Lisa Hough On The Advantages Created By Leaders Prioritising Personal Development

Lisa Hough is a passionate and enthusiastic professional coach, advisor, consultant, and program trainer. Her company, Lisa Hough Coaching & Consulting, is a certified B Corp committed to ‘empowering people and business for the good of humanity.

She works with individuals and companies to develop leaders, enhance performance, and create wellbeing and fulfillment in the workplace. She works in what she calls the ‘human dimension’ of business, because ‘people power’ is at the core of the success of every business or enterprise.

As a champion for people, she’s coached hundreds of individuals on their journey of self- and career- development, but also supported them at critical times of challenge or conflict to manage to a better outcome for themselves and others, thereby impacting many lives and workplaces along the way.

Lisa is a self-proclaimed ‘visionary’ who traffics in both possibility and positivity. She’s an afficionado of life more generally, a yogi and tennis player, and outdoor enthusiast, trained chef and wine lover, and is known for hosting fabulous dinner parties!

Lisa’s unwavering commitment to making a difference in people’s lives and creating impact follows her wherever she goes.

Lisa discusses why leaders who focus on personal growth and self-awareness as opposed to acquiring technical skills are more effective at identifying challenges, managing conflict and seizing opportunities.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Tom Allen] - To start off, can you please share a bit about your background and what led to your work in leadership performance and wellbeing?

[Lisa Hough] - My journey and passions are for people, learning and nurturing. It all started with being born to two inquisitive and intrepid educators. My father was an amazing man, he was an Air Force fighter and helicopter rescue pilot, but later in life he was an educator. That's when I came around (I'm the last of five children), but we travelled a lot and that’s what defines my life. I had a lot of exposure globally because I lived and worked all over the world, first with my family in Point Barrow, Alaska. I lived in The Philippines, again for my father’s work, and I was always fascinated and exposed to so many different cultures and people that I became interested in their development and behaviour.

As an adult I did decades of work in transformational and personal development, so that grounded me for everything I do. But I also had a professional stint; I worked in a lot of roles following university. I worked for Jimmy Carter and his think tank at my university and with Ted Turner in marketing at one of his first cable TV stations. I worked in the manufacturing sector, in the international sector at the OECD in Paris, and then I was the Community Liaison Officer at the U.S. Embassy in China. I also worked in several environmental organisations because I had an early experience which connected me and made me concerned for the environment. I think of myself more as an entrepreneur, I’ve had several exciting entrepreneurial adventures. Most notably, I founded a wine touring company when I lived in South Africa. I used to do exclusive tours to this beautiful place for the better part of a decade. It wasn't a terribly successful business venture; my husband used to refer to it as a charitable venture for wealthy wine enthusiasts! Really, it was a passion project, and I've always been passionate about my work and doing things that had me contributing to society and being alive.

In this realm of supporting people, probably the most critical role I’ve had for much of my adult life, and I didn't chase a career in early on, was as a mother. With my partner and husband being a U.S. diplomat and later consultant, it meant we travelled all over the world. I've spent much of my life overseas away from my country of origin. I'm originally from the U.S. I was exposed to so much diversity and organisations/people behind the scenes, so I got a rich understanding of people and leaders, particularly. This all informed my work and deeply impacted how I help people.

It's a gift having a broad array of perspectives to call on when you're supporting people in their own journey of learning. I became a professional coach, believe it or not, only 12 years ago. I'm now doing my best work, and I was mostly led there because of all the people I’ve influenced, who have said what I do best is help people. They told me I’m an amazing coach and I need to do that work. I got into this professional journey and have started what's for me the first time a real career.

As a professional leadership coach and consultant, can you share more about this work and passion of yours for what you're doing?

What underpins all my work is a commitment to empowering people. It's a core value of mine, and you should be connected to your core values. Mine are empowering people and love. I think of my work as a labour of love because I just love people and I also champion them. It's a critical value, for me when I see people, I see their best.

It's important to see the gold in people rather than just relate to them as their problems or issues, especially when you’re interested in helping them.

I've been coaching professionally for 12 years now, and most of that has been in the business space. This has been mostly with one key client, and funnily enough, 10 years later I'm still their Performance Coach. This company in the technology sector, and it's an amazing company and it's sometimes hard to know what impact I have, but it's just a healthy environment. This is mostly because the company values developing its people.

That's one key area of my work, but I am also coaching clients on the side, mostly executives or people in leadership roles in businesses who all come to me through referral. I don't serve a lot of people, but I like to think that by serving leaders, I get to impact a broader workplace, environment, or community. The other thing I’m passionate about, and I only discovered this during COVID-19, is my as a certified positive intelligence coach.

I love the work of Positive Intelligence and the PQ Mental Fitness program, created by Shirzad Chamine and his organisation. I facilitate that program and coach in that work, which is grounded in neuroscience and cognitive behavioural psychology. The things I love learning about it or find important about it is how it helps people build fundamental skills in self-awareness so they can manage their inner dialogue and emotions. This isn't the stuff we mostly talk, about how it impacts our performance or our success, and it’s key for people to operate effectively when they have tools to interrupt reactivity and learn how to be conscious in the way they operate. We all have messy lives, and we can't pretend they're not there!

I also love the world of business and I'm a real cheerleader for the B Corp movement. My company has recently been certified as a B Corp, and I work as a B Consultant, so I love advising businesses who are on that journey of impact and demonstrating their ethics and responsibilities as businesses. The best thing for me is when I get to coach leaders who are forging a new way of doing business. I can't say I do that exclusively, but I would love my work to grow more there.

The last thing I want to say about me, and my work is that I think of it from the ethos of being interested in people.

For Leaders to operate from the highest good, They must work on themselves, manage their wellbeing, and learn how to approach challenges. It's also critical to know your values and to understand how you're motivated.

Everybody knows about the term Growth Mindset, but are they deeply connected to how to have it, and operate from it? Supporting people in their personal growth and development is my leverage point for having an impact more broadly, and my love of people and helping them be their best is fundamentally there.

What traits have you observed as being the most important for impact led leaders and entrepreneurs who are working in this business for good space?

As a coach you delve into the messy parts of a person’s life, and leaders face unique challenges. These are particularly around how to explore their personal issues when they must maintain persona or hold up a certain way of operating. They can't show their messy selves in their workplace, they must be leaders even though they're just as human as anybody else. They need a safe space to explore, be real, and see things the way they are. Then it’s about enabling them to come back with much more consciousness in interactions with the people and the enterprise they're serving.

self-awareness is key. Listening and communication too. doing business well requires many skills, but we're mostly focused on gaining knowledge and the technical skills to operate organisationally. We fail to see how important it is to develop people.

It's not always sanctioned to talk about self-development in the workplace for example. Leaders and all people who are influencing others need to have those tools, and it's critical to be present and learn how to understand the stuff that's going on in the background and how you listen to people. It all falls into this large bucket called self-awareness. Again, I am referencing positive intelligence, and why I like it so much as it's a super simple framework.

Most people don't think of themselves as being a bundle of reactivity, but when it boils down, because of the way our brains work, they mostly are.

I love leading this program, and because of the social conventions around politeness we don't necessarily talk about real stuff often.

A foundational piece for communication and why I lead the program is it gives people the opportunity to examine their operating system.

If you think of your brain as an operating system, it is the engine that enables us to do everything else. When it's clouded up with reactivity or we're constantly interacting with other people's mess (not who they really are), there's a big cost to effectiveness for people in life, but also in the workplace.

I love the saboteur assessment that shows everyone the functioning of the brain and the thought patterns that exist. When you do it, you get to see the landscape of the saboteurs you're encountering, and it's a self-assessment.

It’s about how you use mindfulness and certain techniques to shift your brain patterns. That's all the work in the Mental Fitness program, and everyone I've taken through this six-week program is blown away when they discover how often their automatic brain patterns are running the show rather than being clear and conscious in their thinking and interactions. I've seen in the last four years the real power of going where most people don't go, and how it relates to productivity or the effectiveness or people's ability to get things done.

After a recent conversation of ours, I wrote an article on the concept of “energy leaking”. Where have you seen leaders most commonly leaking energy and how might they improve their wellbeing and become more effective and efficient in their work, life, and leadership?

I love that you have tagged that term, I don't know if I got it from somewhere else or if it's just something I came up with. First, I love the article you wrote, and I would say that it is critical to spotlight connection and wellbeing in the workplace, particularly for leaders. I’d go one step further and assert that, overt or covert, there are deleterious effects that happen with burnout and overwhelm and disconnection that we're often not paying attention to.

Leaky energy comes mostly in relationships, and just to reiterate the idea of leaky energy from my perspective (because I'm writing about it now) it's important to highlight we have incomplete, unaddressed, or unresolved issues hanging around in the background which can impede our effectiveness.

Why is that? It’s because while you think you've set something aside, there's still a challenge that has happened. You were irritated or you've become upset, and if you’re still on purpose with your work but think that because you're not actively dealing with it, it’s not affecting you… you can be lulled into the thought that it isn't influencing your mental landscape. Quite contrary to that, there is always a current of drain that happens psychically when things are left unsettled and unaddressed. I'm going to call that the nature of ‘incompletion’, and it can take a massive toll on relationships when we leave things unaddressed, and we want to avoid conflict.

I like to see conflict as this fantastic access point or opportunity for you to get to the other side of an issue; it's gold. You mature or deepen a relationship when you deal with conflict, and yet most people's inclination is to avoid it.

Avoiding it means that stuff gets swept under the carpet, the proverbial phenomenon we all know about but don't often recognise. We think if it goes away then it's not messing with things, but truly it is.

When relationships in the workplace or anywhere else are rife with incompletions because people sweep things under the carpet rather than address or deal with them, getting to the other side will often require mediation or support in some way.

Not everyone has the tools of communication to deal with that conflict, and it leads to a decline in relationships. The rub is that we often blame other things for the decline in a relationship or let things fade away. We don't realise all those interpretations we're left with or those nauseating views we have of people aren't who those people are, it's just the story your brain makes up to make sense of the fact that you don't want to be relating with that person anymore. This is an emotional energy bleed, and it’s leaky energy in the domain of relationships that I’ve described. It happens for a lot of things, and I think you need to look at how much conflict you turn away from, how much incompletion you let exist, and note whether those things are a slow bleed to your energy. It's worthy of taking stock and paying some attention.

Where do you see key opportunities to grow the purpose-driven business movement and take it mainstream?

This is a challenging question. I knew you were going to ask this question because I've listened to many of your podcasts, but I find it hard to comment on the siloing effect. I think it's because I focus so much on the micro level, and while I know it's important to helicopter above and look at the macro, focusing on human dynamics has me in the micro looking at things which have a flow on effect. Regarding certifications, all I can speak to is the B Corp Certification. Joining the dots here, I would say it is a wonderful holistic assessment that across the board can impact businesses.

Answering the question of how we grow the purpose-driven movement in business, I would say most importantly it's about giving equally, or at the very least paying some attention to people. As critical as any other aspect of the way we're going about doing business is to develop your people and most importantly your leaders. When you help them develop, it's not just skills or knowledge we can improve. 75% of the teams I spend a lot of my time with focus their learning around their technical and mechanical skills.

Business leaders are focusing on business principles and operational skills, but do we know the impact of developing people and how critical that is? it's as critical as any other part or endeavour of this movement because we know that the human consciousness evolving will influence change. It’s simple but rarely highlighted.

I read an article back in October on LinkedIn and I loved it, I found it because I wanted to point to a resource from a credibility standpoint. According to Dr. Tasha Eurich (she's an organisational psychologist and author), her team and the research they've done, self-awareness is one of the most important skills to work on, particularly for those in positions of leadership. What they found in the studies they've done is that while 90 percent of people claim to be self-aware, with her definition of self-awareness, only 10-15% of people fit the criteria! What does that tell you? We can't take this for granted that people are aware by nature.

On a much broader scale, the definition of self-awareness is the ability to see ourselves clearly and understand who we are, how we see others, and how we fit into the world. It's both external and internal, you have the external part of understanding others and how they see you, so there are many skills that are critical to learning. We need to focus on the development of our inside environments and for the people in our environments.

Empathy, communication skills, a Growth Mindset, and embracing vulnerability is all being talked about, but how much of it is being practiced and returned with trusted and honest feedback?

I'm working with my team right now on a program, we’re attempting to create a culture of feedback to make a difference by stimulating more honesty. We're all part of a larger culture that breeds niceness, and we step over things as a result. I'll share the link to that article because it’s relevant, but it also gives leaders some things to address to be sure they’re developing their leadership.

If I talk about something on a much broader scale that I think is important (because that's the micro), one of them is real human contact. We saw this at Assembly, energy arises when people are together, and we all know that we're facing new ways of working and teams aren't spending so much time together, and human contact is suffering. That’s perhaps an energy leak to the environment, it’s taking away from how we think and operate collectively, it siloes people more than organisations.

Increasingly looking for every opportunity to get back to real interactions with people is one thing, but the other I'll leave more as an inquiry for people. It's something I can get on my soapbox about, but we're so globally connected and have access to things globally. If you want to have an influence on this movement, we want to make sure we are reaching everyone, but we can suffer from this desire or addiction to growth as a paradigm (more economically speaking).

When we're trying to make change and have influence, we can position ourselves as bigger and broader, and it leads to the pitfall of not doing the work at home; if we are not working personally, individually, and locally in our communities, how can we be trusted to change things on a broader scale?

It's hard to say this because we're faced with urgency, so that means we want to broadcast and make as much change as possible. What we do by focusing on our unique spheres of influence first is ensure that the expansion of impact will follow. Thinking on this scale is important, and I think sometimes it suffers.

Don't tell someone how to do something unless you're willing to have looked at that change for yourself first.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across creating a positive change?

One local thought leader is someone who I worked with early on, Matt Sykes, the founder of Regenaration Projects. To the point I just made, he was always the person who in his social media posts was doing the work, going to his local beach, and picking up trash. But he's had an impact on a massive scale and become a founding member of something that has become quite big, and that's Regen Melbourne. This is a collective of so many different organisations that are working in Melbourne for a regenerative change in the city, and more broadly in the state of Victoria. He grew up in Gippsland and does projects locally and around the world. He is focusing on the Indigenous wisdom and bringing key stakeholders together to collaborate on change.

Just last night I went to a screening of UnCharitable hosted by Dovetail Social Enterprises, and there are so many amazing social enterprises in Melbourne particularly. It's the story of Dan Pallotta and several leaders who are shifting the framework of how we operate vis a vis funding in the charity sector.

IT'S SO INSPIRING TO BE AROUND SOCIAL ENDEAVOURS THAT ARE MAKING A DIFFERENCE. HOW THEY INTEGRATE AND CAN BE SERVED BY THAT SYMBIOSIS THAT HAPPENS WHEN BUSINESSES TAKE UP THE SUPPORTING SOCIAL ENTERPRISE OR CHARITABLE CAUSES... IT BRINGS SO MUCH MEANING INTO THE WORKPLACE.

Of course, I think Positive Intelligence is being done everywhere around the world, and I love this program. It's being done in organisations throughout the U. S. mostly, and while here I lead and facilitate an individual program for the public, it's beginning to emerge with people who are capable and primed to bring that work to their organisation. They’re doing the change work around mental fitness and how that works.

You mentioned trauma earlier, I also appreciate the trend that's happening in our conversation around dispelling the myth that we need to not discuss trauma. I think this conversation is becoming more mainstream, and it is impacting how we can influence wellbeing and mental health issues as they creep up. I like the work of Gabor Maté and the movie that featured him called The Wisdom of Trauma.

To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?

Well I’ve just picked up Adam Grant's Hidden Potential, he's a fascinating organisational psychologist. I love his work and every one of his books. Malcolm Gladwell is another good author, but Adam Grant's book Hidden Potential is a good book for all leaders. Another one that I think is on the softer side of that human dimension is Brené Brown's most recent work. She's done great work, particularly with Dare to Lead and applying that into the business space, but her Atlas of the Heart is like an encyclopedia which I think should belong in every household. It gives language to the emotional landscape, and while we're generally thinking beings, 70-80% of where we operate is in that thinking, cognitive space. People are less schooled on their emotions and understanding how to talk about them. It's a brilliant book; as I said it’s like an encyclopedia which I think belongs everywhere.

I'll recommend one other book which I think is an important piece of work. It's quite old, but it's a book called The Art of Possibility by Rosamund and Benjamin Zander. It's an indispensable read on transforming our professional and personal lives. I traffic in the currency of possibility mostly, and this is one of the things that allows us to generate hope and manage with what we've got while also leveraging this hugely creative brain we have. Understanding the importance of possibility is crucial, I just can't recommend it enough that people understand how to get there.