Author: TimSchneider

Aegis Learning Team Retreat 2017

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Planning to Provide You with Better Quality and Value

The Mount Charleston Lodge was the site of the 2017 Aegis Learning team retreat.

To the casual observer, the amount of laughter may indicate that it was nothing but fun and spirited interaction among team members who are also friends.  But the roaring of laughter was just a sign that real work was happening with a team that enjoys each others company immensely.

Using information we gathered from our external customer survey and our internal GAP/SWOT analysis, we have crafted a course for 2018 that will continue to add value and impact to our customers.  Look for 2018 to bring a set of beautifully designed online learning programs, regular webinars, podcasts and great diversity in our newsletter articles.  

Much more than just the technical planning, you will also benefit from many voices, diverse perspectives and incredible and different talents all focused in one direction and with singular, passionate purpose.  We are devoted to your success, to make better people and workplaces and to make a positive impact on the world in which we live.  

Did we mention we laughed a lot too.

Aegis CARES Update-November, 2017 Las Vegas Rescue Mission and Opportunity Village

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Helping to Make Our Community and World a Better Place

Aegis Cares was able to complete two projects this week with impact on our community.

A donation to the Las Vegas Rescue Mission with matching donations from Aegis Learning was delivered that will assist in feeding the homeless population during the holiday season.  The Las Vegas Rescue Mission serves both resident and non-resident homeless and poverty level near-homeless people in the Las Vegas valley by providing basic needs and long-term assistance in substance abuse recovery and life skills.

For the third consecutive year, the team at Aegis Learning is also supporting Opportunity Village by creating a tree for their Magical Forest event.  Opportunity Village consistently is rated the most admired charitable support organization in Las Vegas and provides job and life services to developmentally disadvantaged people.  

Thank you to all the Aegis Cares volunteers and supporters and a big thank you to Polly Walker from Aegis Learning for coordinating these giving events.  

#powerof1

#risetopurpose

Aegis Learning Cares
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Leading Edge – Volume 39 – Difficult People: Apologies

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Dealing with Difficult People-Apologies

A sincere apology offered to a difficult person can go a long way in helping ease the situation and win them over. At a minimum we need to apologize for what they are feeling and an apology is not an admission of wrongdoing.

  • Offering an apology does not imply wrongdoing or error
  • An apology is a powerful statement of empathy
  • At a minimum, offer an apology for the emotion of the difficult person
  • Own the situation by using first person pronouns
  • Remember, this is not about you but about diffusing the difficult person

More Articles

Aegis Learning Edge is in Impact, Value and Results
  • Rise! by Tim Schneider
  • Everything DiSC Catalyst Online Learning from Aegis Learning
  • A Heart for Leadership by Tim Schneider

Leading Edge – Volume 38 – Difficult People: Empathy

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Dealing with Difficult People-Empathy

Genuine and sincere empathy, either situational or emotional, will go a great way to diffuse a difficult person. Always listen for queues in which you can provide empathy and never compare to any situation you have experienced. Also add the use of the person’s name during this step.

  • After Listening, We Must Apply Empathy and Understanding to Difficult People
  • Empathy is Relating to People Either Situationally or Emotionally
  • Situational Empathy is You Have Experienced the Same Thing
  • Emotional Empathy is You Have Experienced the Emotion

And never, ever, use comparative empathy when you directly compare someone’s experience to yours. A real empathy killer.

More Articles

Aegis Learning Edge is in Impact, Value and Results
  • Rise! by Tim Schneider
  • Everything DiSC Catalyst Online Learning from Aegis Learning
  • A Heart for Leadership by Tim Schneider

Owning Our Decisions

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At the end of the day, the decision was yours. Even with collaboration and using systems thinking, you made the call. The decision is part of your leadership record and legacy.

Effective leaders cannot run from their decisions. They cannot blame others. They cannot blame the economy. They cannot hedge or try to escape accountability. It was your decision.

When right on target a decision is a glorious thing. Your hard work paid off and you chose the correct course of action. Everything fell into place nicely and the return was better than anticipated. It is pretty easy to own that type of decision.

The harder decisions to own are the clunkers. The ones that don’t work out so well or the choice that just did not pan out. Those are hard to swallow and to have your name attached.

Effective leaders own decisions that are both good and bad. With good decisions, the leader will share credit with the team, those that provided valuable input and any stakeholder that gave clues about outcomes or consequences.

When the decision is a poor choice you are on your own buddy. Can’t blame the data or any person. It is all you.

With bad decisions, there are a couple of additional decision points that come into play. The poorest choice is to defend and continue to cheerlead for a bad decision. This is simply digging a bigger hole and drawing more attention and potentially, criticism to a bad decision.

The effective leader must admit the mistake and work diligently to fix it. Simply say that you made a mistake, you are sorry and you will get it fixed. Use plenty of personal pronouns to make sure the ownership of the decision is clear. You may not get beaten up for a bad decision but you will certainly loose credibility if you try to run from it.

When looking at a poor decision, first check and see if you gave yourself enough time to analyze and diagnose the situation and all of the potential impacts. This is the most common reason for poor decisions. Then, retrace the system thinking and seek a different and wider scope of input that focuses on why the first decision failed and that the issue still exists. Never compound a poor decision with a rash or arbitrary fix that is simply designed to save face.

By Tim Schneider

Tim Schneider is the founder of Aegis Learning and has been working with teams and leaders for 25 years.   He generates results, impact and his sole focus is your success.

He is the author of The Ten Competencies of Outstanding Leadership and Beyond Engagement and a widely sought speaker, training facilitator and individual development coach.

What’s New at Aegis Learning – Exciting New Tools and Programs!

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Aegis Learning Edge is in Impact, Value and Results

Debut of Q3 and The Path from Aegis Learning

Aegis Learning never stops innovating.  And innovating for you and your growth and we are excited to offer two new tools for your learning and growth.

Q3 is the groundbreaking combination of three pieces of intelligence that neuroscientists and behaviorists indicate have a greater impact on success than traditionally measured IQ.  Q3 combines learning and growth in emotional intelligence, relational intelligence and situational intelligence to provide an incredible growth in personal and professional success factors.  This highly validated set of skills is powerful for leaders, sales professionals, customer service providers and entrepreneurs.   Learn more by clicking the image below.

Aegis Path is a unique set of programmed follow-up tools that will automatically sent to all of our program participants.  This reminder and challenge is accompanied with a self-assessment to measure continued progress and help our participants continue to map out their success in action plan form.  But one of the best parts of Aegis Path is an independent set of tools sent to participant’s sponsors/mentors/leaders that assist them in keeping the learning and culture changing competencies living in their organization.  It maps out discussion points and follow-up with participants to ensure that the return on training investment is long-lived.

Emotional Intelligence, Situational Awareness and Relationships

Leading Edge – Volume 37 – Difficult People: Listening

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Dealing with Difficult People-Listening

The first, and most important step, in dealing with difficult people is to listen to them. Complete and uninterrupted listening is needed to remove the emotionalism and allow you the space to provide solutions later. Creating boundaries is also needed to keep the interactions civil and acceptable.

  • Listening is a Critical Element of Dealing with Difficult People
  • Listening Must be Focused and Uninterrupted
  • Avoid Jumping In to Fix
  • Keep Boundaries and Don’t Accept Abuse in Listening
  • Sometimes Listening is All That is Required

More Articles

Aegis Learning Edge is in Impact, Value and Results
  • Rise! by Tim Schneider
  • Everything DiSC Catalyst Online Learning from Aegis Learning
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What is Showing Up?

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Unlocking a Heart for Leadership

This is a multi-part series of excerpts from Unlocking a Heart for Leadership, a soon to be released book by Tim Schneider.  This book and series examines the powerful methods to add heart based (affective/feeling) approaches to your leadership and life.  An unlocked heart is the third facet of full leadership and personal realization.  

What is Showing Up?

“What you resist persists” Rick Warren

One more quick self-check to see if your heart needs to be unlocked. Quick but complicated to get our heads around.

Look at and spend some time thinking about what is showing up in your life. Is it really what you want and desire or are there elements of dissatisfaction or evenly some deeply rooted pieces where you are not living as you desire?

To be specific, examine who is in your life. Are you pulling great people around you or are you a bug light for toxic and negative humans? Are the relationships you have mutually supportive and caring or is it one way only? These are tough questions but necessary as you move forward to unlock your emotional power.

Take a moment and reflect on your last three or four thoughts. Were they positive, upbeat and encouraging or were they dark and negative? What is the ratio of good thoughts to negative or bad thoughts? This one is a pretty good sign that there are some unresolved issues blocking the emotions that drive your thought patterns.

Another very specific view is about obstacles you are facing. Have you done everything right in an area but the results are not coming? Are you working very hard and have very little to show for it? Have you been passed over for a promotion? Turned down for a loan needed to go into business for yourself? Are you wondering what is holding that back and preventing that success?

Weather consciously known to you or not, yes answers to the above reveal some unresolved issues you are carrying in your heart and emotional composition. Most common among those are:

1. Unrepaired relationships

2. Ungrieved loss

3. Motivations for your actions that are not rooted in good intention

4. Projections to the world that are not what you want or hope (negative perceptions by others)

Have you ever watched news accounts of crime victims reaching out and connecting with the perpetrators of their pain? Although grotesque to think about, these are perfect examples of why relationships, even the most fleeting, need to have some closure, questions answered and some point of clearing.

Unrepaired relationships pull consciously and subconsciously on all of us. Blocking someone out of your life is not repair and simply serves to bury the hurt and block deeper into our subconscious, making it harder to heal. As we all suffer disconnect with others, the heart healthy works to repair while the emotionally unpowered seek to bury the disconnect and simply forget. Quick little note here: you won’t really forget. It may move away from the top of your mind but never out of your subconscious thoughts and emotional composition. As we move through the tools and practices in this book, you will have a pathway to repair these relationships, or at minimum, attempt to repair them. This is an area that we will not sugarcoat in any form. This is difficult and some relationships have decades of estrangement.

Another hard examination is the ungrieved losses in our lives. Very personally, this one weighed on me for many years and there are still a couple of losses that need some grieving time. It wasn’t until years after I lost my dad and mom, did I fully mourn their loss and clear that heart blockage. There is a likelihood that you too are carrying some ungrieved losses in your life. They don’t need to be a death and could come in the form of a lost marriage, failed business or even a missed opportunity.

Like with relationships, our losses cannot simply be buried and we cannot rely on time to heal these wounds. Time blunts some of the pain but the loss remains in our hearts and subconscious minds creating blocks to our success and our ability to capitalize on our heart and emotional power. It will become a matter of finding, acknowledging and then finally grieving these losses to move on successfully.

Your motivations and projections will be examined in detail later in this book but suffice it to say that they drive a big part of our emotional healthy and heart power. When motives are pure and positive, those types of results will follow. When motives are less than pure, the results that show up in your life will reflect that as well.

Projections are the same. You will attract exactly what you project. The unhealthy elements (and people) in our lives appear because of something we have projected to the world. We certainly don’t mean to do that but there is something buried in our emotional composition that keeps driving our projected behaviors. It could be very old or something deeply rooted in a difficult experience. Only you know and it is up to you to find out about it.

By Tim Schneider

Tim Schneider is the founder of Aegis Learning and has been working with teams and leaders for 25 years.   He generates results, impact and his sole focus is your success.

He is the author of The Ten Competencies of Outstanding Leadership and Beyond Engagement and a widely sought speaker, training facilitator and individual development coach.

Celebrating Leaders-McCarran International Airport

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Leaders with Heart, Skill and Purpose!

Bravo! Congratulations! Great job!

There are not enough superlatives to describe this group from McCarran International Airport.  Passionate, skilled and heart-filled leaders that are committed to lead the right way and move the culture of the organization forward.  They embraced all the learning (nine units), peer coaching and outside reading assignments.

Rock on Leadership Flight 1 graduates!