Speaker 1: 00:00 Hello everybody. Welcome to building your legacy podcast today. I’m so glad to have with us today. Nicole Heimann. I met Nicole on the set of the filming of the Marshall Goldsmith docentary. She is a coach and a consultant who lives in Zurich, Switzerland. So her audience is largely Europe and middle East and wonderful, wonderful gift in terms of what she brings to the consulting business. And so I just wanted to share her with you because I think her story and what she provides as a coach and a consultant is really quite unique and I think you will really enjoy what she has to say today. So Nicole, I’ll let you explain a little bit about you and what you do.

Speaker 2: 00:53 Well, thank you very much. Loyce for , having him and , yeah, I’m Belgian living in Switzerland here. And what we do is we coach executive teams until real leadership alliances because what we’ve seen is that often boards are not aligned. Often executive teams are not aligned and if all these units are motherland, how do we want to develop the business in, in companies? And it very much influences the whole culture. So in building these leadership alliances at Bush level CEOs and executive teams it’s a very powerful experience because it influences the whole culture. If, if you get living and leadership by example, well how did she get started, Nicole? That is such a marvelous thing to be able to do. But how did you get started?

Speaker 2: 02:01 Where do I start? , I think already as a teenager I knew that I wanted to help people. I wanted to work with people and then I wanted to study psychology and my parents didn’t think it was a good idea. So I ended up following a sales and marketing path and worked for a company in the chemicals industry, sold lower Dickinson fuels to additives for lubricants and fuels in Europe, Scandinavia, and , enjoyed my job. I had a great career, great colleagues. , really a great time. I, I think that of this time we’ve, we’ve, we’ve a lot of joy and then for my husband’s career, we moved to to Switzerland. And so I gave up my job. I went with a three week old baby to Switzerland and I love my children. I love them dearly. And it was very hard for me to not verge.

Speaker 2: 03:21 , it, I felt, I had the feeling there’s something missing in my life. I couldn’t give meaning to this part of me that finds meaning in work. So and this really was the moment that I felt, well, what do I want to do? , I didn’t want to go back in the chemicals industry and I wanted to follow this, this flame, this passion that already was there since my youth to work with people. And so I started working in the training business in leadership and development training. And , until one day a woman called Zig, Linda Bowman, she was the HR director at a very big company in the middle industry here. She said, I want you as my coach. And I said, well, I’m not a coach. I’m a trainer. And she said, well, I don’t care. I want you as my coach. And I get arguing that I was not a coach. And she said, no, then don’t be a coach, but I want you as coach.

Speaker 2: 04:45 So I made a contract. We’ve thought I would do my best based on all the knowledge and the wisdom that I had in that moment. But I wanted to make it clear that I was not a coach because I didn’t have a coaching and education and at that time you see as many years ago. So I coached her based on my best abilities. And after the process she told me, can you do me a favor? Can you please do a coaching education? Because I never ever want you to say that you are not a coach. Your best coaches I’ve ever had. So what a compliment though. That’s , from this me to do my first coaching education many years ago. And , yup. That’s, that’s how they really transitioned from the training business into more coaching and , yeah. So the things that you talk a lot about is authentic leadership. And

Speaker 1: 05:58 I get it from what you’re talking about because at that very beginning moment, you were authentic. You, you explained what you felt you were not, and you open the possibility to developing who you were and through this process, I think that’s an incredible piece and part of it is part of what authentic leadership is. So can you talk with the audience about what you mean by that? What is that? To be an authentic leader,

Speaker 2: 06:32 authenticity is, is easier. It’s very dear to me. I’m very passionate about that. , I believe we all have a moment in our lives that we realize that’d be it. Not living in truth regard ourselves. , some of us having a realization in their private lives, others in their business lives and , often dictatorship is, is for me. Like it’s a verb. It’s not a status to achieve. It’s a never ending process and it’s really going back to the core of who you are, living in truth, weave yourself in truth with your environment in truth with reality. And , it goes with across herself. , of self reflection, all this wanting to become the next best version of yourself. Cause I think we are like, like onions, we peel away a layer. We transform a habits and the next one is a wedding. And this inner growth that we experienced when we walked in, yes.

Speaker 2: 07:53 Of, of authenticity. , it’s brings happiness. And, and that is really, I think, life. What is it? If we are successful but not happy it’s an empty life if, when, if we have all the success and all the money of the world, if we cannot combine success and happiness or success and fulfillment what is it worth? And that’s really what I love about authentic leadership. It’s working with successful people to make them even more successful because we’ve brought authentic leadership. You become more powerful, more influential, more attractive, more charismatic, and also more happy because I’m in inner growth is directly related to happiness.

Speaker 1: 08:53 So when you talk about authentic leadership, I think often it’s we women who think more about that, but how have you found that in your coaching? Is it both men and women that think about it? Do you find that it is more women than men? , and how do people approach it without being threatened by it? Because honesty can be also very frightening.

Speaker 2: 09:21 Yes. , so first of all on the agenda in my order in our coaching practice we have both men and women. I don’t see a difference. , soda we coach are open and also one to be authentic leaders. , regardless whether they are men or women and both of them enjoy it. And , yes I think you are ready to resell Fritz because authenticity is often misunderstood. , authenticity doesn’t mean that you have to be open and disclose everything. Yes. , the, we have to be aware of the environment we are leading into. , so that’s the one thing. Authenticity is not the same

Speaker 2: 10:36 being open in this club. There’s a lot of fear. , also that’s a fear of stepping into one’s own power of fear of discovering a part of this that we do not know. So that sometimes happens. , it can also be a fear of , spirituality and people bring authenticity and connection with spirituality. And when we have a negative association with spirituality, it feels like they are tapping into something that is scary. , let us, the dose may exist and , or a fear of standing loads of showing up. , so yes, I believe there’s a lot of challenges around authenticity and most of these come from the little ego voice that is active and that wants to keep us small. And once we are able to recognize that where this voice come from comes from and that it is really a myth, then I believed in opening is there to step into a safe way of discovering more and more of who we really are. Because there’s nothing dangerous about it. It is a very safe process as we when we coach, we declines, decides on the agenda and as a coach we vote, show, do me and , learn, learn a client, which parts, which parts? We all have equal parts. We all have the connection to our essence. Once we learn to feel the difference and once we can learn to different suits, where, which voice is coming from, we have choice. We do have choice, don’t we? So,

Speaker 1: 12:57 so Nicole, I think of authentic leadership as being one of those keys. That’s apart of, I’m thinking of the next step. How do you build a legacy? Because that’s what people often want.

Speaker 2: 13:12 So Nicole, authentic leadership to me is so much a part of that next step with building a legacy. Can you talk about that? Because I think that’s what leaders really want is what do they leave behind them?

Speaker 2: 13:30 Yup. Yes. Let me talk about building a legacy. Legacy is the result. Oh, going back to the whole beginning, which is then the purpose. So I think a true legacy is left on the star to lead from a purpose and purpose. , what I think is so beautiful about it is that it’s, it’s already in all of us. That’s the beginning. And it’s about discovering and knowing and then owning your unique talents and your gifts. And once you’re known Nordam in Oldham, you can start to give them away. And when we give away our talents and our gifts, we start to serve for something that is bigger than ourselves. And that is when we touch lives in inside your people and in the end, leave a legacy, whatever, whatever it is. , so also is when leaders are connected to the repurpose and aware of it.

Speaker 2: 14:48 It empowers them in a much bigger way then then, then we are not taking time to reflect about it. , the other thing I would like to say about purpose is that you know how she does often I experienced that people want to find out something huge upon their purpose of your purpose and they searched and searched and searched and they’re not happy with what they think of because they make it an intellectual process of, of the Hills. And when we dig into what really makes them happy, it can really be the small things of working with people or or I, I remember one executive who told me, if you don’t love people, you cannot lead them. Now imagine the impact he has on all the people healing month of love, prisons. And, and that’s his gift self, bringing in loving leadership and giving it away and showing how this kind of leadership impacts impacts lives.

Speaker 2: 16:14 So it’s, it’s in our unique talents into the gifts that we each have. It’s, it’s all there and it’s becoming really aware of, it’s conscious about it. And by giving you the way we leave traces in people’s hearts and, and that is, that is through legacy. When we, when what we do through the way we are, who we are becomes transformational for another person. We’ve left a legacy and we’ve been leading connected to purpose. And I believe we can only be truly connected to our purpose when we have chosen to walk a path of authenticity because we’ve often DCT homes pretty affliction and renewed action and also very functional purpose. That is a part of the whole process. I mean otherwise if we are not connected to purpose and if we are not leading authentically, we’re probably chasing venture exons and moaning at the end of doing,

Speaker 3: 17:30 Oh isn’t that interesting? Cause I think for so many people that’s really the focus is how do I make the money? And then you hope that purpose and meaning will come along with it. And and I think that for me, the thing that I often see is people do that and then they suddenly realize that they also have lost a family because, or their health. No, it seems like if you don’t get the purpose and authenticity right, you tend to suffer health and family issues. What has been your experience? Is that true?

Speaker 2: 18:14 I fully agree with you. The price is high because if you think about it when we are not authentically connected with who we are, we are acting and leading from an image how we believe we should. Yes. And do you see, so time consuming, energy consuming? it’s streaming and also it’s in the way of true authentic connections and intimacy. So yes, it has an impact on our relationships both professionally and of course also privately.

Speaker 2: 19:09 people get into the experience then of I have it all. Yes. And teen sites. Okay.

Speaker 3: 19:16 Have it all but an empty insight. Wow. Isn’t that so, so true. And we’ve met so many people who are like that. But I think I find that that is something that I have to struggle with too because it’s easy to become so busy and so full of action that that time to reflect, to know I’m still on purpose, I’m still who I really need to be. I’m, I’m fulfilling the purpose for which I was created. , it’s easy to lose sight of that, isn’t it?

Speaker 2: 19:51 It is. It is. And that’s why me too, I have my own coach because for me it is coaching sessions are so valuable. It’s a moment of time just for me and reflecting on what I’m doing, where I am and I where I want to be. And it’s very hard to take that time all by yourself. Yeah. So

Speaker 3: 20:19 it’s valuing yourself enough to say, okay, I’m graded, I’m going to get a coach and I’m going to really spend time intentionally. So I do what I want to do. For you as you look at working with leaders to know their purpose and to identify what their authentic, how they’re being authentic about their life. Do you have a process you take them through or is it something that is so

Speaker 2: 20:48 that you develop it for each person? How do you go about that is I use a, a process. I’ve developed my own methodology over the years and it starts always with awareness. , so there’s two skills that we can develop and not make authenticity available to anyone who wants it. And that is the ability to observe and to focus. And these are things we can train. We can, if you’re not good at it, we can learn to be good at it. , because they really open the door to our awareness when we start to observe what’s going on inside of me. If there’s a conflict, where do we feel it in our body? Where do I feel it with the other person? What is going on? , so D the ability to activate this inner observer is very important. To be able to stay out of drama, to be an observer.

Speaker 2: 22:07 And from there to make conscious choices of how we want to deal with the situation. So it starts with dad because disability allows us to move and shift from being a reactive leader to a creative leader. And and then I work with we’ve seven dimensions of that I call the seven dimensions of leadership intelligence that I started integrating. And , these seven dimensions are physical intelligence, emotional intelligence pragmatic intelligence, which for me is the IQ combined with experience. Then we have a com communication intelligence, harshed intelligence, neuro science, intelligence, and also consciousness intelligence. So depending on what the client comes up with, I will choose to work with one or one of these intelligences and start integrating them. Because what I found is that many leaders are good at some of these intelligences. Maybe a lot of them are going for being pragmatic.

Speaker 2: 23:29 Yes. Also, most of them have had a lot of emotional intelligence skills, trainings and communication room for improvement and also integrating the heart and neuroscience and consciousness. It’s this process of integration gives the leaders choices to to act from. And understanding that the heart has, for instance, more neurons in the brain is very important because the heart sends information to the brain. So learning to listening to the heart and also integrative in the decision making process is important. And I like to underline worst integration because what we do not do is now lead from the heart only. That’s not what we’re seeing. It’s, I what we’re seeing is lead from a place of integration isn’t to the body intelligence. Listen to the heart, listen to your pragmatic intelligence Mandel’s who has its own wisdom and , and take decisions from dead.

Speaker 2: 24:56 So when decisions become aligned, we become a much more powerful leader because everybody knows when you take a decision from the moment, but it doesn’t feel reds, that you ignore these impulses. The body is trying to scream, don’t do it. The heart says, I’m not feeling good about this. Maybe we should rethink other options that feel good in the mind, in the heart, in the body. And those are typically the right ones. Because if we don’t follow our gut feelings or the heart, we often make mistakes. And I love the, the fields of neuroscience to integrate these into coaching processes, for instance. , when some leaders don’t want to trust their gut feeling but explaining to them that we have a Vegas nerve that touches almost all the organs in our body and ends up into the rights part of the brain. All these organs send inflammation throat, this vagus nerve in images into the right parts of the brain. And then the left brain translates, translates it and we call it intuition. So understanding that there’s a system that’s, there’s, there’s a whole neuroscience field behind it that explains how this happens really helps leaders to, to relax and start trusting their, their gut, the heart, all of who they are. And I think this is such a beautiful process and a very important one because if we cannot trust ourselves, how can we then trust others? How can we lead? How can we lead? Exactly.

Speaker 3: 26:55 Yes. Nicole, you have so much wonderful wisdom and I think we make leadership so complicated sometimes and right, we do. And what we forget is how so much of that is connected. And I think maybe our need to be clever to be right, to be smart. You know, we all go to MBA programs and become smarter. But within that education, usually the heart is not part of that education. And so we come out with out some of the basic skills that are maybe really essential. Let me ask you one last question. We, we have talked and it’s just time always with you. It goes so fast. , I just treasure times of talking with you. , for you, as you look at your life, you are to me one of those very, I’m transparent, open, honest, reflective people. What kind of legacy are you working to build and leave

Speaker 2: 28:15 the, I think the legacy that was what makes me happy is when I can reconnect leaders to their authentic selves, to the essence of who they are and help them to discover how to lead in a powerful way from that place and impact many, many, many other lives.

Speaker 3: 28:39 Well, you certainly have done that and , you, you, you give always that gift of a peacefulness to people as you talk with them. Your, your manner is so peaceful. , and, and yet it’s very challenging. You, you, you challenge us to always think and look beyond who we are and what we can be. So you, you exemplify what it is that you talk about. And I think what a gift it is. Thank you. Thank you for that.

Speaker 2: 29:11 And it’s always a choice to talk and share with you two Lloyd’s. I learned a lot from USL and Kim, thank

Speaker 3: 29:19 you. This brings our time to a close and so I hate to do that, but we’ll come back and have further discussions with you. Nicole, thank you so much for your time today and thank you for those of you who have been listening to us, we appreciate your taking the time and I hope that this conversation will ignite some thinking on your part to look at what are all the components that are really essential for leadership and for building a meaningful legacy. So if you have questions, feel free to give us a send us an email. If you would like to connect somehow with Nicole, we’d be glad to pass your information onto her. So thank you so much for being with us today. Have a wonderful day. Thank you Lois.