CEO Coaching: Building Resilience and Emotional Intelligence
How CEO coaching addresses the psychological aspects of leadership, including stress management, resilience, and emotional intelligence.
It is hard to do the hard things. It is especially hard when operating with one hand behind your back. This is how I see a lot of executives operate when not using practices that are supported by emotional intelligence. A lot of standard education is focused on how to use your rationality and logic when making decisions, and this education omits how you can leverage the emotional half of your brain to your advantage. Fortunately, CEO coaches can help.
Whatever the stage of development your emotional intelligence is, through CEO coaching you can reach higher levels. By its nature coaching sessions contain a strong self-awareness and self-reflecting component that helps tune in your feelings. Regulation and channeling of those feelings taps into a very important aspect that leverages insights of your intuitive self and refines your decisions.
RELATED READING: How to Find the Right Entrepreneur Mentor for Your Company
What is emotional intelligence anyway?
Emotional intelligence (EI), is the ability to recognize, understand, manage, and use emotions effectively in ourselves and others. It involves a set of skills that are crucial for personal and professional success. The concept of EI was popularized by psychologist Daniel Goleman, who wrote a series of books on the subject.
How can these be addressed through CEO coaching? In the next section of this article, I’ll outline a few areas I commonly work on with my clients.
Internal Interfaces
Self-Awareness
What do we know about our own current state? What are our current emotions, thoughts, behaviors? How do others react to our expressions? Monitoring our own physical, mental, and emotional state enables us to take stock and measure our internals. It is not an easy thing to do and coaching can help sort out the different state feelings by discovering clear boundaries. Here are some Powerful Questions that can help you tune in into your current state of self-awareness:
Your body: What are you sensing with your body? What aches, pains, tensions do you experience?
Your mind: What is your current thought inventory? What is your focus? What are your distractions? What are your priorities?
Your actions: What are you currently doing? What parts of the body and mind are involved? What direction are you heading?
Self-Regulation
Once you are aware of your current body state, the next stage is to understand what you can do about managing and changing it for better alignment. It is incredibly tricky to manage all aspects of your being at the same time, however over time with greater focus you will become a lot better. Coaching can help isolate parts that are yet resistant to change and those that can experience quicker growth. And here are some Powerful Questions to explore that:
Your Body: How can you relax a specific muscle? How can you alleviate the pain in a specific area of your body? How can you gain more comfort?
Your Mind: What are your emotional triggers? How can you avoid triggers? How can you mitigate them? How can you prioritize your thoughts for clearer focus? How can you remove the distractions?
Your Actions: How can you interrupt your actions? How can you get it going? How can you slow down or accelerate it?
Motivation
Being aware and in control of yourself is a great achievement, however it does not channel our intentions. We have to dive deeper to investigate. We have to understand WHY you keep doing what you have started. What keeps you going? In my experience as a CEO coach, I’ve found this set of these Powerful Questions to be helpful:
Your Body: Why is your body feeling the way it is feeling? What is the sequence of feelings that have led to the current state?
Your Mind: Why do you wake up in the morning? Why is your current thought in your mind? Where did it originate? Why did you start thinking about it? What are the ways that you can remind yourself about your values?
Your Actions: Why have you done this action? What can you do to find out your underlying values?
External Interfaces
Empathy
Empathy is awareness of how your expressions, being and actions can be perceived and interpreted BY others. It is also awareness and insight that is gained by observing expressions and actions OF others. Empathy encourages to consider others’ perspectives and develop deeper understanding of others emotions and viewpoints. It’s also a powerful tool for overcoming conflict at work. Empathy can be coached through the following Powerful Questions:
Your body: How is your body language affecting the reaction of others? How is their body language affecting yours? What insight are you gleaming from it?
Your mind: What are you seeing and hearing that helps you make up the perspective of others? How can you listen better?
Your actions: What question can you ask to clarify their mind state? What action can you take to better understand their viewpoint?
Social Skills
Besides experiencing showing empathy there are many other social skills that can be coached in order to decrease stress and increase quality of the relationships. Some business leaders engage in executive presence coaching to build these skills specifically. CEO coaching can help you learn to have better communication skills that would lead to increased assertiveness, control and anticipation of the situation. It will also help with conflict resolution, because saying the right thing at the right time can defuse many kinds of negative situations. Coaching can also help you understand how to develop higher quality relationships and avoid or improve low quality ones. Ask yourself the following Powerful Questions to find out:
Your body: What are you stomach butterflies trying to tell you? What are the ways to practice social interactions?
Your mind: How would the other person like to be communicated with? What can you say to create more options and possible outcomes?
Your actions: Who can take charge? What are the ways you can demonstrate leadership?
Emotional Expression
CEO coaches help individuals learn appropriate ways to express their emotions, ensuring that their emotional expression is constructive and not detrimental to relationships. Additionally, coaching can improve awareness and control over non-verbal communication, such as body language and facial expressions, which are vital aspects of emotional intelligence. What are you able to discover through these Powerful Questions?
Your body: What does your face look like when you are experiencing certain emotions? What do you want your face to look like during times of stress or to show kindness?
Your mind: How can you keep your focus on things inside your head and also outside? What are good ways to practice that?
Your actions: How have you demonstrated your expressions in the past? What kind of feedback did you get?
Conclusion
These are all important and coachable aspects of Emotional Intelligence. However, only practice makes it perfect. Through CEO coaching you can create a set of commitments to follow-through and remove the obstacles that might come up for your growth.
To dive deeper and to create a coaching plan for your unique situation, schedule a coaching session. I look forward to meeting you!
