I once sat in a car park on a Sunday morning and I couldn't get out of the car. Not because anything has happened. Nothing had happened. I'd got up, I'd got ready, and I'd driven there. All of it on autopilot. And then I pulled up, turned off the engine, and just sat there. And the only way I can describe what I felt is that the joy had gone. Welcome to Breaking the Circle for Leaders. I'm John Manning, and if you've ever found yourself dreading a job you used to be good at, you're in exactly the right place. You see, four or five times a year I used to have to work on a Sunday. And I always took this opportunity to go and see the stores unannounced just to see how they're getting on. There was always less managers working on a Sunday, just from the nature of it being the weekend. So it was good just to really understand a true picture of how trading was looking. Was there any opportunities or was anything being missed? You could see in some of the shops that perhaps the revenue wasn't as high as you'd expect. So I'd always planned to arrive just a few minutes after opening to the first shop just to see what that initial opening phase looked like. So on this Sunday I pulled up and that was as far as I got. I just sat there just for a few minutes. I just had no energy, I just no desire, there was just nothing in me that wanted to get out and get on with my working day. I just felt heavy. I rang my wife and she did what I knew she'd be able to do. She just listened. I wasn't looking for some super answer, some motivational speech, some way of just making me explode out of the car seat and bounce off down the road. She just listened. That was all. And that's what I needed. I did go in, but that's not what the story's about. You see, the trap feeling was never really about this about the shop, about the shop visits about going there. It was about where where I'd got to. I guess part of it was I hadn't progressed perhaps as fast as I'd wanted to. You know, when you first start jobs you see so much opportunity, so many places you're gonna go so high through the company. And I had progressed, I had done well, but perhaps I wasn't quite as far as I wanted to go, wasn't quite where I'd wanted to be at that time in my life, and of course there's always that voice, that voice that plagues us most of the time, that voice in our head, and this particular day, and it had been for a while, it was only seemed to ever be a voice of negativity and criticism, and that's dragging it would drag you down, and this particular day I think it was louder than most. We all have that voice from time to time, and we know it's our own voice, and I guess underneath all of that, my current line manager. Well, I couldn't honestly sit here and tell you that we got on fantastically, that I loved working for her. I did find it quite hard. We thought quite differently to each other. I think her favourite line, certainly the one that many years later I can still remember, she would say in the middle of meetings, Oh, I'm a half empty type of person. And you just knew every time she said that it was some badge of honour she was wearing, as if to say, uh you might you might have done a good thing, but I can find plenty that isn't good, plenty of bad stuff, plenty of stuff that hasn't gone right, and we should be focused on that, not what's gone well. And of course, that just was the opposite to the way I was. I was all about my people and motivating them and encouraging them to think for themselves and be individuals, and get a desire to want to progress, progress their shop and progress their careers. But you can imagine sitting in those meetings how the room would feel when there's a half empty glass sitting at the top of the table, it would drag the room down, and certainly for me it just took the enthusiasm out of suggesting stuff to coming up with new ways, better ways, faster ways. You see, for me, if you don't acknowledge the good stuff, if you don't make it public that people have done well, you see, why are they going to perform well if you don't acknowledge it? For me, I want my people to make the decisions as much as they can, and I know in some branded companies in particular, and these big structured companies, the managers can't make those individual decisions, they can't do the what's coming and when it needs to be done, but they often can have an input in the how that is actually done, how that's communicated to their teams, how they're going to make sure they meet the deadlines and the timetable. You see, often the how is the only bit that they can own, but you'd often suggest new things and say, How why don't we try this or that? And often the answer would come back, well, we've tried that in the past. She had a lot of service, she had a lot of history. You could argue that at different times, and sometimes things that didn't work in the past might work now. The trading environment has changed. But I'd see it with other people, it wasn't just me, I could see other people how they reacted. They needed that recognition too, that acknowledgement. And because if not, you'd stop offering it, and I guess I knew I had. So there was no point in having the conversations. You see, she was very vocal about what she thought. So it was easy just to hide behind why bother? You see, I might have been right. But with her, I never found out because I never tested it. But I wasn't having that conversation with her, but I was having other ones. I was having a different whole set of little actions. And looking back now I can see that they were small acts of resistance. There would be deadlines and maybe the deadline was Thursday. I would send it back at ten o'clock at night, knowing really she meant at the end of the working day by probably six o'clock. You see, I was still technically right, it was still Thursday. I think I was just being awkward about the things I disagreed with, and I would tell myself this is about my people and making sure I'm fair to them. But perhaps I was hiding behind that. But I felt at the time I was winning the little battles. Years later, when I found NLP and went deep into learning the techniques, I was practicing one of these techniques in a training room. It's called perceptual positions. You start in your own footprint and say out loud how you feel. Then you move across into their footprints, you stand in their shoes, and talk back to yourself about how they feel towards you, and then you step into the third position, the neutral one, and just observe the pair of you. It's a powerful exercise, and of course, I used her. I sat in her chair and I looked back at myself, and what surprised me was I saw the pressure that was coming down on her from above, her years of experience in the business, and it was crushing her too. And then the bit I didn't really expect to see was me being a bit awkward. Certainly not making it any easier Me not being the most supportive person in that room. You see, some of it wasn't her being difficult it was her being frustrated Frustrated at the way I was being and if any of you want to go further I have a whole chapter in my book and the links in the show notes below. You see, once you see a glimpse from their side, you start to see things differently. You start to see how it is for them, and once you start seeing that, it's quite possible just to reframe, put a different emphasis, a different meaning on it, and change that outcome. You see, when you can reframe the situation and see it from a different point of view, you start to change the way you feel the emotions that it stirs and then suddenly things look very different. Here's what I want you to take away. I spent a long time winning little battles with that lady Filing things at ten o'clock at night because technically it was still Thursday. Being awkward about the things I disagreed with. And every one of those felt like me standing my ground. But you can win every little battle and still lose the war. And that's exactly what I did. Cause I ended up leaving and she stayed. And I never once tested the picture I'd built of her. She almost certainly had her own car park. Some Sunday mornings sat in her own car and I never knew about them because I never asked. So think about the person at work you've written off, the one you've stopped trying with and ask yourself honestly when did you last test what you think about them? I don't mean confront them. I mean test it. See here's three ways and none of them are difficult conversations. Firstly ask them a question you don't really know about them and get them to answer that not about you, about them. You know what's landing for them at the moment? What's coming down, what's coming down from above so you can sense where that pressure might be coming from. And secondly, the thing you've decided that they're gonna say no to. Can't find out and the third one look this week and watch for one piece of evidence that doesn't fit your picture. And when you spot it, don't throw it away. Cause that's what I did for three years. I threw away anything that didn't fit my belief. In the show notes below you can get hold of my free guide why your conversations keep going sideways and the one shift that fixes it. Thank you for listening to Breaking the Circle for Leaders. I hope you've enjoyed this week's episode and subscribe to make sure you get next week's too. And as always, I'm rooting for you.