and just analyzing what's going on.

That will give you different perspectives. Now, when you show up open to other people's perspective, it can really change the dynamic because I have people say to me, well, if I, if the other person isn't doing this, how is it going to be helpful? But actually the energy, um, and approach that we bring to these difficult conversations, um, kind of resets the dynamic.

It gives you a chance. To start again. And this ties really nicely into my six-step influence model. Because if you can't see things from other people's perspectives, you can't understand what's going on for them. And if you want to influence someone, you absolutely have to understand what's going on for them.

So, how can you put this into practice in the coming days or weeks? Where do you need to be more open to other perspectives at the moment? So where are you feeling stuck? Where are you feeling stuck in a relationship or stuck in a situation? It might even be you're there going, well, the organisation is the issue here.

What's the other perspective on that? If you were in charge of the organisation, if you were Chief Exec, what would your perspective on this situation be? When we can recognise that there are There are other ways of looking at this. It frees us. It makes us feel unstuck. It grows that growth mindset, that idea of, well, I haven't found a solution yet.

It totally shifts it. So really, really powerful tool. Go play with it, put it into action. Let me know. Um, what you think. Um, and as I said at the start, if influencing is something that you find challenging, do come and join us on our influence for success workshop. Or if you're a leader, then looking at the influence and impact program, I would love to help you become even more respected and valued and heard within your organization.

And that's what influence is all about.

Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you're not already subscribing, please do so, so that you don't miss any future episodes. And if you want to go deeper on the topics that we talk about here on the podcast on confidence, self-doubt, imposter feelings, increasing your influence, being better at leading, then there are a few avenues that you can take.

The simplest is to get yourself a copy of my book. Closing the influence gap. If you love this podcast, it is crazy. If you don't already own that book, because it's got so much of the content from the podcast in a really accessible way and so many practical tools and strategies. It's basically a practical guide for women leaders who want to be heard in the workplace.

You can grab a copy in any, uh, bookstore. Now we also run a couple of open programs. Uh, we run them once or twice a year each. There is Be Bolder. Our four-week confidence and assertiveness course, which is suitable for women at any level. And then there's also influence and impact, which is our women's leadership development program.

That's a three-month small group cohort working closely with me. And then my team and I also work in house in organizations. Sometimes that's working with women leaders, whether that's running a whole women's leadership program or running one of our really popular master classes for women leaders.

Sometimes it's working with early to mid-career women where we're often sharing our Be Bolder Confidence and Assertiveness program. We also offer gender neutral versions of that, which are becoming increasingly popular because women aren't the only people experiencing confidence challenges. And then finally, we do work with allyship and supporting men to help bring about gender equity in the workplace as well.

So if you are heading up a team. Or a department or within your organization, you're responsible for the people function or L& D and would like to have a chat about how we can work together. I would absolutely love that. And you can go to my website and book a call, or if it's simpler, head on over to LinkedIn, let's connect.

I would love to take working with you to the next level, um, and help you to become an organization that retains and develops and supports the talented women that work for you.