In the midst of the current state of global and national affairs, it’s incredibly easy and understandable to feel burnt out, overwhelmed, and unsure. The ability to separate your professional world and its responsibilities from your personal life has become increasingly difficult, as lines drawn between work and life have been blurred (or worse, erased) and work-life balance seems like a thing of the past. Because of that, we’re seeing – and many of us are feeling – an increase in mental health concerns.
And these burdens can feel particularly heightened for managers and leaders, as their teams rely more heavily on them for direction, support and guidance. As we redefine our workplaces and relationships amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and during important moments of reckoning with our nation’s racist history and reality, many leaders are faced with the dilemma of balancing their professional duties with caring for their own mental health.
On Tuesday, May 19th we sat down with executive leadership coach and founder of Coaching Works NYC Ben Colvin to tackle the question a lot of us are asking: But, hey, what about me? Ben walked us through how to unpack this question, and how we can better manage our leadership responsibilities with self-care to effectively exercise both.
As Ben noted, the heightened stress and anxiety of today is compounded by added pressures including (but certainly not limited to) parenting and homeschooling, job insecurity, health-related concerns, and isolation. To understand the mental and emotional exhaustion caused by these pressures, it’s important to first understand the concept of psychological availability. When we talk about psychological availability in the context of work, we’re referring to the dimension of an employee’s engagement based on his/her/their personal circumstances. It includes an employee’s sense of having the energy and resources they need to take care of themselves and engage in their work at any given moment. This concept becomes slightly more complicated for leaders, still – part of your responsibilities as a leader are to provide an environment for your team that allows each member the psychological availability to show up and perform. However, if you yourself aren’t afforded such availability, inhibited by the aforementioned constraints (and beyond), this is projected onto your own work and your team.
So, how can we manage the interdependence of showing up as the productive leader we want to be with the inner resilience we require in order to find personal balance?
We’ve rounded up some of our favorite tips and tools from the conversation to help you do just that:
Identify what gives you purpose. In order to best determine your priorities, it’s important to understand what motivates you. What can you use as a guiding or centering value set as you determine priorities?
Establish rituals. By figuring out a routine and remaining consistent, you’re better able to create direction and autonomy between tasks, while helping to compartmentalize your day for heightened production.
Keep track of your progress and accomplishments. It can be difficult to see the small wins throughout the day. By writing down measurable items and tasks that you can check off, you’re more likely to find those wins and be encouraged (plus, it’s so satisfying to cross off those to-do’s!).
Reframe your responsibilities. Similar to the above tip, you can think about your non-work chores as breaks and rewards. After you have a long meeting, allow yourself some mental rest while you walk the dog or do a few dishes. To that, Ben suggests using permission slips (“I give myself permission to ___ because ___.”) to avoid any guilt you may feel while also getting to check something off of your to-do list.
Remember: “too much empathy can slow agility.” You’re almost inevitably having heavy conversations right now, but keep in mind that these conversations have a serious toll on your mental health and ability to show up if you aren’t taking care of yourself. As you engage in these conversations, approach them first with curiosity, then show empathy, and finally move to compassion. This progression allows you – and those you’re speaking with – the mental capacity to be present without offering more than you’re emotionally or mentally able to at that moment.
Experiment! There’s only learning, there’s no pass/fail. It’s going to take time to figure out what works for you and those around you, so be forgiving and take the time to figure out what works best.
Check out the full video of May’s event below, and get some additional insight from the conversation. In particular, Ben expertly references Daniel Pink’s book Drive, which walks through three core concepts to cultivate motivation - autonomy, mastery and purpose - and what that looks like in small acts throughout the day.
We’ll leave you with a final thought (and tip) - a mantra provided by Maria, which we can all use when things feel tough: “I am strong, I am bold, my own power I can hold.” Remember that we’re all taking this one day at a time, and each of us will continue to find our own rhythm to the madness. How have you been incorporating self-care in that drive to find personal and professional balance?