Hello everyone!
Last month an astonishing thing happened!
After working with a lovely Social Media person for over a year, one of her many clipped reels of me from a live presentation went viral!
I had no clue until a wonderful Aussie friend of mine sent me a message from Australia saying, "Congratulations on your viral video," to which I replied, "What video?"
She said, "The one on Instagram." Now Instagram has been a challenge for me in the past. I am pretty tech savvy, but Instagram always escapes me. I went to Instagram and looked at the videos, and all I could see were ones that had 5,000, 2,000, 3,000 views. I texted her back and said, "Is 5,000 viral?”
She texted me back and said, "No, silly," and then had a screenshot of the actual video that, at that stage, was at 830,000 views, I think.
Needless to say, I was stunned, and I thought, "Wow, what's in that video?" Well, a month later, it's now had 1.4 million views. It's a 48-second video, and here's what it's about.
People leave bosses, not jobs! I've been saying this for years based on my own experience, and I remember that Marcus Buckingham said that people leave managers, not companies, in his excellent book "First Break All the Rules," had just made it more simple: people leave bosses, not jobs. Well, that seems to have resonated with over a million people! Although I very closely followed it with "IQ gets you hired, EQ gets you promoted, but JQ makes people want to stay."
IQ is intelligence quotient, and we all know that IQ is generically known as how smart you are. Just because you have a high IQ doesn't necessarily mean you're the wisest person on Earth, but IQ often does get you interviews and a job. However, EQ (emotional quotient, emotional intelligence) is what gets you promoted, and many leaders of huge companies these days are saying that the so-called soft skills are the most important for today's workplace.
If that post went viral because people are leaving bosses, not jobs, then it would be a really good idea, I imagine, for anybody who is in a leadership position, a management role, or aspiring to be a leader to pay attention to the so-called soft skills, of which JQ (joy quotient, joy intelligence) is one.
One of the most fundamental aspects of a leader with high JQ is self-awareness, because without this self-awareness and a good understanding of ourselves and what drives us, it's very difficult to be able to focus on how others are feeling around us. I believe the most important thing in life is how we feel about ourselves, and the second most important thing is how others feel around us, so both of those aspects have to be addressed if you're really looking at great leadership skills.
There are many elements to having a high JQ, but for today's purpose we'll just focus on self-awareness and being conscious of what state you're in and what is causing that state within you. You are emanating energy whether you know it or not. You are emanating nonverbal messages 24 hours a day, and if you're not conscious of that energy that's inside you, every verbal message you deliver will be tainted by the so called 'invisible' internal state you are experiencing.
Perspective is a word that's rarely used in terms of self-awareness, and yet it's absolutely critical! I'm writing a book called The Perspective Payoff. What if the problem isn't really the problem?, to help people understand that how they look at the world determines the 'world' they see.
Wayne Dyer, whom I had the incredible joy of meeting several times and spending time with, has the most spectacular saying, which is, "When you change the way you look at things, you change the things you look at.” Most of the time, people have no awareness at all of the way they are looking at things and that it's an actual choice. Or that thoughts are in fact a frequency and have been proven to influence what we call reality in front of us.
In quantum physics, one of the most breathtaking discoveries was that, in a wave of energy, if a human focuses on a particular point in that wave, it becomes a particle. Our attention, focus and thinking change what we see in front of us. In other words, our perspective literally changes what we see in front of us.
I like to think of it as if we are all wearing a set of glasses, and we have at least three different sets of glasses. These glasses are heavily influenced by our childhood, in particular from the ages of zero to seven. They're created by the stories we tell ourselves. We repeat those stories to ourselves so much that they become embedded as beliefs. Those beliefs then form the filter / the lenses of the glasses through which we look.
We have bright yellow glasses that, when we wear them, we look at everything with gratitude, with an optimistic perspective. We're a good finder. We see the good in others and in situations. We may have challenges, but we're grateful for the opportunities that those challenges bring, and we consciously choose to see the challenges as opportunities. We have a growth mindset. We embrace change. We engage and make things happen!
The black glasses are the ones that filter everything we see through a lens of fear and darkness. Sadly, the collective consciousness of our planet is based on fear, whether it's a fear of separation, not being good enough or not worth loving, of not belonging or not fitting in, and just generally being unsafe in some way. The black glasses indicate we have a very fixed mindset. We resist change with a passion. We judge situations and others relentlessly, but most of all we judge ourselves and most of the time negatively. We make excuses. We blame. We avoid responsibility. Generally, we're just miserable and feel that life is incredibly hard and unrewarding.
The third set of glasses are the gold glasses. These are the ultimate glasses to be wearing! We wear these when we are in advanced or evolved levels self-awareness to the point where we recognize we actually are love. (Long story and more on this later!) We look at everyone else through a lens or a filter or a set of glasses of love, and we choose consciously to love, not judge.
Now, in the workplace, talking about love is always a dodgy subject. However, who is in the workplace? Humans.
Humans haven't really changed in the last many thousands of years. We all want to be seen, valued, heard, acknowledged, and recognized. We want to feel cared for. We want to feel that our boss is interested in us; wants us to grow and develop; and encourages us; that we matter to the boss; that what we do matters and how we do it matters. It's really not rocket science!
When you remember that every grown-up is basically a terrified toddler walking around in a grown-up body, then it becomes easier to care for them or love them. Remember, that includes you! Most of us are terrified toddlers walking around in grown-up bodies.
I mentioned that to someone recently, and I was stunned at the response! They were offended that I implied adults were terrified toddlers walking around in grown-up bodies. But they were the first ones ever to respond like this; most people identify immediately with this concept at some unconscious level.
So to manage the energy you emanate - the non verbal messages - one of the most important things you can do is to decide what you can do to soothe your terrified toddler to reassure them that they're safe, that they are worth loving, that they are loved, that they are good enough, that they belong and fit in?
What most people don't realize is that we are constantly swapping our sets of glasses. The real key to self-awareness is to be curious and to work out which color glasses am I wearing right now that are determining the way I'm seeing the world? And can I change them and see what's in front of me in a different light?
Many people might say this is very touchy-feely stuff for a corporate environment. However, remember you're dealing with humans, and everything - everything - in business and life is about feelings. We may not talk about it out loud. We may not be encouraged to talk about it out loud, but how we feel about ourselves and how others feel around us determines our success, our results, our performance. Who buys from a person they don't like? Who buys from a person they don't trust? Who follows a person they don't trust? Who wants to stay with a boss that we feel doesn't care about us and what we do! Obviously - over 1 million people!
If you stop and consider this just for a small moment, you'll start to understand that focusing on joy at work and raising your own JQ are fundamental to becoming a leader where people feel seen, valued, heard, and acknowledged.
Instead of being the boss they want to leave. You are the boss they choose to stay with. They engage and love working with you. Now that's what I call a great high JQ boss!
Zoot, zoot, zoot. From my heart to yours!
PS. Share this with as many people as you can so we can create a JQ movement!
