Episode #482: Emotional Fitness For Leaders (Part Two)

In Part One we looked at Dr. Emily Anhalt research with 100 leaders and 100 psychologists. She identified seven factors which measure how “fit” we are in this sphere of mental health and we covered the first three: Learn your emotional triggers and biases, understand the emotions of others and find comfort in discomfort. Today we will continue with the last four points.

4. Foster a safe space of connection

“Psychological safety” as a term has popped up over the last couple of years. We all need a space where we feel we can be ourselves, where we can relax and let our guard down. This could be within the family and circle of close friends. Here is the rub. Often as leaders we are too busy working to really develop family relationships and deep friendships.

Divorce rates are at about 50% in the West. A lot of this is due to the time being devoted to the work being disproportionate to the time being devoted to those closest to us. We are constantly sacrificing family and friends for work projects. I put my hand up for this one. I am in permanent imbalance trying to get the balance right. We need friends, hobbies, interests outside the mainstream of our work tasks. Working in Japan can also add a layer of complexity, because we are often away from our friends we grew up with and our colleagues we used to work with back at home. We need to make the time and make the effort where we are right now to fix this, because in the long term, it is not good for us to be isolated.

5. Bounce forward from failure and setbacks

Being positive is a good thing. We can see failures not as failures, but as our opportunity to grown and learn. Except we don’t do that. Instead, we beat ourselves up and we keep playing the video repeat reel in our mind of the disaster or failure which we were responsible for. This impinges on the work in front of us, it occupies our thoughts and distracts us from what we need to be doing. It can also rock our confidence to keep moving forward.

Our world of possibilities becomes smaller, we take less risks, we shrink in confidence and we don’t actually bounce back for forward. One of the keys to recovery is to block out the worry aspect about what happened in the past. As we have seen, we cannot remove the memory or the pain, that just keeps popping up, whether we like it or not. What we can do is not allow ourselves to worry about it.

Being unhappy about something which happened in the past is one thing, actually worrying about it is another. So when those unhappy memories pop up, just acknowledge that happened and move on without allowing it to trigger any feelings of depression or worry. Note it but don’t worry about it. That was then, it is in the past, times have changed, this is a new world compared to then and I have moved on.

6. Express needs, feelings and feedback

It might be a generalisation, but that doesn’t mean it isn't true, to say that for men expressing feelings and needs and seeking out feedback goes against the grain. I grew up in macho Australia, so the strong silent type was the ideal model for a man. If you had needs, you sorted it out for yourself and took care of them, without relying on others. Any feelings you had were to be kept out of sight and never shared. If you did share, your rivals would despise you, your bosses wouldn’t trust you and your team wouldn’t follow you. Feedback was always negative in those days, so no one was happy to receive any.

Business is different today and the hero boss is a relic from the past because technology and speed have made things much more complex. I tell my 21 year old son to not be like Dad and instead ask people for support and help and don’t imagine you have to do it all by yourself, like I did.

Sharing feelings is a tricky one. I think we have to be very careful who we share our feelings with and how we express them. Find people you can trust and to whom you can open up to. Expressing the fact you don’t see yourself as being perfect as a boss is a healthy idea. We can still be the boss and recognise we are still a work in progress and our team will appreciate the honesty and vulnerability.

Feedback can be painful. The issue is very few people are well trained in how to give feedback, so we are constantly being hammered by amateurs who have no idea what they are doing. Keep that in mind next time your receive negative feedback. Try to parse out what you can learn from it, discard the rest and ignore the invective.

7. Implement what you have learned into your daily life

If this was only as easy as it sounds. We are creatures of habit and we all love change. The problem is we love change in others. We want the organisation to change, the boss to change, the clients to change, the team to change, but we want to stay exactly as we are.

I have thousands of pages of notes I have accumulated over the years, but how much of what I learnt did I actually implement into my work and life? Occasionally I will learn something or get a hint about a way of doing things and I will make the effort and the time to make it happen. The rule should be find the Pareto Principle of the Pareto Principle and find the 4% of things which will give you the 64% of the results you are after. We can’t do everything but just concentrating on the 4% will help us to go a long way to improving 64% of what we are doing. If you have more bandwidth, then get busy with the 20% of actions, which will bring in 80% of your required results.

These seven ideas about improving our mental health provide a good framework for us to get busy with. Let’s keep this list handy and every day, let’s look at implementing one on the list. That would be a good use of our time wouldn’t it.