UnScripted: Authentic Leadership Podcast

Leading A Team To Victory Through Difficult Times! Feat. Maria Nebres #Leadership #TeamBuilding

July 12, 2021 John Lebrun & La'Fayette Lane Season 3 Episode 46
UnScripted: Authentic Leadership Podcast
Leading A Team To Victory Through Difficult Times! Feat. Maria Nebres #Leadership #TeamBuilding
UnScripted: Authentic Leadership Podcast
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Show Notes Transcript

🗣 In this episode, John and La'Fayette are joined by special guest Maria Nebres. Maria has provided strategic tactical coaching and delivery services in human resources/employee relations for three decades!  Maria provides for us how to maintain your  workplace performance while also balancing the people and business leadership components to business operations. It's easy to lead when everything is going well, the question is can you lead through difficulty? Hit that PLAY and SHARE button to hear how you can lead your team to victory through difficult times!


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Welcome to the Unscripted:

Authentic Leadership Podcast. A podcast we're seeking to lead change, but also seeking to understand.We are also here as a platform for leaders to come together, to unite, to develop and empower other leaders in the areas of business, family, faith and community. I am your host, Lafeyette Lane, joined by my co-host John LeBrun. And today we are joined by our special guest, Maria Nebres.. Put those hands together, those of you that will watch this, you can even put those clap emoji's in the comments section today. She's here to have a conversation with us about leading a team to victory through difficult times. It's such a timely time to have real on the podcast with us today as she will share her guiding perspectives for making true leadership, unpacking true leadership, starting point every moment, because in her Haaz words, Maria believes is what we think they'll do and share. And so we are here to have that conversation. As always, we want you all to continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel there and our social media platforms. But let's get right into the conversation today. We're talking about leading a team to victory through difficult times. We know that we are in what many would suggest difficult times, but leadership never stops. Leadership never stops through difficulties, through storm strength. You still have to be that leader that God has called you to be. And if we want to talk about it from the aspect of leading successfully, because we've seen a lot of leadership through these times that are leading people, but they're not leading successfully. So that's why I want to start. Maria, how does one lead a team successfully through difficult times? Thank you. I really, really believe that before we can answer that question, we've got to answer that question for ourselves. Right. So many times I have experienced in the years I've been in corporate for nearly three decades and in my three decades of serving in corporate spaces where structure is so important so that you can get this common purpose. You know, a whole bunch of people rallying to a common cause, which is really the definition of an organization and group of people coming together for a common common cause. The kind of leadership that's required for that, we tend to forget. It starts from the beginning. In the beginning is each and every single individual. So when we can go back to the starting place, the right starting place, that is really from within. Yeah. There's just so many things that we can definitely unpack. And I hope that, you know, it does come out what needs to come out in this space between us and I, that that's the one thing that I really do want to share, is that we can often tend to forget that the microcosm is so fundamental and it's so important before we can really create a macrocosm structure. Right. So we're talking about two different structures that need to really fully align. And it comes from the internal, the inner, and that is within each and every single individual. Yeah. Sure. So let's let's deal with that a little deeper. Yeah. Talk about the internal rosacea before the external manifests and leadership. What are some of those internal things that you think a leader should possess in order to before they can lead a team, they have to lead themselves. What are some of those internal things? Yeah, OK. So I wrote two books over the last two to three years, and it's really been all about starting from within. And when I talk about within, I'm really talking about the number one leadership that really ignites the kind of leadership that other people can witness, can experience. And that comes from within, which is really all about how you manage yourself and how you lead yourself. Now, a lot goes. There's a lot that's involved in that and that goes into that. And if I were to really highlight what it is that comes to mind for me and what I always promote is that it has to come from a level of truth from that particular individual, because that truth is what gets expressed out in our relationships with other individuals. And really what I'm talking about is, you know, not the kind of leadership that we have defined in terms of an external role that we play, you know, a position that we play in a structure that's external to us. Those are just byproducts. They're creations. They are created by the gifts that we have from within us. So when I speak about the inner work, I speak about the inner work of the gifts that were not manmade. They were God given and the God given. You know, here's one example in the kind of work that I've done over the last five years to promote something that is so difficult for a lot of structures, external structures, to understand that there is a place for love. In fact, love is really where we need to be leading from. Now, the challenge with that is there are some spaces and structures in our lives where it's been pretty much a taboo thing. So how do I talk about it in the space of work that I do? And I call it work its vocation. It's my soul's mission, my heart's mission. You know, yes. On the tangible, technical, hard skill set side, I provide over twenty five years of strategic and tactical expertize and human resources management. You know, somebody really wanted to know what my technical background is. I do have a profile and a resume that can tell you that the the real gifts that I have to fulfill that particular role is from within. And many times I find that when I am helping individuals and I help individuals at an end and a one on one level in terms of my coaching, but I also do group work. And, you know, if it's if it starts with me helping and coaching a positional leader, and then I help them to cascade it out to their teams, that could be an example of a group session that I would have with them. But, you know, the commonality is it has to start from the level of self. And the level of self that I speak of is to really how do you evoke out and bring out the fullest expressions of our troops, which , you know, another word for it is authenticity. Right. Yeah. To be authentic is what? It is to really be truthful, and it it often gets mistaken that I can't be authentic because, you know, another word that comes up comes to mind is that whole notion that you can't be vulnerable, you can't be vulnerable, because if you were vulnerable, you're exposing yourself. So herein lies the whole issue around. I think we've lost track on the fact that it probably. It probably resonates with a lot of people that it really isn't about not being able to make the right decisions so much as it is we tend to get so lost and divorced from our authenticity, our truth. You know that. We end up getting pressured to not be authentic, which causes our ability or stresses our ability to navigate through dilemmas. It's not just us. It's not decision making. We can make decisions all the time. Whether they're right or wrong is another thing. I find that the the pressure points to authenticity in this day and age. But, you know, it's really been it didn't have to be during Covid like it's been happening time and time again where you have the external pressures pressurizing you who you are authentically. That you end up having to show a side of you because you're gravitating not to love, which is who you are authentically, but you gravitate to something else, that something else could be the bottom line. In my experience, it could be targets, business targets. It could be satisfying a need for a particular role that you perform. So you see how we start to get so much more distanced from our authentic source. Because it's very interesting. Yeah, because, you know, my my experience in corporate America is so we do it they do a lot of personality tests, and I'm cool with personality tests, but they do it in the wrong fashion. So they do personality. And then they say, oh, look, most of the managers hold this type of personality. Most of the leaders have strong personalities. Therefore, anybody who has a different, slightly different one almost thinks they have to become like that person. And they are. And then you get the flip side, where I've been hearing this word authentic a lot. It's in our podcast. We like it. But same time you see other people who are very big on social media promoting be a leader, be authentic. And then all the followers think that be authentic means they have to be like that person. So we have the Gary Vee followers. I like the man. I'm cool with them. But they think he's very jersey. He talks jersey and that's so forth. I'm from the Midwest. Don't talk the same as him. He doesn't expect me to. But this follower sometimes think, oh, I need this to kind of talk, walk, act like Gary. And I'm trying to say, guys, no, God created you to be you. We don't need to Gary's. We need one Gary and one you. That's it. Yeah. Everybody thinks authenticity means lots of, you know, curse extra, all these other things. Like Gary. And I'm saying, no, that's Gary's self. And he recognizes that. That's why he's being successful. Why he's happy. Yeah. You can't be happy and be like Gary. But I hear you say leading from love with yourself. What I'm gathering from that is you're saying start with self-love. So then you can therefore sort of the love thy neighbor as you love yourself. You know, the word says that what that really means, if you break it down, is you have to love your neighbor or treat your neighbors as as you treat yourself. Therefore, if you treat yourself bad, you could only expect to treat your neighbor equally bad. Right. Therefore, you must first have self-love to be able to then portray the same love on to others. Is that kind of where you're going with that? Start with yourself. Start with love. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you can put any kind of an analogy to it in both my books. I spend some careful time in making sure that I highlight what I mean by the fact that the STARTING Foundation is who you are and how well you understand yourself, how well you know these terms that in the family. You have no problem understanding what love means when you get into other life domains that are important to you. All of a sudden there's this fear that comes up that you can't be authentic, you can't be real. You know, in one of the experiences that I've had, one of the one of the reasons why I'm contracted to organizations, whether they're Fortune 500 or small, starting up companies, was to put together people policies. Right. And what I have found is that a lot of the policies restrict us from being humans. And the restrictiveness is because on the one side, this is going to get to the whole dilemma and how we create dilemmas, are they necessary ? You know, that's the big question mark that we really need to ask ourselves. And answering that question isn't necessarily starting with the whole group. It's starting with what are you going to lead in that mode movement? Right. What is going? What is it going to be that's your part, but how can you answer that question for others when you can't even answer that question for yourself? Right. So it goes back to what does authenticity mean, what does truth mean? What I promote in truth and authenticity is the truths of the truths that we each hold when it comes to our troops, our unique truths in our vitality. Our wholeness, which is our well-being, our genius, which is where wisdom comes from and our talents and our gifts unique unto each and every individual before we can come together . Now, I'm not talking about the fact that it's it's, you know, getting stuck there, because I really, truly believe that we have spent a lot of time understanding external so much that we've forgotten some of the things that are intrinsically within us. We've forgotten. So it's not even a training issue. It's a remembering issue. Because we have forgotten who we are. And I find that faith has a lot to do with that, because that's another example. Love has tools for us that we were born with. And, you know, it's interesting because I think over time, especially with the rollout, with the type of consciousness that we as a society, as a community, as a world that has been progressing technologically, financially, all these things are external. Right. We've been evolving and a lot of beautiful things have happened with that kind of evolution. But the evolution of consciousness, our consciousness of understanding the things that we are, the things that are intrinsic within us, we've tended to have forgotten. And you know, how that translates out into our world is through love's channel and love's channel, our relationships, human relationships. Right. Is that on packing or is that getting out? That's great, because I want to stay in that same vein. Yeah, well, stay the same vein of other relationships. Now, you were talking about before we can talk from the teen perspective, you got to deal with the individuality, which I think is great. But how do we transition to that when working with others on the team if we're going to be our authentic self? Because if we're going to be our authentic selves, as you've stated, as John has stated, we're not all the same. And if we want to bring all of our gifts to the table, we're going to bring our personalities to the table. Hmm. There's going to be some friction. There's going to be some conflict. Who is going to be some differences? How do how does a leader that's leading those teams are team members working together? How do we find balance in being our authentic selves? Right. And, you know, this is where a lot of the things that we hear from one of the beautiful things in the last five to 10 years is the the emergence of individuals who are stepping up to the plate to really wanting to really promote authenticity or things that promote individuals for being who they are and not getting lost with things that don't allow for us as an organized group of people to thrive like a we're constantly surviving, you know. So terminologies are coming up and we're exploring them more. We're also tooling people up more with the new concept at one point over 30 years ago coming on to 30 years ago. You know, it used to be what was important for organizations in assessing employees was satisfaction, employee satisfaction. And then you jump start into, you know, the 1980s. And it was no longer just satisfaction. It was engagement. So individuals and the Pietersen gaze that into that, the individuals who explored emotional intelligence and gave birth to concepts that we could really consider. So you could see that we are evolving friction, you know, challenges. These are still terms that I think we have an association with from a fear based perspective. When we don't understand human dynamics and then we expect let's just rally everybody together. Of course you're going to have. People try to be the authoritarian or the person who is going to. This is my way or the highway. Sure. That's just human nature. Right. So we need to respect certain things that we've already. It's the same thing that I mentioned earlier where. Just because we're remembering our authenticity doesn't mean we forget it. It's not an either or. There are certain things that we've put in place in structure, like I talk about relational structures because I'm talking about the human dynamics to make a structure work for a common cause. That's the sequence of events in anything like we could talk about it from the perspective of an organization, company y company wise, or an organization from a movement wise. When you have individuals who are coming together because of a common cause, that is an organization, but it's the same thing in the structure of family. Right. Oh, yeah. I mean, half the time when I'm coaching a leader who is a positional leader. Absolutely. Personal issues come up. And the reason why it comes up so I'm I am a master consulting hypnotist, and I use it for the purposes of making sure that my client is really taking a look at a particular enhancement focus, like in the performance enhancement, in their leadership capability, from the perspective of things that are unnecessary issues they have to go through. If they're unnecessary, then that's the issue we deal with. Remove the unnecessary issue, unnecessary issue that we carry from our past. These are things that are unresolved that we carry into our present moment. So it's very difficult sometimes for a leader to be in their full presence, to really capture and know from an authentic place than another individual. Lafeyette, for instance, is going to act up right now. But I need him to be on his game because he's actually going to ask me another question. Now, if he's not in his game, then what kind of a leader am I? Right. So, you know, how can you remain authentic? You remain in the full presence. Yeah. Know. That's good. You talked about the corporate space. We've talked about the corporate setting. But somewhere you made a transition from being a corporate employee to owning your own business. Why did you do that? Number one, it's a two sided question. Why did you do that? And number two, what was the transition from corporate to your own, being an entrepreneur? What was that like? Yeah, thanks for asking. It just seems like so long ago, 17 years ago, I found myself in a situation where for 12 years I was a corporate employee. And I grew up at a time. I'm not sure if you call me a Genex or not, but I grew up from a time where I was in the generation where you did your time and you earned your stripes. I also came from a cultural and ethnic cultural background where you work hard. Sure. Another aspect of the cultural background that I came from was I was an immigrant who was uprooted from my birth home, which was my native land in the Philippines, because I was always told that North America was the land of opportunity. Right. So I assimilated and I saw my parents working really, really hard. And I guess I just sort of absorbed that. And they said, you got to work hard. You got to earn your stripes. You have to be educated. And so I naturally fell into being goal driven. And I wanted to have my education because I was one of four children. And the only girl in a family where culturally, you know, the expectation was for me to really just settle down with a man, a nice man, have a family. But I saw myself no different from my brothers. They were into sports, they were into their education, so naturally I just thought, OK, so I'm going to get educated. So if I kind of fell into the business world and I was really fascinated with the psychology, the social psychology. Of interactions. What motivated an individual psychologically because of their social relationships was what made me. And I think that was because I was a sociologist junkie in terms of my schooling. I loved English. I loved sociology. And then the working world just was like a great. Why do we have social issues going on? Why are there stratifications of inequalities going quite? And, you know, the number one denominator was because there was always someone that wanted more over somebody else. And where do you see that often? It doesn't really matter which environment. You know, that's kind of a part of human nature. We don't necessarily have to like it. But it's going to happen. It's going to come. What we do with it, though, and what we respond just those are some of the things that really motivated me to thinking that if I understood the workings, the inner workings of an organization structure. Could I make a difference so that that was still there in in my mind, part of my goal was I'll earn my stripes and then why do I want to do with it? So I took a bold leap and I decided despite what individuals at the time, I had my own mentors. I'm a big believer. You can't do it on your own. You know, nobody does it on their own. It takes a tribe. It takes a village. And there's always going to be someone who knows that much more than you do. And that keeps you humble. Right. But it also keeps you in terms of your that whole growth mindset that I also promote for individuals as part of the ingredient to effective leadership, constantly knowing that. You have to know when you're going to be a teacher and you got to know when you're going to be a student. Right. That's good. Yeah. So I decided that the big impetus for me was going out on my own. But it also happened to have been that that was on a personal level. I wanted to have a family. And at the time, my family expected me. My nuclease family that I was trying to build really needed me to be home. Now, my head did not want to just be home and do one thing. I valued having purpose and purpose for me. And this is, you know, something that I deeply believe in. And I we went into the coaching support. I give others that, you know, purpose is unique to you as well. And purpose is expressed. Through the walls. That's important. Hence my second book, which is Love and Leadership in the Fast Lane How to Lead Without Selling Short on what matters most. And who answers that question? What matters most to you? Because when you can satisfy it at that level. One of the things I also remind individuals, and it's all my coaching is really all about reminding people because you're the one that knows your truth. You're the one that knows your wisdom. And I think, you know, our society and the way we've all of us have shaped society and the structure in which we live, the life spaces in which we have and perform roles and is we have somehow caused us to go into a default. Where if it fits into this category, then. You have a reason and a purpose and a privilege. Do you see what I mean? Explain that a little more. What do you mean by that? So when we when we when we create and fall into the norm of power, a paradigm where somebody else has defined something for us. We tend to lose elements of our authenticity and our authenticity there, if we could really, really hone in on that. I mentioned to you that it's the roots of our vitality and our creativity and our genius. It doesn't mean that a person is authentic and has, you know, the the liberty and the license to just be authentic and not go back to a common purpose because they've signed up for something. Right. They've signed up for that organization. So, you know, account terms like accountability, responsibility, having a matrix and a structure for that is very is definitely important. And you hold people accountable. You hold yourself accountable for it as well. Right. Absolutely. Yeah, so I think it goes back to what you were saying, you know, does it. How do I help and a leader? How does a leader maneuver through that? They will know the answer. They will know the answer when they can know the answer for themselves as well. Right. So the dilemmas, for instance, in an organization that naturally come up could be, for instance, how do you make a decision for cost management while at the same time you want to empower individuals? Right. Empowering an individual could cost you a lot of money, for instance. So the work that I try to remind leaders about is really around their creativity, around how do you balance the two when there seems to be a dichotomy? Life has dichotomies, right? It causes us to be a lot more creative, but if we're not routed from love, which is I'm talking about the purest sense of the word love, purest sense of the word love structurally in all of life, space is really about loving a concept, loving an idea, loving a relationship that you would do what it took that gives you that razor sharp focus. Love is a single source for the highest engagement possible. Do you know how we know this? We tend to. We tend to revere the inventions of artists. Like Shakespeare, like Picasso. They produced art because of love. The love for their concept there, they're actually tapping into their authenticity and their creativity. So spending time as an organization, whether you're a company or a movement. Rallying, it's almost like that's that's an obligation when you are fulfilling the role of a leader. And a leader, by the way, is is someone who knows and remembers that the number one order of business. Is to influence and develop the growth of other people being leaders. But you can't get to that point when you're not satisfying your basic needs. And this basic need is knowing who you are. Mm hmm. It's a good point. So, yeah, so basically you cannot be an effective leader and effectively help other people become better. If you're not comfortable with yourself first, because you're always be worried about somebody being better than you or somebody leapfrog in your position, taking your position, looking better than you. Any leaders who can't shine that? We always talk about how leaders, when they when they are a leader, when they get accolades, they should act like a mirror. They just use it. They shine that back onto their team. It's not meant to be for you. It's meant to be for you or your people, your team, the ones you helped you get there. You don't just soak it in. Right. As you had just said so beautifully is I believe, is that a leader cannot effectively grow his team, his people. If he does not feel good about where he is, he or she themselves, meaning if they don't love themselves, then they cannot genuinely want their team to grow and be the best they could possibly be. John, May I think it was John Maxwell had once said that he thought he was in a group of a room with a group of leaders, and they said he's talking about training them. He said, you need to train them. They need to be better. He should always be improving them. And he said, well, if I train them and they get too good, then they might, then they're going to leave. He said, yes, they might. But what's worse is if you don't train them and they're terrible, they're going to stay. Yeah, no, they and you know why, John, even that has so much that you can. Oh, there you go. You have a lot to unpack with that, even that statement, right? I mean, it's it is really, really interesting because Fener comes up no matter what. And so it's really interesting because one might think that. You go for personal transformation, training, personal development. Turn off the light, turn it back on. And there you go. You're enlightened. This is life. It's ongoing. It's all the time. But it's an escalator. You're getting better. You're getting worse. There's no still sitting still. I don't know about you, but one of the beauties that I gifted myself with through conscious deliberation, which is another topic I talk about and I help support my clients in, when you're consciously deliberate with certain things, you're constantly in your full presence. And it really doesn't mean that life is any easier. So there is this there's this notion that love is difficult or painful or it's taboo for a certain reason because it's inappropriate. When I talk about loving oneself, I talk about. And I guide in having people remember that. What is love? Love is in its highest form, is about illuminating, illuminating does not necessarily mean you're going to illuminate the rosy Posey all the time. That's not life like. That's the reality check, right. But you've got to still do sometimes illumination. And here's the thing. And some individuals don't want to get to that point yet because they don't want what I mentioned earlier. One of the biggest insights that, you know, it became more and more apparent to me when I was helping leaders. I was also helping employees because, you know, that's the role of human resources in the space, the field in H.R. that I. Performed a role and would be employee relations, so there were many times when I would either have to go through giving the bad news that they were going to lose their jobs or the big rah rah, congratulations, you got the job or you got the promotion. And, you know, it gifted me with the opportunity not only to understand the dynamics of levels of positions that people performed that were associated with the inequalities salary like you see them, all the pressures over laying on top of the other that we end up just purposely. It just all of a sudden the delusion of truth. Occurs. So a leader, it's incumbent upon the leader to make sure that we're all healthy, we're all as well tapped into our source of empowerment because we cannot empower younger individuals. We can we can only provide the forum by which they can. They can be brilliant. Mm hmm. And that goes for everybody, right? Yeah. So a lot of people think love me just means happiness, you know, giving attaboys all the time. Hey, good job. Good job, Bobby. Good job, Susie. Love. It's all love here. To be quite honest, I think it's just showing just as much love holding somebody accountable. Absolutely right. If you like. If I don't love someone in my family enough to hold them accountable to what they're trying to attain, then I just don't care much about what they're trying to do. So holding someone accountable takes energy. It takes me being accountable to their goals. It's me being accountable to them and them being accountable to themselves. That's right. So I think when somebody gets an agreement, it's showing love being accountable. Lafeyette and I work on this show together. We have we sit down and say, I'm going to do this, OK, I'm going to do this part. I do it because I don't want to let my brother down. Right. I want to I want to we want to help people. They care about the success of him. Then I wouldn't worry about my part of the accountability. It doesn't mean you can't mess up. That's why I'm assuming it's kind of what you meant by your love is not always just happy, but. Absolutely. I absolutely love that. I love how we kind of pinging off each other in terms of something that really it isn't as it's not so. It's funny because it's simple. Yes. However, there are so many intricacies to it because you see, for me, I picture love being the big umbrella. And the big umbrella is who we are, which means we must embody love in order for us to actually access the tools that are really gifts within us. Once we express ourselves, when we express ourselves, the stuff that seems so foreign for certain individuals in a leadership, our authority position where, you know, it can either gravy, more love or it can breed inequality. And we know we're in many different pockets of life where it could be either or. Right. Yeah. Love. If you're embodying love, you're tapping into the tools that aren't so foreign and you won't have to try to figure out how can I be compassionate? Because it's intrinsic. It's just natural. It can't be natural when you're not in a place of ease. And a place of ease is what love is, because it is as simple as that. Just the other day, for instance, I had a session with a client of mine and she was very stressed. So most of the individuals I deal with are already at that point, like, you know, when you're thirsty, you're already in the continuum of dehydration. Mm hmm. It's the same thing when you're stressed. Now, there's nothing wrong, you know, nothing that comes. And I had to explain to her that nothing that comes out of us naturally is bad. How we deal with it. Is the qualifier is it going to serve? Or in terms of our response or is it going to put us back? So in her case, she was stressed, like she could not understand why she was stressed. So we had to come from a place for all to get her to a point where she could honor the fact that this is just naturally coming up for you. What is what is it? This is coming from a loving place, a self loving self talk place. This is an example of love and action. Do you beat yourself up and make yourself even more stressed? Or do you say stress? The feeling of stress is giving me a signal. And this signal is telling me because feelings, the feeling of stress is coming from a God given talent, that we have a God given gift that we have, which is called emotions. Hmm. Well, there's a purpose for emotions. We are one big purpose if we can really, truly understand the gifts that we have. God, emotions as an example. Stress can can give you the signal. It's a message that your body and and your your the way you're behaving is maybe off keel. Maybe you're looking for perfection. And it's telling you, you know, like you're telling yourself through your feelings that your God, you have to get back to a place of ease. So don't be a perfectionist like that could be an example. It's like a headache. People think when they get a headache, they need an Advil. I used to think the same thing until I went to a good friend now who is like my chiropractor said, well, an Advil doesn't know how to pinpoint pain. It just numbs the body. I thought, interesting. It is. It doesn't know your toe hurts. It's not that smart. He said the headache is God's way of making your body better able to tell you something's wrong. It's a pain in your body. Is your is your brain telling you something's wrong, your headache is dehydrated, which is actually typically the problem or I'm lacking a nutrient. That's right. Or something along those lines, or I've had too much of something. And now I'm coming off of that has been something along those lines. And therefore, you have a headache because it feels like it's lacking something. It was getting the meat doesn't mean it should have that. Yeah. And you know why? Nine out of 10 times. It's as simple as that. You know, one of the things, too, is breathing into. We tend to stop breathing when we're stressed out or when we're thinking about something, when we don't understand our entire the miracle of our entire body, which includes our mind and its alignment and the proper respect and honor for the fact that we are so much more than our body. We are so much more than our mind. And this is where Spirit can come into play. You know, that's when we can allow for the openness. One of the there are certain essential factors in life, which is one of the reasons why I call my program the factor of. There are so many different factors to consider. Right. And one of the biggest factors that kind of opens the whole gate to at all in terms of a process for an individual to remind themselves to go back into full presence is awareness. So we do spend a lot of time really trying to understand where does awareness fit in and when, you know, we awareness exists no matter what. What we choose to do with that awareness can either move us in this direction, which is towards love, towards who we truly are, or this direction. Right. And. I say this generally because it really does require the specificity of the situation. It is. You need to put it in there for sure. You know, so you need to respect what specifically are you trying to address? It is not, you know, a paint brush that you're painting. Everything that's part of it is taking the time to pause, taking the time to be fully present. A leader who can master that is a leader because you're not a leader. If you don't get that, you know, you really are. You're striving to be a leader. Like we all are. Yeah, absolutely. Those you that will watch and listen to this. We want you to stay connected to Maria. You can do that in several ways. Number one, follow Maria on her various social media platforms and just mention about the fact that, oh, those are two pages there on LinkedIn and Facebook page. There is the factor of realizing potential. You also can follow her on Instagram. Her Instagram handle is at love, the way to brilliance that is at love, the way to brilliants on Instagram. You also can connect with Maria on several of her websites there www.factorof.com. And also she has a video collection, their awesome videos there on www.vimeo.com/marianebres also she had mentioned her books that you can go there and purchase several of her books there. We've talked about love at a extent and length here on the podcast, but we want you to go beyond that. Learn some more in depth about love and leadership there. Her book is called Love and the Highly Engaged Team Make a difference through your leadership and also love and leadership in the fast lane. How to leave without selling short on what matters most. Maria also provides customized private ingroup seminars and teachings, proving methods for harmonizing authentic success with transformation and habits, supporting brilliant outcomes through a love engagement model. And of course, we also want you to stay in tune to connect the ear to the podcast here. And unscripted, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel that you see there on the bottom of your screen, unscripted, authentic leadership. Also, follow us on our various social media platforms. They're on Facebook, unscripted at the new leadership podcast or Instagram handles at Unscripted Leadership. Our LinkedIn page is unscripted Authentic Leadership Podcast. You can stream our podcast on any podcast platform where we just cross our 1000 download souls. To that, we say thank you to all of our group, the family. This is just the beginning of great things you can find us on there. Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, our radio on Stitcher and connect with us on our website, unscripted. That's leadership dot com, where not only where you can find information about the podcast, you can listen to episodes, connect with us. Awesome, exciting things that we have coming up. We also have Mirch. They're available on the website when you sign up for our unscripted email group. You will receive a mirch call for 10 percent off your first promo and unscripted. That's leadership. Dot com. Again, we say thank you to our special guest, Maria, our Nibras, for coming on to have this amazing conversation about leading a team to victory through difficult times. As always, we're here to build bridges and not walls. Bridges connect and walls divide. Until next time, We pray that you be the leader that God has called you to be, God bless.