18 Laws of Power | Strategies for Positive Leadership and Creating Abundance

Hey there, everybody, and welcome to this presentation on 18 Laws of Strategies for Positive Leadership. I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. In this video, we're going to talk about the difference between fear and respect. The difference between an abundance mentality and a scarcity mentality, and 18 laws for positive leadership. So let's start out with fear versus respect. I think most of us can think back to situations in our personal lives or in our work lives where we were in a culture of fear. The person who was our director, the person who was in charge, was forcing behavior, was not open to communication and it created a sense of anxiety and discontent. You are always wondering, when is the other shoe going to drop? What's going to happen if I make a mistake? Oh, my gosh. Respect is empowered behavior that encourages collaboration and supports connection, complementariness and loyalty. When you're working in this sort of environment, your individual strengths and contributions are recognized. Your individual perspective directives are able to be voiced and heard. You may not always get your own way, but you are treated with respect. You work and play off of each other's strengths. So each person takes responsibility for what they are most comfortable with and competent in, and this supports loyalty. If people feel valued, if people feel feel important, if people feel supported, so they know that, hey, even if I make a mistake, they're not going to throw me out to dry, then you're going to create a culture of respect. This is true in families and relationships as well. When we are respectful of one another, we want to hear other people's opinions. We may not necessarily agree with them, but we want to hear them. We want to respect them as individuals and recognize their uniqueness and beauty as an individual. So let's switch gears a little bit to the scarcity versus abundance mentality. The scarcity mentality is based in fear. When people fear scarcity, there's a premise that there's not enough to go around and only the most important, the most powerful, the wealthiest, the most beautiful, are going to survive. So if you don't scratch your way to the very top, you're going to be screwed. And that is an extremely stressful mentality. To have an abundance mentality, on the other hand, is based on respect and cooperation again, and the principal premise that everyone has a role and working together, we can achieve infinitely more than we can in isolation. Think about your work situation. My guess is you as an individual probably cannot do every single thing that needs to be done to keep that company up and running. You as an individual may be very Good at your aspect, your piece of the pie, your part of the job. Each person working together forms the company that is strong. The company can do more as a umbrella than one individual can do in order to satisfy that goal. Same thing in families. When you think about it, in our family, we all have very different abilities. Some are more patient than others, some are more articulate than others. Some are better electronics, some are better with cooking. And we all take the things that we're good at because that takes us less time and energy. We do what we're good at and we let other people do what they're good at. And we spend a lot less energy trying to make the household run than we would if each person tried to do everything themselves. If every time the plumbing broke, I was going to YouTube or somewhere to try to figure out how to fix it, that would take a lot more time and energy than me calling my husband, whose grandfather was a plumber, and saying, hey, Chuck, this needs to be handled, and he can do it a lot more effectively and efficiently than I could. And I can use my energy to focus on the things I do well. So let's talk about these laws of power, laws of leadership, whatever you want to call them. The first one is to remain meek. Never try to outshine another person or try to appear too perfect. People will respect when you are authentic. Now, you don't want to go in and start out by saying, okay, let me tell you all the things that are wrong with me. But recognizing your strengths, recognizing your weaknesses, playing to your strength. And when there is a success, when there is an accomplishment, making sure to give credit where credit is due. You probably didn't do it all by yourself. It was probably a team effort, whether that's at work or in the family. So being meek and making sure that everybody who contributed gets a shout out, gets recognized for their importance, that increases their sense of connection to the product or whatever the output was, as well as to the team. And the respect and acknowledgement actually triggers neurochemical changes in our body, including oxytocin, that are rewarding to the person and make them more likely to want to help more and do it again. Listen more and talk less. Too often we talk and talk and talk and talk, and we want to try to convince people of our perspective in positive leadership. Your perspective is important, but it's important to listen more. Let me hear what other people's perspectives are, because my perspective is from this standpoint. But everybody else is going to be coming from a slightly different standpoint, a Slightly different history. In dialectical behavior therapy, Linehan calls the beginner's mind the perspective of somebody who hasn't been doing it. If you've been in your job for 20 years and you've always done it this way, sometimes it can be helpful to hear from an intern or a new hire or how they might do it because it doesn't mean your way is wrong and their way is right. But they may have a different perspective. So if we listen more, we may get a better perspective. We may learn from other people. If we listen more, we are going to start understanding what makes other people tick instead of trying to tell them what to do. We need to understand what is motivating your behavior and acknowledging their perspective in order to help them feel heard and empowered. When someone feels heard and empowered, then they are going to be less defensive when even if we don't agree with them, it doesn't mean you have to agree with them and say, hey, you're right, I'm wrong. It means acknowledging how they feel, what they're thinking so they don't take this stance of defensiveness that they've got to prove themselves or they've got to keep stating their point over and over again because they're not being heard. Let them know they're hurt and then you can take all the information and figure out what to do with it. Guard your reputation. This is so important to act with integrity in everything you do because your reputation will precede you pretty much everywhere you go. It will proceed you as well. When you are taking a new job, they're going to call your prior employers and your references and based on your reputation, it may impact impact how you what kind of job you get. When you are interacting in social circles, whether it's trying to get onto a committee or interacting at this particular club, how you have behaved in other situations is probably going to be known and people are going to use that in order to get an idea about whether they can trust you and how they might be able to integrate. So guarding your reputation means behaving with integrity. It doesn't mean hiding your weaknesses. It means being authentic, being respectful, being honest. When through action, not argument. When we argue, when we try to convince somebody that we're right, maybe you win an argument, but the feelings of hostility that were created through that fear based or stress based exchange may go on for a long time. Winning through action Doing the right thing is a lot more effective than arguing to try to get your point across. If you are in a situation where you may Be at an impasse. What action can you take? How can you create a win win? Instead of arguing and having to be right and having to win yourself, the other person, Lose win through action. Avoid the unhappy and the troublemakers. And I debated whether I should put this one in here because I don't want you to shun people who are unhappy and troublemakers. You are going to, at work or at home occasionally run into people who are unhappy. Okay, well, we don't want to sit with them in their unhappiness and let that permeate us as well. We can be empathetic and allow them their space to be unhappy. But it's important to maintain your emotional boundaries between the unhappy people and the happy people. Likewise with troublemakers, it's important to examine what is the motivation for their behaviors. There are some people who operate from a scarcity mentality who are more likely to operate from a fear based perspective that may not fit well within your team. And recognizing that is going to be important. Behavior is communication. If somebody is a troublemaker at work, if they are constantly usurping your authority or going behind everybody's back or doing things to undermine the team, that is going to create discontent within the unit. And it's important to address that, to figure out why is that happening. And if that person is feeling disempowered or unheard, or feels like they may not have the tools or capabilities to do what they're being asked, well, then that can be addressed. If they are doing it out of a scarcity and fear based mentality because they want to claw their way to the top, then that might be something else to consider. Not everybody is going to be a healthy ally. It is important to be aware of people who are toxic in their behaviors. It's important to be aware of those behaviors and set effective boundaries and protect yourself. You can have pity for them, you can have compassion for them. It doesn't mean that you have to embrace their behaviors when asking for help. Create a win win that benefits the heart and mind of the other person. When you are doing more listening than talking, you're going to be more aware of the hopes and the dreams of the other people. When you need them to do something, when you want something to happen, if you help them see how that will help them move toward their hopes and dreams, then they are going to be more motivated to do it. Create a win win. Now each person's hopes and dreams and vision of a rich and meaningful life is going to be somewhat different. In a family, you Might say it would really reduce my stress or help me feel better, make me happier. Whatever words you want to use. If you would do XYZ today, vacuum the stairs or mop the floor, whatever it is. And for that person, if they if part of their rich and meaningful life is being in a family unit that is cohesive and harmonious, then doing that may play to their hopes and dreams, may play to their heart and heart and mind. So it's important to know what motivates other people. What is it that they want out of life and how can them helping you help them achieve that? The same thing is true in business. If you know that one of your subordinates or one of your colleagues wants a promotion or wants a transfer, how is it and you need them to do something, how is it that helping you might help them move towards that transfer? Whether it's promoting goodwill within the team, or showing that they're a team player, or even creating connections with the department that they want to transfer to. Whatever it is, how is it that it's beneficial to them? And yes, it sounds self serving and it kind of is, but that is how we're wired. How is it going to help me? How is using my energy to do this going to help me move toward my vision of a rich and meaningful life? Don't build a fortress around your body, mind or heart. Isolation is dangerous. It doesn't mean you have to have 50 people coming over to your house for a barbecue every weekend. But it's important to have supports. As I said at the beginning, none of us is the master of everything. We need other people in our life. So avoid building a fortress around yourself, around your body. When you have people in proximity, it can make you feel more connected. It doesn't mean you have to let people get all up in your space. But becoming a hermit, avoiding interacting with people in real life actually has negative consequences on our neurotransmitters. In work, you know, obviously in the workplace, that's not very touchy feely. So building a fortress around your body is not really applicable. But your mind and your heart are applicable in every situation. Don't build a fortress around it. Don't build walls that are 6ft thick and 5,000ft high made of solid lead. So people can't get to know you. Can't get to understand how you think and your ideas and your creativity. Likewise, they can't get to your heart to feel your compassion or to give you compassion. If you keep them a wall up, not only are you not interacting with them, but they're not able to give to you know who you're dealing with, though, including their reputation, their strengths and weaknesses. If you're building a team, you are hiring people to be part of that team. You want to know, are they going to behave with integrity? What are their strengths and how are can they be integral to this team? You don't want every person on your crew to be a framer. If you're building a house, you know you need electricians, you need plumbers, you need other people. So it's important to know what their strengths and their weaknesses are. Same thing in a family. Now, as a family, you're likely not choosing who comes and goes, but know their reputation and their strengths and weaknesses and build on those. When you build on people's strengths, you are enhancing their talents. You are helping them feel needed and important. And that is rewarding. That develops that sense of loyalty and respect. Surrender to transform weakness into power. Now, there are two ways to look at this. When you are not able to win, when you're not able to achieve something, continuing to try to do it, knowing that you can't achieve it, you're just throwing good energy after bad. So at a certain point, the power move is to say, no, I'm not going to continue doing this. I'm going to conserve my energy and use it for something that I can win. Use it for something that I can do. Synergizing is another way to transform weakness into power. If we recognize, hey, I can't win this, I can't do this, this is a weakness I have. And we'll use plumbing as perfect example. This is a weakness I have. I cannot right now change a faucet. However, I know people who can. So synergizing using people whose strengths complement my resources creates power. Creates power, a more effective use of energy. And when you have more available energy, guess what? You've got more power at work. The same thing is true. Transform weaknesses into power. If you've got one person who is really strong in something, enhance that, nurture that, develop that. Instead of being concerned that they are going to try to overthrow you or usurp you, nurturing them and recognizing that there's plenty of room for growth, concentrate your resources. And this kind of plays off of transforming weaknesses. You've only got so much energy in a day or in your body. You've only got so much time in a day, so many days in a year. So concentrating your resources, using your time and your energy wisely to help you move toward what's important in your rich and meaningful life is going to help you build abundance. When you are concentrating your resources and you're focused on at work getting X project accomplished, then that is going to make you more abundant. You're going to be better at getting that task done, getting it off the table. When you concentrate your resources, you're also looking at, what other resources do I have that aren't just me? You know, I have my time and energy. But if I divide this project so there are six of us working on it and each person does what they're really good at, then we can probably get it done in a sixth of the time and a sixth of each person's energy. So each person has 5, 6 of their energy left over. Do or do not. There is no try. As Yoda would say, it is important to avoid hesitation and timidness when you are taking steps in your life. If you're too hesitant and you're too timid, you may stay stuck in your own head and never actually take action. 95% of the time, any action you take is not permanent. If you take an action and you realize, hey, this isn't going well, I need to change direction a little bit, okay, then you can do that. And I actually have an acronym for that, that's beta testing. When you need to do something, when you need to make a choice or a decision or start something, take a breath, evaluate the situation, talk and listen to other people about what the options are and then act tentatively. And what I mean by that is act. But recognize that if you take that action and you do it and you give it a hundred percent and it's not taking you the way you want to go or need to go. You can modify, you can modify the direction. This is true in life. If you are starting college, maybe you started out under a particular major and then you realized, hey, this is not really for me, and you choose a different major, you switch majors. That happens to the majority of people, not everybody, but the majority of people. If you get into a relationship, you know, maybe you decide, hey, you know, this sounds like a good thing. And you get into a relationship and six months or three years down the road you're like, this isn't really working, then you can consider, what are my options? Use rapid cycle change instead of an immediate overhaul. Humans are creatures of habit. And whether you're trying to change how your family that your family dynamics, or you're trying to change something at work, coming in and just turning everything on its head increases anxiety, adds to Uncertainty. And most of the time, people are not going to be able to handle multiple simultaneous changes effectively. Think about if you've ever made a New Year's resolution to get healthier, and you decide you're going to start eating healthier and going to the gym and stop smoking and whatever else you're going to do. Like these six things. Beginning January 1st, how effective are most people at doing a complete overhaul? Now, there is the occasional person who does better, just, you know, jumping into the deep end. But the majority of people in families, the majority of people as individuals, and the majority of people in workplaces do a lot better with what's called rapid cycle change. Make a small change, integrate it, get it so it is something that everybody is doing and it has now become the new habit. See how that impacts the overall output or outcome, and then decide the next small change. So, for example, with nutrition, you may decide that you want to eat healthier. Okay, Rapid cycle change would say, start by making sure that you're staying hydrated for a week or a month. And then once you get to the point where you are regularly getting enough fluid in your system every day, then you can make another change, maybe adding colors to your diet so you're eating more antioxidants, but you're making small changes. And with each small change, you're able to evaluate, is this working for me or is it not? Sometimes you make a small change. Maybe at work, you move Sam from one position to another, thinking that that would be more effective in accomplishing the tasks in the department, and Sam gets to that new position and is just not cutting it. Okay, that was a small change. You recognize that the problems started when you made that change. So you may move Sam back to the original position. But rapid cycle change is really awesome because you are able to evaluate the effectiveness of every small change. You're able to effectively focus on one thing at a time and make it a permanent change before you start adding the next one. And so you have one thing at a time that's done really well instead of six things done all at once, but they're done halfway. Stop when you reach the goal. Else you may get sloppy or waste energy on a low return on your investment. Think about, and I do this a lot. Oh, my gosh, I'll go outside and y' all know that I typically, not typically I have shoulder problems, back problems. You know, I'm 50. And so I will go outside into the garden, and I will start pulling weeds and I will start cleaning up things with the Intention of staying out there for two hours. And at the end of two hours, I'm like, I still got a little bit more. Let me do one more thing, one more thing, one more thing. And yes, I keep getting more things done, but inevitably I pay for it at the end of the night because I usually end up straining a muscle or aggravating my shoulder injury. And so it ends up having deleterious consequences. I'm getting sloppy if I'm not really careful about my posture and how much time I spend doing certain things. Sometimes you may just waste energy on a low return on investment. If you're working on a project for work and you get it done and it is good, it is a, we'll call it an A project, but you continue to work on it for another two weeks to move it from an A project to an A project. How much benefit did you get out of all of that extra energy? Because pushing it that extra 2% probably took 50% of the energy it it took you to get it done. So it takes a whole lot more energy to get it that last 2, 3, 4% of the way. Is it worth it? Were the benefits? Was the return on your time and energy investment worth it? Did you sacrifice other things that were important because you felt you needed to push it that extra 2%? For a lot of us, pushing it that extra 2% may mean sacrificing going to the gym, sacrificing sleep, sacrificing family activities. If we're talking about something at work, for example, Recreate yourself. I love this one. Every moment you is an opportunity for a new beginning. You don't have to wait till tomorrow morning or next week or first of next month. Every moment is an opportunity for a new beginning. You can recreate yourself. However, in order to do that, you need to know who you want to be. You need to define yourself. And we talk about this in the video on creating a rich and meaningful life. But what kind of a person do you want to be? What, what things do you believe? Actually talking to yourself or evaluating your thoughts and your beliefs to figure out who am I? What do I believe? What are my strengths? What are my weaknesses? Don't let others define you. And that's really important. Too often we let society tell us who we are or who we could be or what we can do and what we can't do. And it's important, important to, you know, obviously stay within laws, not encouraging anything other than that, but by obeying laws and not hurting other people, what can you do? To define yourself as a unique person, do you? My daughter went through a phase when she was a teenager, or she kind of dressed to the beat of her own drummer. And it was very creative. It wasn't something I would have put together, but that's what she wanted to do. She didn't let mainstream media tell her what to wear, how to dress. She was going to communicate her independence through her presentation. That takes a lot of courage, but it is really liberating when you do that and other people are receptive. Not everybody's going to be receptive. That's okay. You don't need everybody to like you, and that is part of abundance at work. Don't let others define you. If you think you would be a really good department manager or XYZ job person and that's not the track you're on, or people say, no, that's not for you. If you think it's for you, then figure out how to make it happen. Don't let people tell you that you can't do it. What do you need to do if that is part of how you want to define yourself? Be adaptable. And that goes along with defining yourself. Be adaptable to the environment. Recognizing that every moment's a new beginning. Sometimes you may be going full steam ahead on something, and then life throws you a curveball, and being adaptable means you can step back and go, okay, got to put this on hold for a second and deal with this over here at work. When I used to work in community mental health, we would frequently have budgetary changes because a lot of our funding came from the state and from the feds, and we had to be adaptable. How can we still achieve our mission within the new monetary guidelines that we have? How can we continue to provide the same services and meet the needs of our population? We had to be adaptable in order to meet the mission. In personal life, things may happen. I was working at the community mental health center. I was going to graduate school, and I was pregnant with my first child. And lo and behold, he decided to come out almost three months early. And so it was important to recognize that while I wanted to continue working and I wanted to continue graduate school and everything, I had to take some time off. I ended up taking off a semester from school and having to take a extended leave from work because my son was in the neonatal intensive care unit. And that was more important to me. I had to adapt and switch my energies, move my energies to what was important to me. Begin with the end in mind. And that goes back. I know I've said it multiple times today. Defining your rich and meaningful life. Who's important? What do those relationships look like? When. What activities are important, what accomplishments are important? You only have so much energy, and it's important to kind of know where you're going. So when things come towards you, when you have to make choices, whether it's at work, where you want to go, your organizational mission, or at home, your personal mission, when options come towards you, you have the ability to say, yes, I'm going to devote my energy and time to that because that will help me move toward my goal. Or that sounds really appealing, but it's not moving me towards my goal. And I don't have the spare energy to go on a wild goose chase right now. Don't dwell on what you don't have. A lot of anxiety, a lot of frustration and resentment and anger, envy and jealousy. And a lot of energy is spent by a lot of people dwelling on what they can't do or what they don't have, instead using that energy to figure out, okay, what can I do in order to work towards the things I can get? Don't focus on the things you can't. I can't be five' ten. That's not gonna happen. I'm five' four and a quarter, and I'm probably gonna shrink a little bit as I age. I'm not gonna get taller. So I can't dwell on the fact that I'm not five' ten. What can I focus on? I can't dwell on a lot of other things that I. Well, I could, but it doesn't do me any good to dwell on things I don't have. It's important to take time each day to mindfully appreciate what you do have, recognize what do you have right now that is important in your rich and meaningful life? What things in your life currently exist to which you're committed, to which you have energy allotted, and make sure to give the time and energy, devote time and energy to each one of those things. When I was a supervisor, it was important for me to make sure that I mindfully appreciated each of my staff on a regular basis. Now, I had 87 people that reported to me, so mindfully appreciating each one each day wasn't going to happen. However, it was important to me to make sure that I regularly called people out for what they were doing right, for what they were doing well, and making sure that they knew that they were part of the team and appreciated and noticed and heard that can go such a long way. The same thing is true in families. Too often it's the whole no news is good news sort of approach to life and parenting. If I'm not being yelled at, then things must be pretty good. But taking time in your relationships, whether it's your nuclear family or your friendships, taking time to appreciate one another strengthens those bonds and creates that synergy and creates that abundance. So you have those resources when they're there. You have those people that hey, you know you can call on when you need them and they know they can call on you. I hope this has given you some ideas about ways that you might embrace a more person centric approach or a more abundance mindset oriented approach to leadership and relationships.