Welcome back to the Look and Sound of Leadership, an ongoing series of executive

coaching tips designed to help you be perceived in the workplace the way you want to

be perceived. I'm Tom Henschel, your executive coach, and today

we're talking about focusing in the face of distractions. Mark's frustration was

understandable. He'd been trying to get support for a project long

before our coaching began. In fact, he'd asked for the coaching to learn influencing skills, hoping

that would help him generate traction for the project.

The truth was he'd actually moved the ball quite far down the field.

Two people had been assigned to the project and a cross-functional team had begun to lay the foundation for the work that

would come. But he wasn't across the goal line yet and he was getting impatient attending endless

meetings to drum up support. What worried him wasn't just that he was feeling

impatient, but that he was acting impatiently in those meetings. Worrying

about his impatience had become a distraction.

Jessica's story was quite different from Marx, but her frustration was essentially the same.

Entering her fourth month of looking for work, she was tired and beaten down.

She didn't want to go to another breakfast with a colleague or attend another networking

meeting.

In spite of feeling that all her efforts were hopeless, she knew she couldn't

afford to get off the job search treadmill. Like Mark, she worried she wasn't concealing

her frustration very well anymore, and that worry had become a distraction.

I'm guessing you can hear how Marx and Jessica's struggles are similar.

They were both being distracted by strong feelings in this case frustration. I could

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