How Emotional Road Signs Can Help You Coach Your Team To Better Results as a NGO Leader

Have you ever wondered why two people can experience the exact same moment—and walk away feeling completely different?

As a humanitarian or development leader, you’re tasked with managing people through uncertainty, change, and challenge. But what if your team’s biggest roadblock isn’t the workload or logistics—it’s the thoughts behind their emotions? This episode dives into the psychology behind emotional responses and how your mindset might be shaping your results more than you realize.

In this episode, you'll discover:

• How to interpret emotions as “road signs” that reveal hidden thoughts and beliefs.
• Learn a coaching technique to help your team shift from self-doubt to self-belief using curiosity.
• Gain clarity on how to lead with confidence by transforming the way you relate to both your emotions and your team’s.

Listen now to uncover the mindset shift modern leaders use to create confident teams and stronger outcomes—starting with one emotion at a time.

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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

 Find out how leadership isn't about controlling emotions, but instead listening to them on today's episode. Welcome to the Modern Humanitarian and Development Leader podcast. The podcast helping humanitarian and development supervisors make a greater impact by taking control of your time, leading more inclusively and empowering your team all the while avoiding stress, burnout and overwhelm. I'm your host, leadership coach and former aid worker, Torrey Peace. Are you ready? Let's get started.

Hello, my aspiring modern leader. I hope you're having a wonderful week. So a few weekends ago I went to see a movie in Bangkok, and the reviews for this movie were glowing.

They were [00:01:00] so positive, so I was really excited to see it. I settled into my seat, popcorn in hand, expecting to love it, but when I walked out, I felt well. I felt disappointed, and it made me wonder how could the same movie that so many had raved about leave me feeling negative while others felt so positive?

The answer is powerful. Our emotions don't come from the situation, in this case, the movie, they come from our thoughts about the situation. And as leaders, this changes everything. If there's one thing that you've learned in all of my episodes, this could be one of the most powerful tools to really help you achieve your goals.

So in today's episode, I am going to show [00:02:00] you why two people can experience the same event, but feel completely different about it. How emotions are like road signs, that point to the thinking behind them and how you can use curiosity, not control to help yourself and your team take action.

So if you've ever been frustrated, stuck or unsure why your team isn't moving forward you're gonna see emotions in a whole new way. Does that sound good? Let's get started, shall we? Okay.

So when we dismiss our emotions, we miss a critical opportunity to understand our own and our team's thinking. If we reference cognitive behavior theory and how our thoughts create our feelings, then what is creating the difference in those who experience different types of [00:03:00] emotions for the same event, same movie, different thoughts, and so different emotions.

My thoughts of this movie after I saw it were more negative. This is so long and I can predict the ending, which led me to have a more negative feeling about my movie experience. Whereas the reviews that I had read that were so positive were people who did not focus on the length of the movie or thought the plot was just fine.

Instead, they were focused on things they liked about the movie, and that created a positive experience for them. This is something that I teach in my course "Becoming the Modern Humanitarian and Development Leader", how to become more aware of your emotions, which allows you to also become more aware of the thinking [00:04:00] behind them.

And when we understand our thinking, we can decide if it is helping us or if it's hurting us, and how we may want to change it. So in other words, back to the road sign metaphor, our emotions can help us uncover our perspective on a situation that we may not even be aware of.

If we use emotions like road signs and and we help ourselves or others to see our thoughts behind our emotions more clearly, we can then question whether these thoughts are leading us to where we want to go. When we understand the thoughts behind our emotions, we can examine them from a place of curiosity.

How is this thought true? Or not? How is the thought helping me? Or not. Let's say that your team member is [00:05:00] struggling to do a presentation. Sometimes it can be difficult for us to describe why your team member struggling.

So this might be a great opportunity to ask your team member what are you feeling about doing this? How do you feel about it? And perhaps they answer they feel overwhelmed or uncertain or unconfident, and based on the emotion that they name, we can then explore the thinking that's causing that emotion.

So a common thought that could lead to a feeling of not confident is, I am not a good presenter. That thought causes less confidence, right? So identifying that thought can be super helpful and then deciding what is true about that? What's not true about that? How is this helping me or [00:06:00] hurting me?

This is what the modern leader does. They help coach their team member and themselves to identify the mindset, which is preventing them from achieving their goal. And then through curiosity, a modern leader helps their team overcome this thought and explore a new and more helpful way to think about it, which in turn generates a positive emotion.

And when we feel a positive emotion, for example, instead of thinking, I am not a good presenter, thinking I am becoming a good presenter. That would generate a more positive emotion or more confidence for this person, which in turn creates a different set of actions and a different outcome. The difference between liking and not liking something, whether it's a movie, a meeting, or a leadership [00:07:00] challenge, often comes down to the way that you think about it.

As a modern leader, your job isn't to suppress emotions, but to listen to them and use them as guides. So this week, notice one emotion that you feel while you're leading or at work. Write down the thought behind it and ask yourself, how true is this thought? And is it helping me lead the way I want to?

Share what you discover with me by LinkedIn or on email, and you can always go to my website, aid for workers.com and find how to sign up there. If you want to go even deeper into how to coach yourself in your team through these moments, I recommend you check out my course, becoming the Modern Humanitarian and Development Leader, where we work on tools like this to help you lead with calm, clarity and [00:08:00] confidence.

Alright, until next week, keep evolving. Bye for now.

Are you the type of leader that tells others what to do, or do you let them figure it out for themselves? Understanding your leadership style is a first step to deciding what's working for you and what's not. To find out your leadership style, take my free quiz. What is your leadership style? You'll immediately find out your default style, how it may be impacting your team, and a few practical ways to become an even better leader.

Just click on the link in the show notes, www.aidforaidworkers.com/quiz. Fill out your quiz and click submit. So what are you waiting for? Go to [00:09:00] www.aidforaidworkers.com/quiz and discover your leadership style now. Your team will Thank you for it.