It doesn’t matter the amount of skills and strategies a leader acquire. Growth and performance hinges mostly on mindset and behavior.

Both behavior and mindset plays a pivotal role in your overall wellbeing which is why it’s important to keep them grounded.

If not, the automatic reactions to situations can influence your decision-making and performance. The worst is you’re unaware of it. If you don’t see it in yourself, then it’s happening without your conscious input and is serving you in an unconscious and unhelpful way.

These unconscious behaviors are learned from a belief developed over the years that goes all the way back to childhood. At some point you’ve learned that this kind of behavior helped you avoid unwanted feelings or experiences. To protect yourself you’ve unconsciously depended on your automatic behavioral reactions. We call this protection the fighting-ego syndrome.

The experience created the belief and the belief created the behavior. The problem is that now this protective behavior no longer serves you but it’ still operating in the background.

The first step to changing any behavior is self-awareness. Change requires rewiring your brain—the mindset. Ask yourself how your past experiences might be affecting your psychological and physiological wellbeing? Jot down the responsibilities, situations or even relationships that are high-stakes for you. What is your mind saying to you about this? What self-image fears crop up?

Don’t dismiss that this thinking doesn’t apply to you, because thoughts and beliefs affect everyone’s behavior.

We teach how to address the childhood experiences or events, draw more mature emotional conclusions about them, undo what no longer works and respond skillfully (not react) going forward.

You can learn to build the cognitive, emotional and behavioral sophistication that allows you to make more conscious and effective decisions and choices in a challenging situation.

To learn more, get your copy of Lead2Flourish and invite Dr. Deana to bring these tools to your organization in a talk or workshop.