Hi everyone. I’m Saralyn Hodgkin. And this is the podcast to practice your leadership.
Exploring your inner team is powerful stuff. This is a conversation I have with people, lots around the self narrative, the inner dialogue, the, the stuff that goes on in your head. How do I deal with that, Saralyn? My, my take here, my stance here is seeing all these places and voices and beings as your inner team.
And what is the possibility and the potential when you explore this inner team of yours. So let me, let me walk you, walk you through this. Cause I think that, um, what I’ve learned anyways is it’s helpful to have some prompts of what I’m talking about here and that what I’ve learned anyways is that it can be powerful stuff when you explore your inner team.
So let me give it a little bit more, a little bit more colour. So your inner team, do you know who they are? Who are these voices? Who are they? What are they saying? When are they showing up? Do you have patterns around these inner teammates of yours in terms of when they show up, what they say, how they make you feel with what they say.
Can you even take these inner team members and theseteammates in a way where you can define them as a character, can you give them a name? Can you give them a name? Can you actually sit with these inner team members and say, what is your name? Who are you? When did you come into my life? What would it be like to approach these team members as friends, uh, as places within yourself that have wisdom and love and, you know, the way they’re showing up might not be so helpful right now.
Thank you very much, but that they’re showing up because they are standing up for you. And so let’s get to know them. That’s not squash them. Let’s get to know them. And quite quickly you can see which teammates are really helping you right now. And which ones are sabotaging you and just not allowing you to align and walk in alignment in your leadership and in how you want to show up in the world.
And can you actually see them all as friends, approach them with appreciation and explore their narratives, their names, where they might even live in your body, when they show up, if they sit at the front of the bus or the back of the bus. And the point here is to start being able to characterize them in order to design a relationship that is serving now.
Because all these inner team members, they came to you and came through you to protect you in some ways that were really useful at some point in time. And now maybe they’re just not showing up in useful ways. So when you look at those inner team members, get a pen and pencil and just, you can write some of them down right away.
Right. And who knows what kind of names they have? Maybe they have names like inner critic or distractor or dreamer. Maybe they have names like Naveed or Rita or Tom. I don’t know, whatever it is. Uh, that shows up as an actual name or maybe they show up as an emotion, like shame or a shamer or the avoider, but can you define who those character are from a place of saying, Hey, I’m so grateful for you for all that we’ve done together.
Let’s let’s just acknowledge you for, for just a moment and give you a name. And then once you have those names, let’s say maybe you can write down 20 of them. Let’s start with three, everybody. Not make this too overwhelming. Just naming three. How are they serving your leadership right now? How are they serving your leadership right now?
How are they not? How are they not?
Here’s another prompt for you. How is this team member protecting you? How is this team member protecting you?
Is that still helpful? Is that still helpful?
And then write down the prompt. What wisdom do they provide for you? They’ve got some wisdom. They didn’t come up from nowhere. Can you look at that team member and just think, what wisdom are you providing for me? If you take out the judgments, if you come alongside as a friend from a place of appreciation, can you see the wisdom they’re providing for you?
And then of course being really clear of how this relationship with this character is not helping you. And so in conversation with that team member saying, Hey, you’re trying to protect me. You got lots of wisdom and you’re here. Can we redesign our relationship? Can we redesign our relationship? Here’s what I’d actually like with you. You game?
Then it’s getting clear, right? What do you need to hear in order to settle down when you rear your head in ways that might not be helpful? And here’s some suggestions of how you can better show up even more so. Maybe, maybe there’s so much wisdom and there’s so much potential in our relationship. Could we maybe even change your name so that you embody more of that wisdom that I need versus that old ways, old protections.
These team members, you know, they are there to be helpful and sometimes they get unwieldy because we don’t have conversations with them around, hold on a minute. This isn’t working for me anymore because I’ve changed. I’ve grown or worse yet we just try and stomp ’em out. Oh, well, you’re the shamer. I’m just going to stomp you out. Well, hold on. The shamer has a lot of intelligence. The relationship needs to be redesigned because the effect it’s having on my leadership isn’t working for me. How they’re protecting me is great this way, but not great that way.
What I needed before was this, what I need now is this.
Sometimes we want to be able to just change overnight and just squash something. And if I just get rid of it, when really what we’re asking for, and what is most helpful is to be with ourselves in a way that explores what is helpful now, because I have grown and what I want and what I need are different now. Different now.
This is a practice. It is a practice to be with yourself. Explore your inner teammates and realign and redesign those relationships. Stay in the practice all, do your own work.
Thanks all, I’m Saralyn. You can find me at holonleadership.org. I walk alongside you as you practice your leadership.
