Tanya Semerad 0:00
Hi I'm Tanya Semerad, former lawyer and business leader turned coach and you're listening to high performance made simple, the show for people who want more clarity, influence and wellbeing, so you can live and lead more courageously unlock your full potential, and inspire others to do the same. Let's do this.
Tanya Semerad 0:50
Hello, my friend, I'm so happy you're here, I want to share with you an idea, a way of thinking that can drastically improve your relationships, improve how you speak, improve how you write, improve how you type those messages and emails, so that you can significantly improve how you relate professionally and personally. And uplevel the overall quality of your relationships with this idea, you will deepen your important partnership, you will become a better leader and role model and through this overall improve your quality of life. It's the idea that everything we think, say and do comes from either fear or love, and that you're either behaving from distance, threat, scarcity, competition, ego superiority, coldness, loss, hurt, pain, or from friendliness, self assurance, service to others. Equality, cooperation, Win Win, from warmth, inspiration, joy from heart. My reason for making this episode is that without having happy, meaningful, deep connections with people, strong emotional bonds, I like to call it connective tissue. And ultimately, your quality of life and satisfaction will be low. And I don't want that for you. This is something within our range of influence, something we can work on ourselves and improve. So take a look around you. How do you think about the world? How do you speak to your friends? What kind of stuff do you talk about? How about leadership? What kind of leader? Are you? How do you provide example to others? What kind of role model are you? How do you think he impact others? What do you do for a living? What kind of business are you in? What kind of groups do you support? Who do you get behind in sport? Charity? Politics? How do you feel about your life? Are you happy with your life? Excited? Keen for your day? Or are you unhappy? Life is so so life is okay. That's unhappy. Let's face it. How you relate to other people even impact how you walk down the street. It gets this granular? Do you walk with your eyes down hands in your pockets? A bit of a grimace on your face? Or do you look up chin level make eye contact, maybe not too much eye contact to randoms on the street, but your eyes are leveled up, you're looking up more or less. You don't want to trip you're looking up. You may have a smile on your face is not a crime to be happy. It's not complicated, my friend. It's simple. This is a high performance discussion point because it's difficult to go beyond standards consistently over the long term while maintaining positive well being and relationships. That's the definition of high performance. When your topics of conversation are standard. Standard means average. You can't be a high performer when you're acting average, constantly discussing bad sad news, gossiping about other people putting people down, focusing on pain, repeating the suffering and reliving trauma. That's all fear based discussion is then difficult to be a high performer. When your leadership style is about pitching your people against each other, I'm talking about leaders of companies and leaders of families. When you thrive on conflict when you thrive on other people arguing, do you pour yourself a glass of wine when you watch them argue, when it's all about you and your egotistical needs, when you are fear mongering, when you don't support people when you're not vulnerable, when you're not real or authentic, when you neglect your colleagues, when you squeeze your customers when you're being unclear. When you're not accountable. Those are all fear based thoughts and actions. It's also hard to be a high performer when your relationships are about getting one over the other person trying to make them feel bad. So they're more likely to do what you want them to. You can't be a high performer when you're focused on creating jealousy. When you're withholding love. You're being distant for no good reason and not sharing the reason. And distance is physical. It's emotional. It's mental, and it's also spiritual distance destroys people. And it's especially devastating when it's from selfish leadership, selfish parental figures, what are we teaching people in our care to be like, life sucks when you come from fear thinking. And clearly you can't be a high performer. But life is way more fun, way more exciting, high impact, high performance, if you will, when your conversations come from love. When you're lifting the other person up, when you're present, interested, celebrating their wins, pointing out the progress they've made past the pain, instead of dialing into the trauma, dialing into what went wrong and everything that happened to them and all the bad stuff. You can't be a high performer in your relationships. To be a high performer in your relationships, you have to have conversations about real desires, real dreams that people have and talk about how to turn those dreams into actions into actionable goals. They can take a step forward towards today. Even if it's a little one, he got to help people see their potential again. When you're leading from a place of love, your leadership style inspires people, it gets their buy in it gets their skin in the game. You acknowledge mishaps, only long enough to prevent them from happening in the future, not publicly hanging and humiliating people. It's about creating Win Win opportunities when you're a leader. Yes, between the colleagues in your business between the people in your family, but also within the people that your business serves with your clients and your customers. And then letting that goodness that love keep flowing into third parties like charities, people who are in need. Leadership from Love is about being vulnerable, authentic, and drawing strength from that. It's about giving clarity of course about what is important, what is appreciated and what is rewarded. When you're speaking and acting from love in your relationships. You're celebrating the uniqueness of people and respecting their needs, while closing the gap between you and them. It's about seeing yourself in the other person. It's about going out of your way to help someone going out of your way to help the people you love. close relationships are also about touch. Yes, hugs, delicious, warm hugs, kisses. I'm totally here for it. We have oxytocin stimulated from high fives with other people. Oxytocin is there for a reason. It's biological, and that heavily impacts our psychological health. That's one of the reasons the COVID lock downs were so crap. It wasn't just that we were suffering from not seeing people we can do that on camera we can see people there. It's the touching people that was missing. We're missing the oxytocin from the handshake, the fist bump, the kiss on the cheek. Oxytocin stimulates that closeness, that feeling of being together, really dialing the volume down on the feeling alone voice. So my friend, where are your thoughts coming from? fear or love? Your challenge should you wish to accept it is twofold. It is mega. Immediately after this episode, start to notice where your thoughts are coming from. This is the first fold. Just ask yourself are my thoughts originating from fear or love? For example, notice some of the decisions you made today. Did you think about doing something nice and then decided against it? Notice what you're talking about with your friends are you finding out what they're doing, where they're going, what they're buying, so that you can keep up, do the same. And be brag about your plans. These are all fear based thoughts and actions, the fear that you'll get left behind FOMO Fear Of Missing Out FOMO is real, heavy fear that you won't be as cool or important anymore, not the top dog in your friendship group.
Tanya Semerad 10:34
A hot tip for figuring out whether your thought is originating from fear or love is to notice that fear thoughts are usually focused on you what you have to lose. It's your pride, your ego, you're focused on your feelings, your worry, your way of doing things. These thoughts are really disempowering. So you're gonna feel like you're on the backfoot. If you do, that's a fear, thought. Love thoughts. On the other hand, a usually about other people. They're about caring, connecting, celebrating, helping, fully empowering, lifting people up physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, lifting people's spirits lifting their energy, it's about going out of your way to do this for people. The second fold of the challenge is to substitute one fear thought, for a love thought, love up on people, and do it, act on it today. Don't say tomorrow. Today. If you're unsure how to do this, give the bonus app called How to substitute your thoughts using the Sub Player technique. A listen after this. It is super fun and extremely practical, you'll feel like you have a new superpower to use straight after it. A quick practice note for this challenge. Sometimes swapping your fear thought is going to be extremely challenging, more challenging than you thought. Because that fear was carved into you it would feel from your early years usually, you may be unaware of its impact on your life today, and how it impacts the people in your life today. A quick story. Very recently, my partner and I were at the grocery store. It was a Sunday. And it was freezing cold in London. And it was I think it was only about minus one. But for me that is freezing. I know it's colder and other countries but I'm from Australia originally. Okay, so we were making our way quickly to the grocery store. We were going to make one of our favorite meals, chicken pesto pasta, really warm, comforting, this nutritious and delicious. Yes. So in my relationship, we have this unspoken agreement that groceries are my domain like 80 90% by domain I kind of have to know and do know what we have in the fridge and pantry at any time and also where it's located. First row, is it second row, third row or is it second shelf top shelf. Where is it? I know. So in reeling off the list of ingredients for chicken pesto pasta, I forgot to mention the pasta. fairly significant considering it's cold chicken pesto pasta, but we'd used it the week before and I just forgot. Right? So later that evening around 8pm And we were home. I realized I'd forgotten the pastor. It only kicked in then and I thought we had the dregs and it probably wasn't going to be enough. I laced up my shoes, pulled on my coat and went out to get the pastor against my partner's protests that the past we haven't been up but I really wanted. I really wanted him to have an easy evening. A happy and filling dinner is part of that vision. I was back in 14 minutes flat and when I got back, I noticed that the mood had changed. And he was starting arguments. He can be a real firecracker sometimes he just couldn't understand why the heck I went out when he said he didn't need any more pasture. That actually it was strange that I was weird. I had to take a freeze frame moment there before I snapped back Yeah, I racked my brain for where the weird behavior could be. I checked my entire body for the weirdness. Couldn't find it. Of course I would get the pastor. Now growing up my parents always helped each other. If one was cooking and realize there was an essential ingredient that was missing. The other would pop to the store no problems. Today, we were missing the past a bit of the chicken pesto pasta, so I popped to the store. No problem. limbs. In fact, I was happy to do something for the man I love. Of course, I was going to the store, I was basically skipping there and back. It was an act of partnership, pure love, no strings attached. But sometimes your acts of love won't be received the way you sent them. It turns out that my guy wasn't used to this behavior, he thought I was trying to get one over him to make him feel bad for not getting it himself. And for me to have some leverage for later. Like, I couldn't believe it. So I started doing my breathing exercises. Let's face it, if this was a game of What Would You Rather, I would rather have watched a show on the couch in peace, especially after having worked that Sunday and also worked through lunch. So I left the room and started to think about it more deeply. Tears also started burning into my eyes, because I asked myself, What kind of past experience did this person have to feel so threatened by acts of love, by acts of care. Needless to say, it made me love him even more, I ain't stopping this love train it is Ooh, it is going. So the point is, sometimes there's going to be a mismatch in acts of love. Don't let this stop you from fighting the good fight. And my friend, it's just change is positive change. And change, even if it's better, is really uncomfortable for everyone. And I learned that that night. So just keep your eyes, ears, and heart open while you do this. Be gentle, be kind. And if you're the one who's feeling uncomfortable from acts of love, chances are that you're looking at it through the lens of fear, fear based thoughts, fear based experiences that happened in your past, maybe your past relationships of your past childhood experiences. And now of course, you're protecting yourself from being hurt again. However, while they were useful experiences at that time and made you who you are today and all that which you know, you are amazing. It's also time to ask whether they're still useful for now, for today, and for how you want to live this chapter of your life. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoy this episode. And if you'd like to support the high performance made simple podcast, you'd really make me smile. And not just because I cried earlier. Please share it with three awesome people. Maybe they're your friends, maybe they're the people you work with, or your partner in life. Love upon them to catch the latest from me not just to catch my tears. You can follow me on LinkedIn at Tanya Semerad or Instagram at Tanya underscore high performance, and I look forward to tuning in with you again soon. Ciao for now.
