<![CDATA[Sue Rosen

<![CDATA[Sue Rosen - Blog]]>Sat, 23 Mar 2024 17:19:20 -0700Weebly<![CDATA[Who is going on a bear hunt?]]>Thu, 01 Dec 2022 08:00:00 GMThttp://suerosen.com.au/blog/who-is-going-on-a-bear-hunt

Who knows the children’s book ‘We’re Going On A Bear Hunt’? It was written by Michael Rosen (no relation!) and illustrated by Helen Oxenbury way back in 1989 so I am sure lots of you have come across it.

My girls loved this book when they were little and not only were we reading it all the time but we would also act it out in Centennial Park at every birthday party! I would sing the story with the kids whilst my husband would hide in the trees until it was time to jump out to scare the kids (if you have a child who was traumatised by our birthday parties I apologise!)

The story is about a group of children going on a bear hunt and along the way they encounter a series of obstacles, such as long grass, a cold river and thick mud. Each time their refrain is:

“We can't go over it.
We can't go under it.
Oh no!
We've got to go through it!”

So what does this story have to do with leadership?

I was reminded of this refrain as I was reflecting on the experience we have when we have made a choice to step into the unknown, away from a long practiced way of being to a new way of being.

We’ve made the commitment to getting better balance in our lives yet in order to fully become a person who does that we have to move through this murky, awkward learning zone of figuring out how to maintain better boundaries.

We feel untethered because we are letting go of old behaviours, such as saying yes to everyone, and we have not yet fully embraced new ones, such as prioritising our own needs.

But we cannot go over or under this phase, we need to go through it. And this is when you really need a support crew around you.

People who are your cheerleaders as you wade through the mud of setting set clear expectations, who challenge you when you slide back into old patterns of saying yes to everyone as you make your way through the long grass, who remind you of your commitment to a more balanced life when you feel like sitting on the bank instead of jumping into the cold water of difficult conversations. And who are compassionate when sometimes you run away scared from the bear and take on too much.

New behaviours require practice, curiosity and experimentation if we are to embody them so they become truly embedded in our lives.

As one of my clients said of a conversation she had with her CEO following a coaching session “It was hard to have that conversation but it felt really powerful”. This is the practice which will make a difference to her ability to initiate and maintain her boundaries.

Who is going on the bear hunt with you?

]]><![CDATA[How are you creating strategic pauses?]]>Tue, 01 Nov 2022 07:00:00 GMThttp://suerosen.com.au/blog/how-are-you-creating-strategic-pauses

How are you creating strategic pauses in your day, your week, your month?

When you are racing from one meeting to the next, ticking items off the never-ending to-do list, and firing instructions about looming deadlines, ask yourself “at what cost?”

Modern corporate life has raised “being busy” to a high-status declaration, implying that we are lazy if we are not running at a million miles per hour, yet if we are in a constant state of busy-ness our sympathetic nervous system is activated, which triggers our fight/flight/freeze response. This can be incredibly useful for getting lots of s**t done but ask yourself: Is being busy the same as being effective?

When do you simply STOP and take a breath, lift your head from your computer screen and see the big picture?

From my own experience I know that when I have been under extreme stress at work, I stopped listening to my team members, I stopped building relationships with my peers, I lost my connection to the whole purpose of my role and the organisation, I came home cranky to my family and my health suffered.

Not great outcomes for either myself or those around me!

When we are operating from this adrenaline and cortisol fuelled space it is almost impossible to access our compassion, our courage and our curiosity so great leadership flies out the window!

Neurologist, psychiatrist, and author Victor Frankl is often quoted as saying:

“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space, it is within our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.”

Creating strategic pauses throughout our lives enables us to access that space between stimulus and response, even when we are triggered in the moment. We can do that by:

Working with a coach each month to find clarity on what is important to us and how we want to BE as a leader
Blocking out time each week to look at the big picture and prioritise accordingly (& ruthlessly!)
Setting time aside for reflection every day, noticing what is working and what is not
Focusing on taking deep breaths and centering ourselves in our body several times a day to allow us to be open, present, and connected

This is about slowing down to go faster, and it may sound crazy to you right now but your ability to take one mindful deep breath can transform your leadership – why not try it?!

]]><![CDATA[When did you last learn something new?]]>Sat, 01 Oct 2022 07:00:00 GMThttp://suerosen.com.au/blog/when-did-you-last-learn-something-new

When did you last learn something new?

And feel all the awkwardness of being a beginner?

I have always loved to dance but for years I only danced at parties with my friends and yet I kept having this niggling feeling that more dancing would nurture my soul in a way I had been missing. So, I recently returned to dance classes, and I decided to try something new!

Enter the salsa class! And the awkwardness of not knowing what to do, feeling foolish at being twice the age of many of my classmates, laughing at my mistakes and having to practice again and again to try out new muscle movements and rhythms. My body loves to dance but it doesn’t know how to dance in this way so I am having to unlearn muscle memory from my earlier dancing days. It challenges my mind because it so easy to slip back into old patterns and habits.

In a world of complexity and ambiguity, leadership is also all about learning, unlearning and relearning, and yet so many of us were brought up to believe that as the leader, we have to have ALL the answers and we have to have the RIGHT answers. When so much of what we are working with is unprecedented this need to be right can hold us back from being curious and adaptable.

It can hold us back when we believe we do have the right answer because as Daniel Kahneman says in his book Thinking Fast and Slow “our excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world in which we live” closes our minds to people or information which tell us something different.

And it can hold us back when we don’t feel like we have the right answer because we shrink from sharing our views, and we get defensive as we fear “being found out”, or we “go with the flow” without challenging others’ viewpoints or ideas.

Either way we are not developing ourselves as leaders and empowering our teams to step up and contribute their ideas so that we can find new ways to move forward with today’s challenges.

To face these challenges we need to (as author Carol Dweck says):

“be a novice again and again… to get comfortable with effort, struggle and confusion”

And to get comfortable with effort, struggle and confusion we need to embrace both courage and humility. Courage to be vulnerable enough to say I don’t know or I need help, and humility to acknowledge that for all of our expertise honed over many years we need to keep challenging our beliefs, assumptions and habits.

So how are you challenging yourself to be a novice again? To explore new ideas and behaviours with curiosity, courage and humility?

And if you see me on the dance floor please join me and we can laugh together at our mistakes!

with love,
Sue

]]><![CDATA[Laugh so hard you cried]]>Thu, 08 Sep 2022 06:54:02 GMThttp://suerosen.com.au/blog/laugh-so-hard-you-cried

When did you last play, purely for the sake of playing?

As adults we have serious concerns in our lives, such as how will I pay the mortgage, how do I raise my kids to be good people, how do I help this business survive? And sometimes we get dragged down by all this seriousness and forget how to have fun.

Days and weeks go by where we feel like our nose is to the grindstone and we can’t look up, which leads us to become resentful. Then we get cranky with everyone around us and it is easy to start blaming others for our predicament but in all honesty, would you approach a boss (or a parent) who looked grumpy all the time?!
All the research tells us that positive emotions are a critical part of our well-being and that our well-being is a critical element of being engaged and productive at work, so how can we shift this?

It is time to reclaim laughter, fun, and joy!

Last weekend I went away with a bunch of fabulous girlfriends and I spent much of my time doubled over with laughter – games of charades and karaoke will do that to you! Play, belly laughs and friendship fed my soul so that I could return to my family and work feeling refreshed, and like my cup is once again full.

How can you be intentional about getting more play and more joy back in your life?

Some ideas:

Shifting your physical state shifts your mood so pump up the music and dance around your office
Sing at the top of your voice in the car
Book time away with good friends
Schedule a games night
Watch your favourite comedy
Build sandcastles on the beach with the kids

Even remembering a time you laughed can help shift your mood – I know I am going to keep giggling at that Flashdance moment from Saturday night for a long time to come!

So what’s is going in your calendar right now?

]]><![CDATA[Who Likes Confusion and Chaos?]]>Thu, 08 Sep 2022 05:41:26 GMThttp://suerosen.com.au/blog/who-likes-confusion-and-chaos

I suspect not that many of you at all because as humans we tend to feel safer when we feel certainty. Our brains are predicting machines, and when we lose our ability to predict what will happen in a given circumstance, we lose our sense of being able to control outcomes, leaving us feeling vulnerable and exposed.

Yet, living in a fast-changing world which has been become increasingly complex we need to learn to embrace confusion and learn to sit in discomfort.

Many of my clients work in the finance space and they start their careers trying to find the ‘right’ answer, then they move to considering multiple scenarios and they want to control every variable, they seek 100% of the information in order to offer an interpretation or make decisions. All of this clinging to certainty can result in analysis paralysis and an inability to make any decision at all, or a failure to delegate leading to them drowning in an overwhelming volume of work.

Many of us were brought up to revere the ‘hero’ leader, who had all the knowledge and gave all the commands and we are still putting that pressure upon ourselves once we are in leadership positions, yet in a world of complexity and uncertainty no-one has all the answers, and it is only by working collaboratively and inviting all voices and experiences into the room that we can find new pathways forward. So at some stage we need to let go of certainty and go with ‘good enough’ coupled with a willingness to change our minds and change direction if and when new information comes to light.

So when we seek certainty and everything around us is shifting how can we centre ourselves so that even when we share with our team that we don’t have ‘the’ answer we still instil in them the confidence that together we have the resources to work out a strategy?

This requires you to cultivate a deep connection to your values, sense of purpose and a belief in yourself. This is where self-leadership begins, and it is the key to all great leadership.

Yoga has taught me that when a pose is uncomfortable, rather than immediately move out of it I should bring my focus to my breath and tap into my centre of gravity and balance – reconnecting our busy minds with our body and spirit brings us back to that to which we are most deeply committed. It is from that place of grounding that we can move forward with strength, humility and curiosity to face the gnarly challenges of the day.

It may not be yoga for you but I encourage you to ask yourself how do you find your centre so that you can be fully present to those around you and the situation which faces you?

And when there is chaos around us how can we come back to the question: what is within my control? (without that being focused on controlling others!)

with love,
Sue

]]><![CDATA[Mary's Story]]>Mon, 21 Mar 2022 05:48:57 GMThttp://suerosen.com.au/blog/are-you-banging-your-head-on-a-brick-wall2980092

Observing one of my fabulous CFO clients (let’s call her Mary) recently a mutual acquaintance commented that Mary has absolutely grown in stature over the last year.

This last year has been a tough one for many people and Mary is no exception, there have been times when she has been knocked down, when she has questioned what on earth she is doing in this high pressure role, and yet she keeps getting back up, and each time she does she grows in confidence.

So what has changed for this CFO?

Mary has been cultivating her Executive Presence, which I define as being her ability to inspire confidence in both her capabilities and her potential.

How has Mary done this?

By carving out time for a strategic pause in her busy work schedule so that she can reflect on her vision and priorities
Acknowledging and embodying her strengths and achievements
Challenging the beliefs which have held her back from communicating with clarity
Fully embracing who she is as a leader, with all her imperfections
Learning to centre herself around her values and her purpose so that when all around is chaos she maintains her calm and her focus
Being courageous enough to step outside her comfort zone and build a profile outside her own organisation

This is not easy work and there is no silver bullet but the rewards are great, with Mary becoming a much more influential leader, who can have the impact she hopes to achieve and feel more fulfilled whilst doing it.

I encourage you to ask yourself:

“Who is the leader I want to be?” and “What am I doing to move myself in the right direction?”

If you want to cultivate your executive presence check out the details to access my free masterclass below.

Executive Presence Masterclass
3 strategies for cultivating your executive presence

Technical brilliance is no longer enough - As a CFO you need Executive Presence!
In this masterclass we explored 3 strategies for cultivating your executive presence so that you:

Become more influential with your stakeholders
Get greater cut through with your ideas
Have more impact when it matters

With 30+ years' experience in finance roles including CFO I understand the challenges you face, and as an accredited and experienced executive coach I have the skills to help you overcome them.
Get your FREE access now

with love

Sue

If you're not already following me on LinkedIn I would love to connect with you there.

]]><![CDATA[Are you banging your head on a brick wall?]]>Wed, 23 Feb 2022 05:33:12 GMThttp://suerosen.com.au/blog/are-you-banging-your-head-on-a-brick-wall

A few weeks ago I ran a masterclass on executive presence, and proposed that the three primary challenges facing finance leaders in relation to executive presence are that they feel:

Invisible: are you holding yourself back from speaking up?
Ignored: do you feel like you delivering the same message again and again and yet having no impact?
Isolated: are you so focused on deliverables and deadlines that you are neglecting relationships?

When I polled the participants the most prevalent of the three was number 2; this feeling that you might as well be banging your head on a brick wall for all the cut-through you are achieving.

What gets in the way of us breaking through that brick wall?

I believe that usually what gets in the way is our own need to be seen as the expert, to have all the answers, or to be “right”. All these needs have built up over many years, particularly if your worth has been derived from gaining technical knowledge, and they can cause us to persist with our method or style of communication long after it has been proven ineffective.

So what’s my top tip for getting through that brick wall?

It might seem counterintuitive, but it is Listening.

Learning to listen helps us to understand the other person’s perspective and what really matters to them. Once we understand more about their needs we can connect on a much deeper level which in turn will enable us to collaborate more effectively to achieve the organisation’s purpose and goals.

How can you practice being a better listener in meetings?

Create breaks between meetings so you don’t have to rush from one straight into the next
Try mini-mindfulness practices, such as 3 deep breaths, at the start of every meeting to ensure you are fully present
Put devices on flight mode or turn them off and take notes on paper
Ask yourself what might be true for this other person?

Being right feels really good (my teenage daughters have pointed out my need to be right many times!) but what else might open up for you if you learn to listen to new perspectives?

You can access my executive presence masterclass here.

If you're not already following me on LinkedIn I would love to connect with you there.

]]><![CDATA[Is this getting you down?]]>Tue, 08 Feb 2022 08:00:00 GMThttp://suerosen.com.au/blog/is-this-getting-you-down

So as well as Covid-19 in our community I am seeing an awful lot of another debilitating disease: Comparisonitis!

I was hit by a very nasty bout of it a few weeks ago. I am in a mentoring group of really supportive female business owners and yet I found myself struggling to celebrate their successes because I kept thinking what am I doing wrong that their revenue is higher than mine? And looking at a competitor’s social media posts about her new book and thinking why would anyone work with me when she clearly knows and can offer so much more?

Who else has suffered from this? The nauseous feeling is brought on when you compare your own achievements to other people around you and find your own sorely lacking. I know from my clients that many of them have questioned where they are at in their careers when they compare themselves with other leaders.

I actually think that everyone has suffered this at some stage (unless they are entirely narcissistic!) because it is natural to look at people around us and judge what we see. It is all too easy to get sucked into looking at what they are doing and forget that we only see their highlight reels and rarely their bloopers.

And I find that it can be very tricky to shift. Once you are stuck in that place it can be become completely debilitating because what is the point of my getting out of bed and doing anything if everyone else can do it better? The voice of the inner critic becomes louder and louder and threatens to become the biggest obstacle to our progress.

“Comparison is the thief of joy” - Theodore Roosevelt

So what can you do to recover from comparisonitis?

Acknowledge that you don’t know the full story of the people you’re looking at: neither what it took for them to get here, or indeed where ‘here’ actually is because it is very possible to have a shiny exterior and be struggling to pay the rent.
Focus on your own strengths and your North Star: when you have a deep understanding of the value you bring and a connection to your purpose you will know that the other person may be in the same role or the same business but no one else will bring quite the unique combination of strengths, experiences, passion and presence that you will.
Harness curiosity to engage your beginner’s mindset: what are the things I can learn from the people around me? What inspires me and could I tap into in my own role? How could I engage the support of those who are doing well?
Focus on what brings you joy: shifting your focus to what energises you and lights you up is a powerful way to shift your mindset.

I feel your pain if you have been struggling with comparisonitis, it is an icky place to be, and it can sometimes strike out of the blue, so if that is you, what will you do this week to start your recovery?
If you’d like support to shift your mindset to focus on your own professional growth rather than watching someone else’s then let’s have a chat.

with love
Sue

If you're not already following me on LinkedIn I would love to connect with you there.

]]><![CDATA[Leading with Your Head not Your Heart is Hurting You]]>Tue, 23 Nov 2021 03:28:08 GMThttp://suerosen.com.au/blog/leading-with-your-head-not-your-heart-is-hurting-you

Years ago I asked to meet with my boss because I was feeling rather disengaged. I told him I felt unsure of my place in the team, that I was stagnating in my development and that I would like to be considered for some meatier projects. I felt I had a lot more I could contribute.

My boss listened…… and then scolded me for taking too long a lunch break that day!

As you can imagine I did not feel heard, and I walked out of his office muttering expletives under my breath! I had taken a long lunch break to attend a job interview and this comment simply reaffirmed that looking for another role was the best way for me to spend my time.

As finance professionals we are trained to be analytical, and our work has generally meant that we are very task focused, we take pride in our abilities to get stuff done and deliver to deadlines. As a rule, I find that my clients are task and action-oriented, yet when we operate like this we can lose sight of both our relationship with ourselves and our relationships with others. This means we spend most of our time in our heads and we can become disconnected with our heart and soul.

Why does that matter?

Like my former boss it can mean that you become so focused on the tasks and processes that you lose sight of the real person sitting in front of you. And if you are unable to build deeper connections with the people who work for you, they will never give you their loyalty, fulfil their potential or make their greatest contribution.

Equally if you do not invest time and energy in building relationships with your peers you are liable to find yourself feeling increasingly side-lined in decision making, perhaps wondering why you can’t seem to get your voice and opinion heard.

Or doubling down on your title and position and demanding that as CFO your perspective matters – in the short-term this might work because of course you do have important technical expertise which is critical to the business but over time you may notice that your colleagues are not sharing their thinking, then you become frustrated that you are not being consulted early enough in projects, and ultimately business performance suffers.

So how can you shift from leading with your head to leading with your heart?

There is nothing more scary to a CFO than the idea that they might be perceived as soft and fluffy (I know, I was terrified of this perception because it does not fit the CFO mould!) But remember I am not asking you to abandon your head and it’s brilliant thinking, I am suggesting that it is time to learn to lead with both so that we are accessing all the data available – both from our heads and our hearts. And that means learning to lead with LOVE.

Listening: taking time to actively listen to the people we work with
Openness: bringing an open-mind and non-judgemental attitude to conversations
Vulnerability: authenticity as a leader is critical and that takes vulnerability
Empathy: sensing other people’s emotions and imagining what they might be feeling is usually the first step before we can act compassionately

Some of the CFOs I work with are more task focused than others – we all move up and down the continuum between task and relationship focus depending on circumstances, but we can all develop our capabilities in these areas of LOVE.

It starts with a desire to change, to transform our leadership so that we become more effective as leaders, so that we can deliver improved business performance – and there is nothing soft and fluffy about this!
Rasmus Hougaard in his book The Mind of the Leader, based on his research with over 35,000 leaders, describes leadership this way:

“Leadership today is about unlearning management and relearning being human.”

“A good leader must understand what makes a good life and how to help people find that. A leader’s job is not to provide a paycheck and benefits: It’s about helping people be truly happy and find meaning in their work and life. When a leader succeeds with this, it unlocks real performance.”

I certainly know that if my boss had treated me with more compassion and shown a genuine regard for my growth and development I would have been performing at a much higher level.

What steps can you take this week to lead with more LOVE?

]]><![CDATA[8 Tips How to Receive Feedback Most Constructively?]]>Mon, 08 Nov 2021 09:15:51 GMThttp://suerosen.com.au/blog/8-tips-for-how-to-receive-it-most-constructively

In my last blog I wrote about how giving feedback is HARD!

This week I want to look at the other side of the equation and talk about receiving feedback because that ain’t easy either!

If your boss said to you ‘you are being too dogmatic in the leadership team meeting, giving everyone else the impression that you think you know best and you’re not prepared to listen to them’, how would you react?

It is completely natural to do one of the following:

Become emotional, start listening to that inner critic voice which says ‘you see, this just proves you are rubbish at this job’
Start defending your actions, saying ‘I am the only one with the detailed understanding of the financials and no-one wants to listen to rational arguments’
Go on the attack, with ‘what do you know, you weren’t in the room, you don’t understand’

But we have to ask ourselves how helpful are any of these reactions? Will they help us become better leaders?

As leaders, if we want to cultivate a culture of safety where feedback is constructively given and received, we need to model asking for feedback and that can trigger an overwhelming sense of vulnerability.
Author and researcher Brene Brown defines vulnerability as ‘uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure’ and this is absolutely what we are feeling when we invite feedback.

So how can you build your capacity to invite and receive feedback?

I believe this starts with acknowledging three things:

Connect feedback to your values and purpose: adopting a growth mindset and continual learning is fundamental to making progress on anything which is important to you
Feedback is the perception of others: it may or may not be true, you may or may not agree, and seeking multiple sources can help you determine which elements are the most important for you to take on board
You don’t have to act on feedback: ultimately you have the choice whether you act on the feedback you receive, that choice may come with consequences, and if you choose not to act it may be advisable to explain that you value the individual’s feedback and explain why you did not act on it.

Once you have decided to ask for feedback, or are receiving unsolicited feedback, I have 8 tips for how to receive it most constructively:

Notice your own physical and emotional responses: you may feel your breath quickening, your heart racing or your hands becoming clammy
Take some slow, deep breaths & acknowledge to yourself what you are feeling & ask yourself is the helpful right now?
Take a break: if you are finding it too hard to calm your emotional responses, or find yourself continually interrupting the feedback giver then it can be valuable to acknowledge that you are having trouble focusing on the feedback because you are feeling defensive or disappointed or upset and can we have a break and then reconvene in 10 minutes, or tomorrow, when I feel calmer?
Listen to understand, not to reply: focus on the content of what the person is saying, what is the most important message in their words? What is the emotional tone of what they are saying? What is not being said?
Seek specifics and clarity: if anything is unclear to you about what they actually want you to do or change then ask questions – when you said I was being dogmatic, what specifically was I doing that caused you to feel that? What would you like to see me do instead?
Thank the feedback giver: regardless of whether you agree, you can appreciate the effort someone has made to provide feedback
Reflect on what has been said: perhaps unpack it further with another colleague or coach, and decide how you feel about it, how it aligns with your values and what action you want to take
Follow-up: this may mean either putting the advice into action, it may mean closing out the conversation explaining why you are not choosing to do that or finding another way forward through further dialogue with the feedback giver.

Understanding ourselves is the starting point for great leadership, and understanding how others perceive us, and the impact that has on what we can achieve is critical to taking the next step in our leadership journey, as it enables us to see both our strengths and our blind spots through a new lens. And once again this approach takes courage and compassion.

As part of my coaching process it is possible to build in stakeholder interviews so that you gain a bigger picture of yourself as a leader.

How are you developing your capacity for receiving feedback? Let's connect!

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