Good morning friends
Today is more essay than letter. It’s a bit long. I apologise, but is about your self-care, about self-care for leaders. It needed the words. I’d love to know what you think. You can find me on LinkedIn to let me know. Next week will be briefer.
In Soul Therapy: The Art and Craft of Caring Conversations, psychotherapist Thomas Moore observes, “The main tool in therapy is the person of the therapist. You have to boldly enter the emotional field of a troubled person or a conflicted couple and use everything you have to help them sort out their lives. Ideas and techniques help, but they are for the most part, in the background. The therapist has to use himself, at some risk, to care for the others suffering. If anyone needs care of his own soul, it is a therapist”.
Isn’t this true of leadership?
In the abstract, leadership is simple. Build revenue. Grow brand. Protect margin. Control costs. Keep some cash on hand. Focus on strategic capabilities. Yet, no matter how capital-intensive our business, everything we do is mediated through people, relationships, language and our understanding. That all depends on the leader.
We forget in leading teams and organisations, it is our very person, us, who we are, that must do the leading.
We ignore ourselves, forgetting the better we are, the better our work is, the more effective our teams and organisations are.
Moore says, “A therapist’s job is demanding. Every human life is infinitely complicated, complex and motives are deep, subtle, and hard to perceive. The past keeps worming in to upset the present, and it’s difficult and time-consuming to sort it out all out. Emotions are high, and sometimes they’re directed toward the therapist. Threats of lawsuit are a possibility…”
Familiar?
Like therapists, leaders have intense people contact. Like therapists, leaders rarely have conventional conversations.
You listen to understand, to see pattern and possibility. You communicate to motivate, to inspire, to create intentional, aligned action. You resolve disputes. You are sometimes the lightning rod for dispute as you lead uncomfortable change. You must be hyper-alert to an everchanging context, a context, which is never neutral, that contains opportunities and threats.
There’s more of course, but you know it well. You live it. Reading Moore got me thinking about self-care for leaders.
Our brains, our bodies, our spirits, our emotions, our relationships all of them shape our leadership. If we don’t care for them, we don’t care for our leadership, with material consequences for those we lead.
He says, “A therapist’s day is never over… you are always a therapist, looking at the many sides of life with an eye for deeper meaning” and “When you meet with people, you let your whole self be seen. You don’t hide behind a professional mask but are present as a full person and human being, with your limitations and foibles. You show your ordinary self, while at the same time creating and sustaining the vessel of therapy. You are both ordinary and skilled”.
Also true for leaders… we must be both ordinary and skilled.
Moore advises, “Know your limits. Give yourself rest and pleasures that can both calm and invigorate you for the special, taxing work” and “A therapist might have to relax in ways that have more substance that the mindless escapes people often use”.
True for leaders too. Care for yourself is yes to rejuvenate, and it is yoked to your purpose. They’re inextricably intertwined.
Here are some ideas I know help. They’re pleasurable ways to strengthen your leadership. They will, to borrow Moore’s words, ‘calm and invigorate’.
I will skip over diet and exercise. What you put into your body and how you strengthen and move it has a material impact on the quality of your thought. You know this.
I’ll say this though, eating well is not just the food, it’s the presentation, the company, the crockery and the cutlery. Bright greens with a splash of roasted sesame oil and quickly browned crispy garlic chips on a bright yellow plate eaten with chopsticks is a different universe to boiled broccoli.
Take that image to work, make how you start a meeting or greet someone, a work of art.
I also won’t speak about sleep and overwork. Unless you’re one of the rare five-hours-sleep-a-night people, you need regular, good, predictable sleep unpolluted by technology. Work weeks that continuously exceed sixty hours degrade your performance. You know this.
Back-to-back meetings intensify stress and accelerate burnout. You know this too. A simple ten-minute gap between each meeting (supercharged by closing your eyes and taking some deep breaths) helps you reset. You know this.
I’m following Moore’s lead, to ideas which calm and invigorate whilst fortifying your leadership style.
/ Listen to yourself
You got the role because of years of accumulated success. You went through multiple interviews with panels of people. They listened to you.
If you’re the founder, you’ve spent years convincing customers, employees, lenders, suppliers. They listened to you.
When last did you listen to yourself?
I ask my clients to list their successes. They always find it hard to do. Yet, their successes have created their success. There are lessons to be learnt, if they listen. You can do the same.
Just like each Olympian know the principles of their code but attains victory through adapting them to themselves, there are generic principles to leadership and success, but you express them in your unique way.
Be still. Reflect. It need not be monk-like, just listen to your thoughts.
Drive without making calls. Start and end your day with ten minutes of reflective silence, listen to and learn from yourself.
You have years of experience. Every moment, you’re subconsciously spotting clues about what needs to be done. If you don’t stop to listen, you’ll never hear.
// Spend time with success
Even in the most extreme turnarounds, there’s a division that is doing well, customers that loves you, a group of people that embody your vision for the future. Learn how they do what they do. You’ll be re-energised.
On bad days return to their stories, they’ll reignite your optimism and remind you what is possible.
Do this outside your organisation. Create a community. We all need allies. They give perspective. They’re different to your friends. The relationship different, the conversation different but refreshing all the same.
/// Read to Lead
Author Cynthia Ozick said, “I read in order to write. I read out of an obsession with writing”.
Our remix is “I read to lead. I read out of an obsession with leading”.
Yes, read business books but remember Jim Collins caution, “Executives should read fewer management books. I don’t mean that reading is a waste of their time; on the contrary they should read more. The question is what to read. My one view is that only one book in twenty should be a management book”.
You lead people, their lives have successes and failures, fear and hope, love and loss, in societies that have histories, that are interconnected and interdependent. Anyone leading an organization through change knows the “past keeps worming in to upset the present”.
Read fiction to understand living life. The lies of fiction reveal the truths of life. Read those that challenge you. Leadership requires expanded perspective.
Life happens in language and emotion and complexity and relationship, between and inside people. Great novelists know that. They show us the feelings, the thoughts, and how they cascade and ricochet through relationship.
To lead, you must understand people. Fiction does that. Read it.
Along the way, you enrich your language and imagination, a leader needs those too.
Read history to visit the future. The challenges you face have precedents. Whilst it is never copy-paste, knowing the past gives future possibilities, looking back gives perspective on the present.
Add some good therapists and sociologists. The better you understand being human, the better you lead.
To lead you must capture attention, good writing does that. Let the Laureates language infect yours.
//// Play a little
Find creative ways to bypass blockages.
You’re struggling paying attention to detail. Do a 5,000-piece puzzle with your children.
You’re moving too quickly. Enrol for Tai Chi course. You’re moving too slowly. Get a teenager to introduce you to Fortnite.
You’ve become too tactical. Play one of the great chess games. Be white and black, just follow the moves, experience being a grandmaster.
You’re feeling inarticulate. Read great speeches aloud.
You’ve become rigid, go for a walk with a toddler and follow their lead.
///// Have a big vision
There will be days, sometimes months, occasionally years that get you down. Be clear about why you’re doing it, beyond the board reporting cycles and quarterly earning updates. It will keep you going.
In recent decades, some strategists have pushed for ever more abstract expressions of vision. Beware of those. Keep it real. It must mean something, to you and your people, that always means making a tangible difference.
////// Make it personal
Sometimes, even vision will flicker and fade, reinforce it by making it personal. Know your employee’s lives, know the lives of your customers and suppliers.
On the bad days when vision isn’t enough, think of that one person. Their image will get you out of bed to ensure they have work, can afford medical care, can send their children to good schools.
In Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone, the protagonist Marian reflects on his stepfather’s Ghosh invitation to study medicine, “He invited me to a world that wasn’t secret, but it was well hidden. You needed a guide. You had to know what to look for, but also how to look. You had to exert yourself to see this world. But if you did, if you had that kind of curiosity, if you had an innate interest in the welfare of your fellow human beings, and you went through the door, a strange thing happened: you left your petty troubles on the threshold. It could be addictive”.
This type of addiction makes you a happier leader, become a dealer of curiosity and innate interest in the welfare of your fellow beings.
See you next week.
Karl
PS: You can find me on LinkedIn and learn about my coaching practice here.
