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Pattern Interrupt: How to Productively Disrupt Behaviors Blocking Your Path to Success

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Today’s business leaders face numerous challenges, many of which stem from interactions with people. In office or service-based environments, engaging with colleagues, clients, and customers can account for 60-80% of daily activities. In some service industries, this number can rise as high as 90%.

These interactions are influenced by a range of factors, one of the most significant being your unique human wiring. This wiring influences your thoughts, actions, and how you engage with others.

Understanding Your Human Wiring

Every individual has a specific wiring pattern that influences how they generate ideas, process thoughts, communicate, thrive in different environments, and make decisions. Understanding this wiring is key to identifying recurring behaviors that might be hindering your progress—especially if you’re in a leadership position or working on scaling a business.

Often, these recurring behaviors are attempts to satisfy your wiring’s natural tendencies. Without awareness, you may find yourself stuck in a loop, repeating actions that don’t lead to the results you want.

A Common Wiring Pattern and Its Challenges

Over the years, we’ve worked with leaders who exhibit a particular wiring combination:

They enjoy creating and implementing their own ideas and are strong advocates for them.
They prefer to think things through and communicate directly—this is what we refer to as the “Internal Thinker.”
They juggle multiple tasks, often becoming impatient and setting unrealistic expectations for themselves or others.
They value information, structure, and doing things the right way.

Leaders with this wiring often struggle with the following:

Self-Critical Mindset

Without awareness, their internal dialogue can be self-limiting or self-sabotaging, often focusing on what isn’t working. They may overanalyze situations, becoming overly critical in an effort to avoid mistakes.

Delegation

Believing that they are the best person for the job, they can become bottlenecks. Their urgency to move on to the next idea often prevents them from adequately training their team, leading to an overflowing plate of responsibilities.

Fear

Fear of failure, making the wrong decision, or not looking like they have all of the answers in front of their team can paralyze their progress.

Procrastination

Procrastination often stems from their wiring. Impatience leads to delays in tasks perceived as time-consuming. As internal thinkers, they may procrastinate on difficult conversations, overanalyzing what to say. They also delay delegation, fearing it won’t be done perfectly or that it’s faster to do it themselves.

Imagine a leader wired for task-oriented work, responsible for nurturing and developing a team. This task-oriented leader must now focus on nurturing elements—like reinforcing training, encouraging idea-sharing, and being patient with mistakes.

How can they excel in this role?

Strategies to Interrupt Patterns and Improve Leadership

Disrupt Your Natural Impulse

Your wiring is a natural impulse, but your response is a choice. Recognizing your tendency to have your hand in or thumbprint on everything allows you to interrupt that pattern.

Pattern Interrupt: Instead of immediately solving a problem for your team, ask them how they would approach the situation. Encourage them to develop solutions, which not only builds their critical thinking skills but also strengthens your leadership capabilities.

If social interactions drain you, take small steps to build relationships.

Pattern Interrupt: Spend a few minutes asking about someone’s weekend or acknowledging an employee’s consistent performance. These small gestures can help foster a more positive team environment.

Retrain Your Brain

If you find yourself stuck in negative thinking, catch yourself in the moment and shift your focus to the outcome.

Pattern Interrupt: Replace thoughts like “nothing ever works out” with affirmations like “opportunities are aligning from expected and unexpected sources right now.” By consistently practicing this, you can train your brain to move away from self-limiting beliefs and open up space for creative, expansive thinking.

Be Responsible for Clear Communication

As an internal thinker, you might believe you’ve communicated something when you haven’t. Fear of being wrong can lead to deflecting responsibility for miscommunication.

Pattern Interrupt: Own your part in any miscommunication. If you missed a key detail, such as a deadline, acknowledge it, correct the mistake, and move forward. Owning clear communication is vital to effective leadership.

The Bottom Line

You may repeat certain behaviors because your wiring is operating in the background without your conscious awareness. The more you understand and create awareness around your natural wiring, the better you’ll be at interrupting patterns that no longer serve you. This will help you achieve your desired outcomes and lead more effectively.

Invitation

If you’re ready to scale your business with greater ease, I invite you to attend the Wake Up Profitable Boot Camp on October 21-22, 2024. This Master Class is specifically designed for business owners who are eager to grow their operations.

This class is powered by our proprietary Entrepreneurial Edge System and the first crucial step is Mastering Your Inner Entrepreneur. This transformative phase will help you understand and manage your unique wiring and build and lead a highly-productive team.

During the Boot Camp, we’ll also guide you through a Blueprint for scaling your business, showing you how to systematize operations and marketing. This is your opportunity to unlock your leadership potential and elevate your business to the next level.

To register for the Wake Up Profitable Boot Camp visit https://www.excellerateassociates.com/wake-up-profitable-boot-camp Monday-Tuesday, October 21-22, 2024,

or

Join our Introduction: Scale and Systematize half-day class at https://www.excellerateassociates.com/attend-profit-lab-intro/ on September 12 or October 10, 2024

Human Wiring: It Influences Your Company Culture More Than You Realize

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Human wiring refers to the innate, neurological tendencies and traits that are present in every individual. It’s no surprise, then, that human wiring has a significant impact on company culture, as it influences how employees interact with each other, how they approach their work, and how they respond to the environment they work in.

Specific ways in which human wiring can affect company culture include:

1. Communication

Different people have different communication styles and ways they process information, which can impact how they interact with others in the workplace. Some individuals may naturally prefer more direct communication, while others may require more diplomacy or tact. Understanding these differences at a level where you can deliver communication they way the other person wants to receive it can help build a more harmonious and effective workplace culture.

When a client known for his direct, authoritative communication style, went through human wiring awareness training, he was flabbergasted at how he occurred to others. He had no awareness that his direct style was causing stress for his team. When he understood the innate needs of his team members and with a few tweaks in the way he approached them made a difference in employee engagement and productivity. Instead of running away when he entered the room, the workplace environment became interactive and enjoyable.

2. Conflict Resolution

Human wiring influences the way individuals’ approach and resolve conflicts. Some individuals prefer a collaborative approach, while others are comfortable with confrontation. Using a confronting approach with someone who needs a collaborative approach is a recipe for a trip to your HR department. When you understand human wiring and use effective communication and conflict resolution tools, your team can actively participate in promoting a positive, productive and drama-free workplace culture.

When a colleague, who preferred a collaborative approach, mentioned that his boss would shoot down every idea he had, I suggested that he find out what was most important to his boss. With a few targeted questions, he was able to get to the heart of his boss’s viewpoint. Once he addressed each concern, his boss bought in to his latest idea.

3. Leadership Styles

Depending on human wiring, a leader may be more authoritarian or directive, while others may be more democratic or collaborative. Providing leaders with personal awareness training creates leaders who generate a more effective workplace environment.

For example, one of our clients has a leadership team that possess two common human wiring elements. Each senior leader has a high degree of autonomy and a high sense of urgency (impatient). With this mix of wiring, they are inclined to push themselves and others for immediate results, often creating unrealistic timeframes. Since their leaders naturally pushed (high urgency) for results, their staff found the greatest rewards came by delivering results quickly. However, rather than departments collaborating, people worked in silos making independent decisions to get results. This autonomous, results-driven leadership team found themselves operating in less-than-ideal productivity and profitability. There was often rework because decisions were made in silos, quickly, and without inter and intra-departmental collaboration.

My clients quickly realized the influence of their natural wiring in shaping the company culture. Once they raised awareness of their wiring’s influence on the company’s culture, we were able to set up leadership development tools, a cultural framework, and processes to align what they say their values are and demonstrate those values in action.

When you are clear on your key cultural alignment factors along with the impact of your team’s human wiring on the company environment, you get to the root of cultural alignment, team productivity, authentic and conscious leadership, and company performance.

Overall, understanding human wiring gives company leadership the tools to create a workplace culture that is supportive, productive, and positive for their employees. By valuing and leveraging the unique strengths and perspectives of each individual, companies can build a productive and resilient organization.

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