Wael El Helou on Lands Work, Theatre and Refugee Integration – CRR Global – Podcast

In a podcast hosted by CRR Global, Katie Churchman interviewed our MD and former Director of CRR Lebanon, Wael el Helou, and discussed how he used ORSC tools to help open up a dialogue between Lebanon students and Syrian Refugees. Lebanon has the largest per capita population of Syrian refugees in the world. As of 2020, the Lebanese government estimates their country hosts 1.5 million Syrian refugees.

During this episode, you can learn more about the concept of World Work, which embraces the idea that we are continuously impacting the world, whether we are conscious of it or not. Whilst World Work can involve big acts of altruism and community spirit, it always starts with self. Across the course of this episode, you will be hearing from Wael how he used ORSC tools to serve the wider community.

To watch full episode  Click here 

Leadership in the Times of Crisis

An article by Wael El Helou

In a region that has been hit by adverse economic and market conditions for a few years now, crisis has become the new normal. Political turbulence, instability, wars, sanctions, corruption, and the list goes on and on making Maslow’s pyramid of needs go nuts over what to service first and what priorities look like, today.

On the individual, ‘person’ level, the reflection of those is even more severe with a duality of roles that stretches the most conditioned amongst us beyond their farthest comfort zone. Leaders, subject to personal, family, financial, life and corporate struggles, are there with an expectation to lead forward. Stress, helplessness, low morale, disengagement, ambiguity to the extent of blindness are among the few conditions the current environment has to offer.

Within all this, comes the pandemic causing a life threat, closing borders, locking social units in, and without any prior warning, disrupting most companies and their teams and putting them in an immediate survival state. They found themselves overnight playing a new game with new rules that almost no one is familiar with, let alone, savvy about.

Now, lead!

In this article, we will attempt to lay down 3 pillars of leadership under the current crisis, and to offer tools that can service plausible outcomes for each. These pillars are founded on the concepts of the paradox theory, and the tools shared aim at exploring ways to balance our approaches to self-leadership, business, and people in business.

Another new year, another resolution? Did you make one? Do you know people who have? Allow me to make a prediction, and it’s this: that very few resolutions made will become a reality. I’m confident about this because for over 20 years I have coached and trained people who want personal change but had failed to do so, especially at New Year.

 The New Year is supposed to hold some special magic that success will come with a new start to a calendar year. Yet resolutions to lose weight, stop smoking, start a business, write a book, etc, etc, fail for a number of reasons, but they all boil down to a lack of self-control. This means being more consciously aware of your thoughts and actions, and changing them to create and bring about the new version of yourself.

 Many people lack enough self-control to achieve the things they really want. This is because the act of personal change requires effort. It may also require a change of beliefs about what you think is possible, and about your view of the world and other people. It may require a shift in values that often means breaking away from societal norms. You will be acting and speaking differently, and this can sometimes cause others to treat you with caution or suspicion. So your relationships will change. You will also need to beak some habits that have not been serving you well.

 Self-control is driven by determination. What sometimes triggers people into personal change is the straw that breaks the camel’s back, somewhere inside a voice says ‘enough is enough’, or it can be that something suddenly becomes really important, and achieving it will bring a better/happier life for self or for others.

 There’s also the ‘I’m a failure’ syndrome, where a person attempts change and because they tried before and failed, each new failure becomes a barrier to change as you don’t want to feel a failure yet again.

 When a person is resolute about making a change, and they are ready for the change, they won’t wait for New Year – the time is now. Change happens when all the ingredients are there – an important reason, a worthwhile outcome, aligned beliefs, determination and self-control.

 So do you think that overnight, when the calendar turns to 2018, there is enough magic to make it happen? Maybe, if you are ready for the change you seek at this time.

 You will know when it’s time to improve and develop yourself. You will know when enough is enough. You will know when the future you desire is far more exciting and compelling than the present. The question is – will you act?

 Happy New Year!

There is an ocean that lies between those with ideas, and those who know how to turn them into reality. Success is based on one’s ability to make it happen, separating change-makers from dreamers. As billionaire entrepreneur Wayne Huizenga puts it, “some people dream of success, while other people get up every morning and make it happen”.

Strong leaders are those who manage to translate ideas into strategy, and of course execution. They possess a higher ability to execute, the charisma to inspire others into helping them achieve their vision, and the courage to make tough decisions when needed.

These are 5 ways in which leaders make things happen:

• Leaders have a vision of where they wish to be, and manage to gather a team that is inspired and willing to work hard to achieve that vision. Getting others on board may not be enough however, for commitment must be converted into action. A leader knows how to persuade and mobilize people as well as resources, and has a talent for handling conflicts, challenges, and adaptation.

• A leader speaks the action language. They look at how to make things happen, how to keep the pace, and how to avoid hurdles that may slow further growth. They know how to set up implementation plans and may start by setting small goals, and work their way towards bigger ones.

• A leader knows how to give their team the necessary help and confidence to step ahead. When one knows how to effectively lead implementation, set up strategy, inspire action, and divide the work according to capabilities, one can deliver great results. Leaders have a talent for growing greatness in others. They have strong coaching and mentoring skills, helping shift mind-sets, behaviors, and performance, all the while pushing people to find their own answers. They help others with insights that are based on their own experience.

• A leader knows how to create a sense of urgency, how to push others in such a way as to bring the best out of them. They bring out an inner desire to race with oneself and the motivation to keep going. This helps create a certain flow that pushes mind and emotions into higher functionality states, which in turn push forward performance and productivity. Successful people are those who manage to achieve such a state of “flow” more often than not.

• A leader is an excellent communicator who manages to transmit their goals effectively with utmost passion. Leadership is about making things happen, a process of getting people together to work towards one goal, one vision – and nothing is more important than to be able to communicate one’s ideas in such a way as to inspire others to follow.

Leadership can transform intention into action, vision into reality, and individuals into a community with a purpose. To capture people’s attention and make them into autonomous beings who wish to fulfill their tasks, is an art.

“Leaders become great not because of their power but because of their ability to empower others” – John Maxwell.

In today’s hyperactive world, organizations face the challenge of sustaining employee creativity and performance. The work environment is increasingly stressful, and though some may perceive stress as a kick starter for productivity, studies have shown quite the opposite; stress may heighten our motor functions, but it decreases perception, cognition and creativity.

So how do we foster creativity?

Dr. Gerard Puccio, Department Chair and Professor at the International Center for Studies in Creativity, Buffalo State, describes creativity as a set of skills that anyone can improve; that all that is required is an open mind, the determination to succeed, and a creative toolkit to develop and hone skills. Which is where coaching comes in, a tool to influence creativity and performance in the workplace by helping make the most of an organization´s most valuable resource, people.

1.Collaboration Is Key
Coaching is a process of collaboration and co-creation designed to help achieve goals. The coach works with employees to identify and set the ground for clearer goals, while establishing management strategies to ensure they are met; all the while encouraging employees to partake in fulfilling the organization’s vision. Employees do not need to be pushed to perform, rather shown how their contributions help solve problems.

Apart from encouraging creativity and productivity by making employees feel significant in their organization, a coach supports them in pursuing new ideas and alternative solutions; collaborative brainstorming encourages fresh perspectives and provides the space for ideas to flow; “the best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.” – Linus Pauling

Creativity is not a requirement of the creative department, it encompasses the organization as a whole.

2.Creativity Thrives with Leadership Support
According to a study by Adobe, companies that embrace creativity outperform peers and competitors. High performance is seen in environments where leaders provide processes and funding to back creative initiatives. Employees are tired of being told what to do, but eager to learn and remain relevant; they want continuous coaching and leaders who pay attention.

Coaches are trained to help inspire employees to fulfill their personal and professional potential, and activate their natural talents. They help develop communication skills, and a fresh perspective on personal challenges and opportunities – which increases confidence, thinking, and decision-making. A coach encourages employees to think creatively and motivates them based on an understanding of their tendencies as individuals, all the while providing the space necessary for inclusive and creative sharing of ideas.

3.The Art of Releasing Potential
If you have trouble keeping/finding great employees, investing in coaching is an ideal way to develop employees and show them you care about their growth; individuals who feel cared for tend to give their best. They also tend to take ownership for their work once they trust the intentions of their organization.

Coaching also brings work-life balance that is indispensable to the creative process. From an organization’s perspective, mental and emotional stability are key components of a healthy and productive workspace; happy employees tend to be creative, productive employees.

No matter the type of business or industry, leaders should nurture and promote programs that develop creative capability. Creativity does not belong to anyone nor is it a competition. The ideal creative team encompasses various types of intelligence, from analytical to artistic, relational and operational, and a good coach knows how to manage these differences in such a way as to bring the best out of people, and push them further.

“A manager tries to change people; a coach knows to grow them.”

In our battle for an audience’s attention, eye contact acts like the presenter’s lasso, and could, if used well, be a major ally. It is truly like a lasso in the sense that you grab them one by one by their eyes and pull them into what you’re trying to converse with them about.

Nevertheless, it has 5 traps that you need to watch out for:

– The Retina Check 

When we say eye-contact, we mean a subtle look in one’s eyes for a couple or a bit more seconds that makes them feel that you are speaking with them and you are giving them the attention they deserve. Beware spending too much time with one of them though, or having too deep of a look that could cause discomfort or a feeling of intrusiveness. Remember, it’s not a retina check.

– The Beauty Magnet 

Another one of these traps is the beautiful face in the crowd that makes you feel like you know them from somewhere and then you spend the rest of your presentation looking at them only.

– The Familiar Face 

This is an alternative to the beauty magnet, and it’s usually a friend, a colleague or anyone you know from before to whose eyes you get stuck. And again, they end up under your eye-spots and you disregard everyone else.

– The Nod 

This is about the poor one who nods. What many times follows that innocent nod, is a presenter who cannot believe, in the midst of their nervousness, that someone is actually listening or paying attention. And there they are, not giving the nodder a break from their eye contact and again, forgetting about everyone else.

– The Fly 

This is a trick that apparently some are trained on to get past their fear of looking people in the eyes. Someone, somewhere had maybe suggested that they skim the horizon instead. It simply doesn’t work.

So: Eye contact is a great lasso for attention when you use it well, meaning when you spread it all over your audience in a subtle way that makes them feel that you care for the attention they’re paying you.

Glossophobia: Glossa in Greek means tongue, and phobia means fear or dread. So here you go, now you even have a technical term to brag about. And mind you, it is the number one phobia and accounts for a share of 19% of them all, even more than death, spiders, heights and confined places! The range of its symptoms stretches from sweating, stuttering and freezing to breathing difficulties, cramps, nausea and panic attacks.

If those sound or feel familiar, worry not, you are definitely not the only glossophobic out there. Statistics say that 3 out 4 people suffer from some sort of fear of speaking in public.

Yet, it is one of the most influence building skills out there, so what to do?

Here are a quick list of things that you can do fast to adjust and fight back:

Reality is, to no one’s surprise, the most important thing here is State Control. Neuroscience links state to behavior. And state itself is a full physiological and psychological experience that takes over thoughts, mood, bodily reactions and behaviors in general to an autopilot mode dictated by the state in question. If reversing the state is not possible, what we want to do is replace it by one that is more resourceful. The fastest way around that is to influence the internal conversation and its sensory experiences. What you want to do at this point is remember an experience during which you had the state you want (vs. the one in shock). This could be a real experience that you are bringing out from memory or one that you make up from scratch. For example, let’s say you want to be in a state of confidence. You remember a time when you felt confident, or you imagine how you would be when you are confident. The important thing at this point is to recall that experience in its fullest details: from what you were seeing, to what you were hearing, to the music in the background, to the colors of the memory, to the feelings involved and all that. Then you want to make that experience more vivid by exaggerating all and everyone of those sensory experiences. Let’s take colors for example, you want to make them as vivid and as vibrant as you can. Take a moment and try it out. This will have the effect that dancing song that you love has on you when you hear it.

The second thing you want to do is assist that resourceful sensory experience with physiological aids that will trick the brain into believing that it is true. Breathing is key at this point. Have you ever watched a deep sleeper breath? They do so from their belly. That’s what you want to imitate. And you want to do that while taking in as much air as you can and exhaling it slowly, almost at half the inhaling speed. This will calm you down and will get you back in control.

The third trick has to do with your posture. States have postures and the brain gets confused about which comes first and which leads to the other: the state or the posture. So when you’re depressed or not in a very good place, you might tend to look down, walk around with a slow pace, have the shoulders bent forward, the face looking sad and the voice inside you is deep and not very positive. On the other hand, when you’re confident and excited about something, you stand tall, shoulders upright, chin up, you walk with a kind of faster pace with a determined smile on your face and the voice inside you has a completely different pitch than the one you had in the previous example. So with the brain not knowing if the state gets your body into that physiology or if the physiology gets the brain into that state, you can trick it by adopting the physiology of the state you wish to be in. So, if you want to feel confident, act confident. To test that out, try adopting the physiology of the first example (non-resourceful state) and think about sad things and see how fast these rush into your head. Now shake it off and adopt the physiology of the second example (resourceful state) and try thinking about things that stress you out and experience for yourself how more difficult that will be. To many of my trainees, it is even impossible.

To sum up, three out of four of the people around you are glossophobic. If you’re one of those three, do what follows:

1. Control your state by recalling or imagining and visualizing the resourceful experience you wish for (ex. confident) and make it as vivid as you can. 
2. Breath in, breath out two times slower. Do so from your belly. 
3. Act like the state you wish for (stand tall, smile, chin up…). 

Ambitious people know that it’s up to them to drive for the results they want in work and in life generally. If the results aren’t as good as expected then you simply try harder. This is the usual way for many highly ambitious people, and it works – some of the time.

When things don’t go according to plan, regardless of the increased effort you put in, then what?

It can become frustrating when the result you want is really important, yet you make no progress. It can feel like there’s a huge barrier getting in your way. The more you try, the more frustrated you become.

This frustration is a signal that you need a different approach. Perhaps a better strategy, or alternative style of communication. The problem with frustration is that it can fix your mind too rigidly on the details, when what would be more useful is to stand back, relax, and focus on the overall process. Sometimes it is better to let go of the urgency and frustration in the situation so that you can use your imagination to figure out an alternative approach.

But the imagination doesn’t work well under stress, which is precisely what frustration creates. When you relax and rise above the detail you will be able to map out, in your mind, the cause/effect patterns that are creating the barrier to your success.

Taking an alternative perspective in this way allows you to understand your situation better. You become more aware of your own thinking and behaviour, and how others may be perceiving you. Armed with this fresh perspective you can adapt your approach accordingly.

It sounds simple doesn’t it? Yet it’s surprising how many ambitious people keep trying the same things and hoping for a different result. When you hit a barrier there is no point in repeating the same approach – you need an alternative. One of the NLP presuppositions describes it in this way: ‘if what you are doing isn’t working, do something different’.

The reason people don’t try alternatives is that they become stuck in the way they think, and stuck in repeating the same behaviour. The ability to shift your thinking and modify your behaviour is something you can learn, practice and develop. The more skilled you become at this the easier everything in life becomes.

As a baseline you need to really understand human nature, and be able to recognise patterns in language, including your own. We humans are complex creatures, but we think, act and behave in set patterns throughout our lives. For some people the patterns work well, for others they don’t. When you are able to delete or edit your patterns, and create new ones, then you become significantly more influential in all life contexts.

You can acquire the skill to shift your thinking, take alternative perspectives and design different strategies during the course of our NLP Practitioner Programme. The variety of tools and techniques learned help you to adapt to any situation in work and life. You become more relaxed as you need less effort to achieve your aims. It’s a bit like a computer in that if you don’t upgrade the hardware now and again its performance will decline. As a NLP Practitioner you not only get an upgrade to your hardware, you get to upgrade your entire operating system – in a highly stimulating and supportive environment.

“Leadership is practiced not so much in words as in attitude and in actions. Harold S. Geneen”

Company’s success is not solely based on revenue and international presence but primary on its managerial and operational systems set.

Throughout the years, we witnessed the birth of different leadership styles, which were implemented on different levels, including politics, religion, or even community groups. Nowadays, situational leadership seems to be mostly helpful and successful among other styles which highly depends on the leader understanding the behavior of each team member and adapting his conduct based on their level. This techniques highly depends on these factors:

– Analysis, where leaders need to understand the situation they are dealing with

– Adaptation, where leaders’ conduct needs to be adapted to match the contingences of the situation

– Communication, where leaders need to convey messages in a way that is understood by all

– Continuation, where leaders need to move forward with the plan of action

Let’s look at this from a different point of view; all decisions are based on leaders’ conclusions vis-à-vis the environment they’re adapting to, which can be considered as subjective since the only person agreeing on the whole thinking process and actions to take is the leader him/herself.

Subjectivity issue ought to be questioned in such leadership style as the so called “boss” is the only one assessing each employee’s situation and imposing plan of actions- therefore, we need to examine this correlation which exists between Situational Leadership & Subjectivity.

Subjective Leadership does not necessarily follow the same technique used in assessing Situational Leadership, but it also has an incredible added value, which is personal experience. List of processes included in the Subjective Leadership style goes as per the below:

1. Maximizing Self-Awareness Level:

Each leader, in a way or another, benefit from what we call Innate Leadership Strength, including areas of development and critical skill sets that are used in high performing environments, as well as strong knowledge of the leader’s character/behavior. Awareness needs to be sustained on that level so that initial analysis can be made fast and accurately.

2. Initiating and Leading Coaching Conversations:

This is highly effective when team members’ behaviors need to be identified. Leaders have to benefit from excellent communication skills in order to orient conversations in a way to distinguish the best plans of actions in accord to each person’s character.

3. Working on Team Members Development:

When leaders get to a point where they have control over the environment they’re in, it becomes easy form them to draw the path each team member has to take for their own personal growth.

4. Observing Behavioral Change and Achieving Results:

After the course set has been applied, leaders evaluate the path on both levels: team members and results. The changes of behavior mainly comes from leaders, as they have to choose and adapt to a certain leadership language which is both concrete and corporate. If team members have been responsive to this language, it’s a success for leaders. They’ll then be able to observe and the results they had set in mind for every project/campaign/etc.

The fact of deriving key takeout after using Subjective Leadership also means adding value to leaders’ personal experience, and this is where the practical approach comes in hand. It opens a continuous path towards development and discovery of new techniques in leadership.

John Dewery, one of the founders of the philosophy of pragmatism and functional psychology once said “A problem well-defined is a problem half-solved”. We read this and we think, yeah, that’s right! But how often do we really stop to properly define a problem? How do you go about doing that?

More often than not, we are automatically biased towards dealing with the symptoms we see and feel rather than framing and scoping the decision we need to make to change them! Being natural problem solvers, people have a huge propensity to believe in their capabilities of finding a solution right away! As it turns out, this is one of the biggest mistakes of problem solving!

Finding the right decision to make is a process, where the decision comes at the end, not the beginning!

• The first step is to clearly define your decision problem and clarify what you are trying to achieve by solving it.
• Next, you ought to create alternatives to choose from, and make sure that each of the alternatives generated meets your objectives.
• At that point, you will be ready to make a decision after considering thetrade-offs between alternatives, uncertainty of the outcomes and your appetite of risk!
• Along the way, you have to be aware of the biases you might be facing.

Just like anything else: you learn decision-making; you exercise it multiple times to get better at it, until it becomes something you excel at. There are no “natural” problem solvers and decision makers; there are only trained ones and untrained ones!

Once you become trained, your perspective to “problems” changes! You become less averse and more competent and capable of facing them. This is what our workshop will prepare you and your organization to be. Together, we will learn and practice the decision making process that will sets you on the right path to leadership and your organization on the right path to success!