Why Wellness Starts with the Leader

Part 2 of our 4-part conversation on embracing wellness as a part of leadership..

The most important relationship a leader has is with themselves. In this conversation, host Russel Lolacher talks with Stephen Kohler — CEO of Audira and author of The Leadership Anthem — about how stress shows up in the body, what cortisol and fight-or-flight do to leadership, and how leaders can hold themselves accountable with a simple mind–body–spirit check. Protecting your own wellness first sets the stage for leading others well.

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Transcript

Russel Lolacher: So let's get internal here, because the, the, and I talk about this a lot on the show, is that the show is called Relationships at Work, but the number one relationship we have to have is with ourselves because that's, that fuels everything else. So as leaders ourselves, are there any warning signs that we may need be needing to pay attention to around wellness before it starts impacting everybody else?

Stephen Kohler: I love it. And, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna use for, for some of your audience members what I'm about to say will resonate. And for others, it, it may feel like crazy talk.

It's gonna sound a little woo woo. Something that I've learned. For many of us, we are trained and learned as professionals to really rely on what I would say our, our mind and intellectual, right?

So we're in our heads a lot and we're thinking, so what I'm gonna say that's a bit provocative is to understand wellness, we have to get into our bodies. Now that's gonna sound crazy, but what do I mean by that? If you talk to any neuroscientist, any therapist, any psychologist, any leadership person, they'll tell you, our body is one of our greatest signals of how well we are.

What do I mean by that? The first thing is, is to, to feel, to listen to how you're feeling. If you're feeling stressed, if you have this stress hormone in your brain kicking off called cortisol, it means you're in what's called a fight or flight response. When you're in a fight or flight response, you, by definition, you're not gonna lead very well at work.

And sadly, for most of us, probably 78% of our, a lot of our our lives, we're in this fight or flight response, and we're not gonna be able to make good decisions. We're not gonna be able to collaborate well. We're not gonna be able to have positive impact when we've got cortisol constantly going through our brains.

So the first thing is to listen to your body. What are you feeling? Is your throat clenched? Are your palms sweaty? Is your stomach going in knots? What does that tell you? Maybe it tells you you are in a very inspired setting and you're real excited 'cause you're about to go on stage and everything's great or, or maybe it tells you you're in an environment that's not in alignment with your values.

Maybe it's telling you that the relationship you have with your boss could be improved. Maybe it means the relationships you have with your colleagues is not great. I think if, if a lot of us slow down listen to our bodies we can, it will tell us a lot that we may not be acknowledging. Yeah. Let me pause there 'cause I get very passionate on these topics.

Russel Lolacher: No, I appreciate and also understanding, I mean, I go back to my baby, which is definitions. Like, I love the idea of definitions and if you can even define by knowing yourself, self-awareness, what the difference between adrenaline to your point about going on stage or presenting versus anxiety. Because it may feel similar to someone who doesn't know the difference between the two or themselves well enough to know what their, because you don't wanna label things that are negative when it's really just an uncomfortable versus... uncomfortable it should be motivating versus uncomfortable, meaning you should run.

Stephen Kohler: I love that. Yeah, and that's a great example, Russel. It's like, thinking about two different scenarios. I am nervous, but in a good way because I'm about to go on stage like I'm a performer, right? So I'm excited. I can't wait to go on, but I'm a little nervous versus I'm standing outside the door of this, of the the CEO and I feel dread.

Completely different feelings, right? And getting in tune with your body, which I know sounds woo woo is a key way to understand how well am I. Right? Another, another great way is I talk a lot about as a coach, about this idea of listening in, in this case, the reason I'm bringing that up is listen to what people are saying to you around you.

You know, some of the most instructive things about when I was not well actually came from somebody else around me because I couldn't see it. And people would come up to me and say, Stephen, are you okay? You seem a little stressed right? Or you don't look so well? Have you been sleeping? Okay? And of course the answer was no.

But I've been so stuck in it in whatever situation was I, I didn't acknowledge it.

Russel Lolacher: How do you keep accountable to yourself?

Like, I'm, I'm, I do this in a way of asking myself, I do this by, I ask myself a lot of questions when it comes to just sort of having these inner dialogues with myself. It can show up as meditation. It can just show up as a quiet moment, whatever it is. But I, I ask these questions of myself to understand where I am. How am I gonna react? What's the best way to react in these certain circumstances? But in the, in the idea of wellness, is there conversations we could be having with ourselves? Questions we could be asking ourselves to just sort of recalibrate. I get it from listening from the body, but I also want to sort of look at it from a cerebral sense.

Stephen Kohler: Yeah. So I love it because in the lineup of work that I do, I do my best to walk the talk and I'll explain what I mean. So when, as a coach, one of the, one of the, I will, I will tell you, no surprise to you and your listeners, one of the biggest things I hear from the leaders I support are challenges around this very topic of wellness.

Now, usually the way they articulate it are things like, Hey, Stephen, I'm feeling overwhelmed. I'm feeling stressed. I don't know if I can keep going. And now they could be talking about a relationship. Most of the time they're talking about a, a professional challenge. And inevitably we get into what I will call identifying for them.

So having them define in their own words what wellness would look like if, if they could get from where they were. Overwhelmed not sleeping, feeling stress to a place of wellness. And often what we talk about, and, and this is my own metric for myself to answer your question, is and again, this is gonna feel a little woo woo, mind, body, spirit criteria scorecard, if you will.

So your listeners probably know all about the KPIs or metrics, right? In my case, I have, three metrics I hold for myself, a mind wellness, a body wellness, and a spirit ness. And, and I'll define what them am and then I hold myself accountable on a daily and weekly basis. And then I say to my clients, let's explore what those could be for you and how you're gonna hold yourself accountable.

So for me, mind. I know that for me to feel well, I need to be intellectually challenged. So throughout a given day, a week quarter challenge, I have metrics for myself of how much I'm doing that. What does that mean for me? Am I reading? 'cause I know that's an intellectual challenge. Am I engaging myself with learning new things that are stimulating?

I run a business, right? So I have a bunch of metrics around the mind keeping myself challenged. I like to meet interesting people like you and have interesting challenges. What happens when I'm not doing that? I start to feel foggy. I start to feel alert. I'm not intellectually engaged, and I know that signal, which tells me I need to like re-spark my brain.

I have a body metric. What does that mean? I know that for me to feel well, I need to be doing something physical. In my case, I've defined that to be getting outside and running. I like to run or take the dogs on a walk. So I say, okay, Stephen, when was the last time you ran? 48 hours ago. Okay, it's time to run.

It doesn't have to be a marathon, but I run. Third metric is spiritual and in this case I define it as music or spending time with family. When any one of those is out of alignment, I start to not feel well. I feel dragging. I'm you know, all of those things that I think a lot of us, so I then keep myself accountable on a calendar.

I'm big about accountability, and I'm like, okay, Stephen, it's been three days since you've done, you know, running music or spent time with your family. No, no, no wonder you're feeling crappy, right? You gotta go out there, especially when you don't wanna do it. I do the same thing with my clients. It's not about me telling them what they should go do.

It's about how do you define wellness? And they might say something like, oh man, I love fishing. Like, okay, what are you gonna commit to? And they're like. I'd like to maybe go fishing over the weekend. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. You're gonna commit to yourself and me right now that you're gonna go fishing over this weekend, and you're gonna text me that you went fishing at three o'clock on Saturday.

I'm like, okay, Stephen, I'll text you. It's things like that that ultimately define wellness.

Russel Lolacher: But there's a lot you can't control. So we're talking a lot about what we can control and that's absolutely where any leader should start. Your yourself, your relationships, your reactions to things, but going into that community piece. There are a lot of people around you, a lot of people you interact with every day.

Your bosses, I use the term boss, not leader for a particular reason. And in that there are things you can't control and impact that wellness regardless of what boundaries you've set up. How do you handle that? Or is there like a, is it fight or flight in that sorry, you've tipped over a boundary.

I have to quit now, or is it sort of a spectrum?

Stephen Kohler: I love it. And that's a great point. 'cause a lot of people that that's real, right? You say, okay, I'm gonna go for a, a run during lunch, and then your boss says, no, you're not. You're gonna come with me in a last minute meeting. What do you do? So what I, so the answer to your question in my mind is it, it goes back philosophically to what can you control?

Then the answer is agility. That's part one of the answer. And then part two of the answer is what I'll call making it up to yourself. So let's walk through this scenario. So you've committed to yourself, you're gonna go on a run at lunch, but your boss calls you at 11:45 and says, no, I need you in this meeting.

And you're not gonna, he doesn't know, but you're not gonna go for that run. So you'll say, okay, what? What can I control? I can't control, my boss just blew up my lunch plans. So what am I gonna do? I'm gonna be agile. I'm gonna say yes to my boss, of course, and then I'm gonna make it up to myself. I was gonna go grocery shopping at 6:00 PM but you know what, I'm gonna throw that out the window because I made a promise to myself that wellness, physical wellness is important.

So I'm gonna go for a run at six o'clock and I'm, I'm, I'm gonna be agile, but I'm not gonna kick the can down the road. And I'm not gonna say, oh, well I guess, I guess I'm just not gonna get to this. That's the key. It will require some hard trade-offs.

So it will say, I was gonna do X, but because this commitment I made for myself is so important, I'm gonna have to say no to something else. That's the key. That's the key. The, the big part of strategy, by the way, and, and wellness in my mind is about trade-offs, right? So I, instead of doing X I'm gonna do Y instead.

Russel Lolacher: I think that sounds great. And the reason I'm gonna kick the, kick the tires of that one a little bit too is then, but where's the line in that? Because in my brain I'm thinking of things like the, the term technical debt when you get into agile work and so forth, the project management. But I love the idea of it getting into cultural debt and basically what we're talking about wellness debt.

So we keep going. We'll do it later, we'll do it later, we'll do it later. But then that starts building up and that commitment of that, that habit we wanted to build of meditation or running every day goes from five to four, to three to two is becoming less and less because we keep saying yes or keep allowing these things we can't control to keep pushing these. You say, don't go grocery shopping, you're gonna have to run. No, you do need food. Your kids need food. So eventually you are gonna have to go grocery shopping and that might need to be prioritized. So how do you handle wellness debt? Because it's not it can become a problem.

Stephen Kohler: it's the answer is a choice.

Ultimately, it's about a choice and, and look again and with some agility. So you, you can say, look, and I, and I, I say this a lot to my clients. You have to, you have to be agile with what shows up, right? So the boss blows up your lunch plans. Great. Then you say, okay, I'm gonna run at six, but then you're, you've gotta, you know, take care of a child or go grocery shopping. Understood. So you're agile. In, in in the broader scheme though, after two, three days, maybe a couple weeks, couple months, couple years, you start to have to listen to yourself and say, but what am I giving up? Or what am I trading off? You know, I've, I've, I've, again, I support a lot of leaders that are in jobs that are no longer fulfilling.

And I say, what, what has this cost you? So to put it in terms of this, this podcast, it's, you're in a wellness debt. What, you know, what is this costing you? It's costing me my health. It's costing me my relationships at home. You know, I had a coaching call with a client last week and he says, I haven't seen my son in, you know, it feels like I haven't seen my son in three months.

And I'm like and how do you feel about that? So then you say it comes back to a choice. And then we have a hard conversation about continuing to look for opportunities to set boundaries at work. And if those are not, if that's not possible, then we say, what is in your control? One of the things that's in your control is making a different choice about a role, a position, a job.

That's within your control. Now, a lot of people say not really. And I, and I challenge them, I say, yes, it is. And I talk about, 'cause a lot of people say I could never get a job. I couldn't leave this industry, blah, blah, blah. And then I review with them. I, because I'm not, I, I can be objective. Like, let's look at your experience.

You have amazing experience. Let's look at your connections in the industry. You have amazing connections, right? And, and they're like, yeah, actually, you're right. Maybe I can find another job. May, maybe it's possible to work in an organization that's not toxic, right? It is, right? 

Russel Lolacher: It, it's harder to see through it when you're in it.

And it's, that just speaks to the importance of a network coaching, people... people that have a different perspective than you do because you are, you're in it, you're feeling it, as we've sort of talked about whatever that those feelings are defined.