The Essence of Leadership with Helen Argyrou

EP #004
TW: Mention of Sexual Abuse

In this episode, we're talking to Helen Argyrou. Helen is a clinical psychologist and founder of Helen AHA, which is an innovative leadership program for future leaders, who wish to understand body-mind integration for wellness and achieving harmony with their work-life balance. She is based in Cyprus.

We discuss:

* Leadership Roles in career and our lives

* Qualities for a Growth Mindset

* Emotional Regulation

* Peak Performance Strategies
 

You can connect with Helen here:

Website: Helen AHA 

Facebook: (1) Women Of Truth Yin | Facebook


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Transcript

https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/shared/M-njySCJtgNaZ7nORU4zeCqmqeLYUL4UWTLF4xQBZyVgUaaNxIVjIJ8fdqKRJ0DowB1do0rUkKtO-YTxeaEAsisOwnA?loadFrom=SharedLink

Speaker 1 (00:00):

Welcome to The Everyday Determinator podcast with your host Anne Okafor, founder of The Determinator Collective. We want to help you get off that hamster wheel of life and turn you into an Everyday Determinator by sharing stories from our guests who have overcome varying challenges in life and careers, and by reviewing and signposting you to helpful resources to start you on the journey to achieving your goals. For more information on The Determinator Collective, please visit www.anneokafor.co.uk. Thanks for listening, Determinators. (singing)

Anne Okafor (00:40):

Hello, Determinators, and welcome to The Everyday Determinator podcast. In this episode, we're talking to Helen Argyrou. Helen's a clinical psychologist and founder of Helen AHA, which is an innovative leadership program for tomorrow's leaders who wish to understand body-mind integration for wellness and achieving harmony with their work-life balance. And she is based in Cyprus. Hi, Helen. It's wonderful to have you with us today.

Helen Argyrou (01:17):

Hi, Anne. Hi, everyone watching. It's really great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Anne Okafor (01:21):

Thank you. So, Helen, as a future leader myself, looking to understand how I can trail blaze in the industry while maintaining my wellness, I'm eager to learn more about what you do. You offer a number of different services, such as leadership and wellness programs. Would you like to give us an overview of your offering?

Helen Argyrou (01:40):

Yeah, sure. Well, it's great that you decided to focus on this topic, because everybody looks into the future hoping to live a really valuable life. And some of us even look beyond that. We look how to be of service, or how to help humanity, or how to change the world in some way. And for those of you that are feeling like that, you could be a future leader. And it's such an important distinction to make early on in life that that's not something we necessarily have to head for, but if we want to become something close to that, we need to become the best version of ourselves. So, that means developing various things in our personality that are going to help us take the long road to success, whatever that could be. It could be that you become really wise, or that you become very experienced in your profession, or that you become someone that people want to listen to. Each example is a leader in their own right.

                And even without looking at career, many of us become leaders of our families, as mothers, fathers, and even family members in extended families. We can have a leadership role in our community without even intending it so. So, leadership is a really interesting aspect of human development and human behavior, and it requires a balance between our ability to work on our personality, as I said, to learn how to negotiate, to learn how to communicate, and then to also learn how to lead. These are skills that we actually develop. And there's an interesting piece of research by the Carnegie Institute that says that these skills are way more important for your financial stability than your technical skills. So if you're an accountant and you know how to work the books, or you know how to balance the books, then you have that as your 15% of the skills. But learning how to communicate well, learning how to negotiate well, learning how to lead and working on your personality, interestingly enough, are responsible for 75% of the future financial stability.

                So when we look at, "How well are we as leaders? How balanced are our minds? How much self-care do we give ourselves? How do we know to balance our temperament in times where people will bring something that we don't agree with or that they are in conflict amongst them and you have to do something about it?" many different situations will call for us to have those four skills. There's many different ways to talk about it. There's lots of research nowadays on the fact that leadership is changing. So for me, I've become very fascinated by what I call the role of us as evolutionaries, ancestors of the future. Everybody really, whether they're a leader or not, is an ancestor for a future generation. So when we take that role quite seriously and we decide to do the best with it, to learn the most that we can, to make the best contribution, to make the biggest difference, we can become true evolutionaries, meaning we are shaping the future of tomorrow.

                So my program Leadership Chamber, which I run with Dr. Sinead Hewson, is a deep dive new style think tank, you could say, or a hub where we bring leaders of high caliber into the same space and we begin to talk about what it's like to become this agile, situational leader for the current times. Things are changing so much. So we need to be able to see what is in us that can already do the job. And it's more a matter of peeling away all the layers of doubt and frustration and stress to get to this core essence of who we are and to know that in there, potentially often, is a very powerful voice, a very powerful leader that can really support the community, especially if these are established leaders already.

                Apart from that, we also run in-house trainings for corporates and organizations who want to learn something like the growth mindset, which I highly recommend right now. A very important thing. To begin to think differently about challenges, how we can thrive, how we can grow, and how we can learn when things are tough is one of the greatest capacities we have as human beings.

Anne Okafor (05:48):

Excellent. So you mentioned that certain qualities are important for this growth mindset. What are those, and why would they be important in becoming an evolutionary for the future?

Helen Argyrou (05:59):

Yeah. I love that question, Anne, because I cannot stop talking enough about the growth mindset. I was very skeptical when I first heard it because I was in a phase of feeling frustrated with all the coaching lingo that you see on LinkedIn. You see all this positive psychology everywhere. It's even now being called positive toxicity. Everyone telling you, "You can do better, and you are the best." And at the end you think, "What is this growth mindset?"

                So I thought, "Let me go and see if there's any science behind this." And actually, I was amazed because it's totally based on a scientific experiment, a psychological one at that, by a lady called Carol Dweck. And she found four things increase your ability to do better in life. And that means when you're faced with a challenge, she studied students at exam time, you are really compromised in your ability to perform because of anxiety, all the unknown factors. And four things push you through. One is believing in yourself. The second one is being able to set realistic goals and matching those goals up with daily action. The third one is being able to build a social connection around you that's positive. So you've got to have not just family and friends but what I call power partners. And I borrow that from Claire Zammit, Dr. Claire Zammit. She does a lot of research on women and how we need to raise each other up. So, people that really are going to be in your corner.

                And then the fourth thing, the most important one, and as a clinical psychologist, I laugh when I say it because it takes a lifetime to do it, it's emotional regulation. How do you get your anger in check? How do you not let your disappointment pull you down and sink you to the bottom of the ocean? How do you let sadness happen but not let it sway you into the bitterness and resentment that can come when you've been hurt a lot in life? Because any traumatic experience you have when you set up a business or when you start a new life cycle of whatever kind is going to get re-triggered when you have a disappointment. And we all know that life is not easy and it's getting thicker by the minute, let's say, more complex. I wouldn't say worse, but we have evidence that life is getting way more amazing. There is amazing momentum on the planet of conscious, incredible people that are humanitarians, that think in ways that we didn't have before, that are conscious. And we're also getting an exponential growth of things getting worse.

                So things are getting better and worse, so you can't say anymore we'll fall into the cynicism. We need to be able to regulate the emotions that come with that, though, because there's a lot more challenging stuff happening. There's a lot of sad news, people are starving on the planet, and yet still we owe it to ourselves to be the best version of who we can be. So to regulate all that comes along with life and then all that comes along with building whatever challenge, or business, or whatever else you're up to is really important. So those four things help us to learn and grow in times of great challenge.

Anne Okafor (09:01):

Yeah. I mean, that's something that I've really been working at as well, to be fair. One thing that works for me, and I don't know whether it works for everyone else, but it's sometimes just to observe those feelings and allow them to happen, but to not allow them to take over. Observe why you've been made angry or observe-

Helen Argyrou (09:01):

Exactly.

Anne Okafor (09:19):

... why you've been made emotional and then try and address what the trigger was. It's sort of like taking that little step back and looking at it objectively, I guess, rather than just letting it carry you away into all sorts of different queer old things that we do to [crosstalk 00:09:34] people.

Helen Argyrou (09:35):

Absolutely. Absolutely. So important that observation and being the witness to what you feel that you don't get swept up in it, that you feel that you are the feeling. I've had to work my whole life in that because I'm a deeply feeling person. So I think it's a very powerful thing. I wish they'd taught us in school. Maybe they will. If some of you out there listening become leaders of schools, maybe you can start teaching how to regulate emotion.

Anne Okafor (09:56):

Absolutely. No, I think it's so important and as well, the social aspect of that, having people around you, that's incredibly important as well, especially for young or new leaders starting in new industries finding go-to people. And to have that sort of structure around you really helps with things like resilience and things, so that when you do you have disappointments, you've got other people as well to help you bounce back and sort of keep you in check a little bit.

Helen Argyrou (10:21):

That's good, yes.

Anne Okafor (10:21):

I think that probably helps with the emotional regulation as well because you've got that sort of checkpoint of someone else to say, "It's okay. It's not the end of the world. It's fine. We'll try something else tomorrow." So can you maybe tell me a little bit about a time when maybe a client has really excelled from some of these teachings that you've had, maybe an example of some good success?

Helen Argyrou (10:45):

Sure. I've also started a Inner Circle for women. So I'll share one of the examples from that, which was someone who came to me wanting to be a speaker. And what was touching and distinctive about it was that she had had a sexual abuse history and she really wanted to talk out against the secrecy of the trauma that comes after sexual abuse. Often, specifically the women that I've worked with, I haven't worked with many men that have been sexually abused, but from the women, I know that they carry their abuser's name and identity for years and then they never reveal it. And they sometimes don't tell anybody about the incident.

                And supporting this woman through the Inner Circle to learn how to build her business, because she's a natural healer, and to be able to tell her story without overdramatizing or shrinking back from telling details was very, very profound experience for both me and her. And it, I think, showed me that leadership is such an expansive word for many things, because in a way I see her as a leading voice on what it means to heal from sexual abuse. And to be able to forgive a perpetrator is a story we all have, on some level, in us. So she's speaking to everybody when she says things about how secrecy has a price and it can create a lot of damage to our self-esteem. So, that was a very profound shift.

                And of course, also recently we've had some amazing challenges as leaders, organizations that have been downsizing. I remember also working with someone in India who was heading up an office for a really progressive company in Switzerland, and they had to downsize that office. And just doing some coaching with him and some training on the growth mindset also really helped him to recontextualize. His gift as a leader was that he was incredibly empathic and he never knew that before. So being able to have that reflected from our training was very helpful because it got him to a place where he could see that even without a team, he had that as a gift that he could use in the world, but that he was also now being given an opportunity, so it was very hard for him to let go of his leadership role, to actually do a deep dive into the analytics of the company, and even got inspired to now set up the Indian branch from scratch on another level.

                A quick third example is a recent client, a human rights lawyer, who has also a very interesting history. In the Inner Circle, she was also able to begin to set up conferences where young women were talking out about all issues they'd been having and really was helping to set up the community in different ways. These are just three, but there are many of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship circles where I've been mentoring over the years where I test out content to see, how can we use psychology to understand the psychological stamina? People call it resilience. It's also stamina, but also growth mindset comes in there. But there's also something else called working in your genius zone or being in a state of flow where we can see that it's so important to understand what you need to do to be the best version of yourself and how you build your business around that. So, many different ways that we can collaborate to explore.

Anne Okafor (14:11):

Excellent. So I think what I summarized from that is that a lot of leadership is actually learning about yourself and learning about what you've been through in the past and how you can almost find the best out of those sort of situations and turn them into something amazing. And we all have that within us, I believe. I really do believe that we all have the capabilities to do these things if we're so willing to look inside a little bit and learn a little bit about ourselves and take a chance on trying something new. And I think you referred to learning how to just compete only with yourself. Being better than you were yesterday is what you need to really be achieving and looking towards the future. So I know you do a peak performance, and you have five points for getting to that stage for maybe someone looking to start on that journey. Would you maybe outline what those five points are just for us?

Helen Argyrou (15:04):

Yeah, sure. Well, we have different ways of working depending on what the end goal is. So as a peak performance strategist, I consider that to be a role that I take up to support people, to understand a little bit more about the deeper aspect of your personality and how it can sabotage you and how it can make you suffer. And that it's not really who you truly are. Underneath your personality is your essence. And when you understand what your true purpose and mission is in life, you can see that it helps you to connect with that essence.

                And so we still, though, have to work with this neurotic character, and we call that an ego. I think many of us have accepted that we have one. And there's 27 different types. So when I do a peak performance strategy training, I actually take people into a testing phase where we do an Enneagram test. If you've heard of the Enneagram, it's a really powerful tool. It helps us figure out what kind of ego do we have, and how am I going to go to work with it when I hit the trouble spots, when I don't get the results I need, when I'm challenged by other people? When I'm sitting with one of those emotions we talked about earlier and I'm struggling to regulate it, what do I do? The Enneatype testing really helps us to figure that out.

                So we do a whole process based on these five steps, which, first of all, have to do with capacity building, and that's the personality pieces. How can I build a kind of reserve energy? But also, how can I learn to work in my greatest strengths? Those are very big questions that can help us for our entire lives. The second one is publicity and visibility. Very important nowadays is to cut through the noise, be seen, be heard for who you truly are. No more the faking it. It's all about truth marketing. And it's very important that you learn to create the opportunities and take the opportunities, not just wait for the ones that are going to come along and knock on your door, whack you over the head. You have to sometimes go after them, and you have to sometimes meet that person and suggest that you could do something for them or that you could send something to them so that you get an opportunity.

                The third thing is credibility and integrity. And I would add to that integrity to credibility because they work together. Credibility is all about being able to be who you say you're going to be, and that actually has some standard of delivery. So you see how integrity comes into that. And so being able to be authentic and genuine, what everybody's talking about, is so important, but then also that means you're honest about what you've studied, how much you know, what you can deliver. Very important. People need that.

                And then, of course, we get to the fourth one. And I've collapsed the fourth into the third now to make it easier as four steps, but originally that's why there were five. So integrity came separately, because there is a piece of work to do, if you haven't, about power. There's a lot of ways that we sabotage our power when we are not aligned. So when you're thinking one thing, feeling another thing, and then you go off and do something else... Just think about the last birthday party you went to, did you really think about what you wanted to buy that person as a gift? Or did you just go and find something last minute? Do you have feelings for that person that connect with what it is that you were thinking about you wanted to give them? And then, what did you end up giving them?

                This is a very quick way to just see how aligned are we, and did we put in the time, effort and genuine care that we could have, would have wanted to, to have that integrity mapped up? Well, you have that integrity in everything you do. So in your business, for example, where are you in your thinking process about what you want to achieve and how much do you match it up with the ambition, the competitive drive, the motivation? And then what do you end up doing? Or do you think it, feel it, but, eh, Netflix? We've all got things that we're struggling with right now. So we have to work a lot on integrity, because the problem with it is when we don't line up, we lose a lot of power.

                The fifth thing, then, is originality. And I brought that in last as an add-on which actually I was going to build a whole separate program on. And I have got something around originality, which is a standalone process. Because when you're building a business, the most important thing you can do is find your USP, your unique selling point. So if you're going to brand yourself, or if you want to be tapping into your essence, whatever it is you've got going on in life, whether it's professional or personal, your uniqueness is your greatest currency, your biggest gift, your most precious jewel. And the more you understand what is original about you, what is unique about you, the more you can put into your work, into your contribution that special touch that can never be copied and pasted by anybody else.

                So these are the five things. I'll say them again. First one, capacity. Visibility, publicity, credibility and authority, integrity and then originality. Very powerful way to bring all of ourselves together and work on our Enneatype, if we want to use that tool as well, and to really then drive in a end point. So what's my big goal? I do a lot of work around manifestation and goal setting as a spiritual and a systematic strategy to motivate us and to inspire us into becoming the best version of ourselves. So, that's the formula.

Anne Okafor (20:43):

Fabulous. I mean, there's loads there that really resonates with me as someone kind of fairly new into an industry and trying to reach out for goals almost here, there, and everywhere sometimes, you feel. And there's loads there, great insights. So, thank you very much. But I know we're quite tight for time, so I'd just like to round up by quickly asking you where our listeners could find you on the social media or on your website if they'd like to know more about all of this wonderful work that you're doing?

Helen Argyrou (21:14):

Thank you so much, Anne, and I'd love to offer you a sample session. Let's do a little bit of a exchange. I'd love to spend some more time with you. If you have a chance, we can chat about that. So I actually decided to run the website with the word AHA so that I would save people from pronouncing my surname, but also because I had a website before that called AHA Intelligence. And it stands for attract, harmonize and arrive. I just gave it away. So attract, harmonize, arrive. Because I do a lot of work on the neuroscience level and I'm a drummer and musician. So I understand the power of harmonizing the vibrational field, as we say it in more special lingo. And so you can find me on that website, helenaha.com. And you'll see that the AHA explains a little bit more about how we actually go on a journey to arrive where it is we want to arrive.

                And sometimes we know where we want to go but we end up somewhere else, and that's also okay. And sometimes we know where we want to go and we end up somewhere really similar, and that's also okay. So the point is, though, to map the journey and to have strong intention. There's nothing more powerful than feeling inspired and having a strong intention. So we work a lot on that, helenaha.com. You can also find my women's group on Facebook, which is called Women of Truth Yin. It's a place where all kinds of speakers, leaders, entrepreneurs come to discuss options on how to leverage their business and how to become much more developed.

Anne Okafor (22:45):

Awesome. We'll include those links in their show notes anyway, Helen. Thank you so much for giving your time and these great insights today. We really appreciate you. You're remarkable. So, whether you're bouncing back from a challenge or storming forward, the Determinator Collective is here for you. Stay remarkable, Determinators.

Speaker 1 (23:04):

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe so you don't miss when new episodes are posted. We will continue to deliver real life insights on overcoming challenges, practical tips, and advice on becoming unstuck with a collective of people just like you, our Everyday Determinators. Until next time, take care of yourselves and your friends. Thanks for listening, Determinators.