How Your Inner-Monologue Influences Your Leadership

A key objective of business leadership is to inspire others to take action, perform at the top of their game and ultimately deliver optimal results for the organization. Managers play a significant role in employee engagement, with the most effective bosses setting the stage for their teams to achieve greatness. 

Are the words you’re speaking to your team members supporting high performance or stopping the potential for success in its tracks? The answer, and the root of the problem, might surprise you.

If you’ve watched my keynote before, you’ve heard this story, but there’s something else I would like to add on to the end, so stay with me. 

I was once in an aikido dojo for one of those “touchy feely” leadership training workshops, and we were partnered up to do an exercise called “the grab.” As luck would have it, I was paired with a woman from HR. The workshop facilitator informed us that we were going to practice making requests of people. My eyes rolled back in my head as I thought to myself, “I’ve been managing people since I was 20 — what do I possibly have to learn about making requests of people?” 

The facilitator must have caught my dubious look, because that’s when he turned to me and asked a pivotal question that would lead me to change my perspective on leadership communication forever. 

He said: “If you don’t need any practice making requests of others, think about a request you would make of yourself.”

Ok, kinda hokey — but I was game. (I mean, I’d already paid for the workshop, after all.) The exercise went something like this: when it was your turn, you were supposed to take two steps forward, grab the arm of your partner, and then make a request of them. Ok, fine. Simple enough.

I thought for a while and came up with a request that I might ask of myself: to get up off the couch and get some exercise. (I was on sabbatical at the time, and let’s just say I wasn’t exactly hitting the gym every day.) When it came time for my turn, I stepped forward and said to my partner: “You should go workout. You’re undisciplined and lazy!”

Pause for crickets.

Needless to say, this did not have the motivating effect that I had intended. My partner looked aghast and said to me, “Not only do I not want to go exercise — you made me want to sit on the couch for the rest of the day!” (Which is often what ended up happening when I asked myself in this way.) 

How could language like “undisciplined” and “lazy” ever encourage anyone to take action? It doesn’t. And yet many of us as leaders utilize this kind of language and expect followership.

Sowhere had, “You’re undisciplined and lazy!” come from? After all, I had worked 60-100 hour weeks for 20 years. How is that “undisciplined and lazy”? 

Then, it hit me: those are the words my father spoke to me when I was young. 

After all these years, those very same words he had used to get out of bed in the summers as a teen were continuing to echo through my mind and seep into my leadership communication as an adult.  

Except now they were in my words instead of his.

Here’s what I realized that day: The words we speak to others are often just an echo of the words we speak to ourselves. And the words we speak as leaders will echo in the minds of those we lead for years to come.

So how do you embark on the process of changing this negative self-talk that will inevitably come back to bite you? My approach involved writing affirmations to myself in the “you” form, as if someone was talking to me. 

I wrote: “Your father’s voice says, ‘Krister, you are undisciplined and lazy.’ Your voice says: ‘Krister, you are disciplined and strong.’ 

Whose voice will win today — yours or his?”

Overcoming my negative thoughts involved identifying where they came from in the first place and replacing them to reject them. 

Is your internal monologue negatively impacting your leadership communication? What are the words you use with people around you that will echo in their minds, as well as the minds of their family and those they lead, possibly for years? 

If you're looking to improve your leadership communication — and results — start by shifting the words you speak to yourself. It will not only have a lasting impact on your ability to inspire followership, it will also inspire a ripple effect of positive interactions in all areas of your life.  

Take my Talk SHIFT Assessment to help start a Talk SHIFT in your life and in your organization.

On a scale of one to 10, how helpful was this story to you? Share your thoughts on social media using #TalkSHIFT. 

Bon courage!