Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink
Every action you take as a leader has a ripple effect, starting with your team, going out to the organization, and even out into to people’s personal lives. Here we offer you the chance to learn from real-life stories of leadership, so you can gain a deeper understanding, and level up your own skills. From communication, to culture, to power and equity, to feedback, to resolving conflict, and more. Join us and make sure you are creating the ripples you want.
If you would like your questions answered on the show, please share your story here: https://allthrive.ca/share-your-story/
To join the show live, go to: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-fink-all-thrive/
Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink
43 - Confidence and Anxiety in Leadership
Do you ever grapple with anxiety and/or imposter syndrome as a leader? Join us as we dive into the importance of personal development in leadership, in order to be the best leader possible. From reactive to responsive interactions, we share helpful tools you can use to shift your state, not only in stressful moments at work, but in the long term so you can grow.
Do you have the skills to ensure you are always regulated and responsive as a leader?
If you want to understand how to stay calm and keep embracing your growth, you should give this one a listen.
To have your questions answered on the show, submit your story here: https://allthrive.ca/share-your-story
Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink is live every week at 12:00pm MST. Please join us to get answers to your leadership questions! https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-fink-all-thrive/
Every action you take as a leader has a ripple effect, starting with your team, going out to the organization and even out into people's personal lives. Here we offer you the chance to learn from real-life stories of leadership so you can gain a deeper understanding and level up your own skills From communication to culture, to power and equity, to feedback, to resolving conflict and more. Join us and make sure you're creating the ripples you want. Welcome to Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink. Today we are going to be talking about anxiety and confidence and what that looks like in a leadership role when you're maybe struggling with some of those things. Emmy shares their story. I am a newer, young leader in my company. I've been here for a couple of years and wanted to advance my career and get a pay bump, so I applied for a leadership position. I honestly didn't think I would get it. Since I did get it, it's been quite stressful. Mostly, I'm suffering from anxiety and a bad case of imposter syndrome. I'm younger and less experienced than some of the people on my team, but mostly what keeps going through my head is why should they listen to you? What would you suggest to help me be more confident in my position? So, emmy, first of all, thank you so much for sharing, and I can certainly appreciate how hard it is when you have this sense of imposter syndrome and this anxiety around leadership.
Speaker 2:There is a lot of responsibility to good leadership and it's not uncommon for people to feel worried or stressed when they take on a leadership position. Even more experienced leaders who are confident in other areas might find points that they come up to that they do feel more insecure about that. They find things come up for them in these new situations that their confidence does waver and when you question yourself like that, as a leader, you're doing exactly what you should, because I want to appreciate that you are being aware of this and that you're looking to improve it early in your leadership career, in your journey. I've unfortunately worked with some high level leaders who have gone through long careers, long leadership journeys, with still holding some anxiety or this lack of confidence or imposter syndrome, and you can see not only how it's affected them through all that time, but also affected the people that they were trying to help, all these different teams that they've led in that time. Also, it's just great to bring this forward because it really highlights how interconnected our personal development journey and our leadership journey need to be to be really healthy. The more that you can know about yourself, your foibles, your pain points, your strengths, your challenges, all of those nitty gritty pieces inside of you the better the leader you can be. And if you don't do that work, if you're not willing to look at this stuff, if you try to hide your head in the sand, you can take all the leadership courses in the world. You can read every book, listen to every leadership podcast. You will never reach your full potential as a leader and you will be doing a disservice to the people that you're trying to help.
Speaker 2:Before we start this discussion with lots of ideas and a comment like that, I do want to encourage you, emmy, to take this slowly. Don't let it become this overwhelming thing of all these things you should be doing right away, or that you'll feel like a failure. I'm a recovering perfectionist and I know sometimes, when I asked for something and I heard good advice, I'd want to, you know, do everything at once and fix it all at once, and then I'd get more stressed thinking about all the things I needed to do because I didn't have them figured out yet. Of course, that won't help with anxiety, that won't help in this situation, and I just want to say, as we start you have time to absorb this, to try things out, to do this personal work. So try a little piece at a time. Don't worry too much about this. Just slowly incorporate into your work. When we're doing all of this type of personal work because this is more on that personal side there's so, so, so many different approaches you can take, and I'm only going to touch on a couple ideas and I'll break them down into things that you can do while you're in the moment stressing out, and what you can do when you're not directly in the situation. A bit calmer Now. Let's start with what to do in the moment.
Speaker 2:One of the reasons that addressing this personal work is so hard is that when you get into these challenging, stressful situations, your brain gets hijacked. It's sending signals to your body, it's sending signals to different parts of the brain and it is in protection or survival mode. In these moments, when we start to get stressed, it goes in the survival thing and we can no longer operate out of our prefrontal cortex, which is this nice, calm, rational place where we get to think things out and we get to think about things clearly. So when you're getting stressed and anxious in the office, you no longer are thinking logically about the situation and you're going to become reactive. And I suspect most people have had a reactive leader and you know how hard it can be to work with them when they are reacting to something. And since you don't want to be that leader, let's take steps to calm your body and mind, because that's when we can be responsive and we can settle into this state. That's a lot better way of interacting with people, because you don't want your team to have to experience that.
Speaker 2:A really easy way to do this is to start with breath, and there are a million people that do different types of breath work out there, and I encourage you to look into some different options. Maybe there's one that you find really resonates with you around anxiety, or maybe there's just one that you really like from a meditation or yoga practice you have. Feel free to explore that whole gambit and pick something that you really like. But just the act of taking a couple nice deep breaths brings you back to the moment, calms your nervous system, and anxiety is usually either about what's happened in the past that you're dwelling on or what's going to happen on the future, bringing that focus back to the present moment. All that's happening right now existing in your body, that you're safe, that you're alive, is a really good thing, and the nice thing about this kind of thing any sort of quick breathing exercise or even just breathing and being aware of it is you can do this at any point. You can be in the middle of a conversation with someone, notice yourself starting to get anxious, starting to feel that response, maybe a tenseness in your body, and you can take those couple breaths, take that mini chance to regroup and now you're moving in a different way forward.
Speaker 2:I'm also a big fan of using your body as part of your grounding tool. More of that somatic work and the one I like does take a couple minutes, so it wouldn't work so well in a conversation but if you were in your office, maybe alone, and you notice yourself starting to get tense and worried about something that you're doing, you can do this. So start breathing and as you take a deep breath in, you can start to notice what's happening with your feet. Are they hot, are they cold, are they tingly, how do they feel? And you're not judging, you're not trying to fix anything. You're just observing the state of them and you can move all the way up your body with that Right. Just observing the state of them and you can move all the way up your body with that right. You can move to your calves and your knees and your thighs, slowly going up and just feeling every part of your body. If you want to relax even more, too, you can take a breath in and tense that part of your body, take a breath out, relax that part of your body and it really just helps again calm this system. That's proprioceptively soothing to your body, that nice tightness and squeeze and then release and the piece too.
Speaker 2:With your body as this tool as we're using it is, we also store so much of our tension and trauma and all these challenges, all these nitty gritty things that we hold on to in our bodies, and sometimes just bringing the awareness to the body also helps you understand what that thing is better, how you're holding on to it, and it might help you move past it, because the body and mind are incredibly linked. So maybe you're listening to this and you're like come on, leah, this is obvious. Everyone talks about breath work. I know this kind of stuff and to those people, I'm going to challenge you to do it more, because I've met an awful lot of people who know this, who don't practice it as much as they think they do and they still have their own stuff come up and they're not always regulated emotionally when they're in the office. So if you think, yeah, I totally got this, I know this, I do this practice, I'm just going to challenge you do it a bit more Really.
Speaker 2:Make sure maybe you have multiple five-minute spaces a day where you're doing this work. Maybe you're doing deeper work to really recognize when you are stressing out even just that little bit, because it's very rare to find someone who is not stressed by work. So it is easy to say it is harder to practice. So, really, whatever level you're at with this, make sure you're putting that time in, and those five minutes here and there are going to make you way more productive for the rest of the day, decrease your stress level, which is something we all need as leaders. So take the time. It's very worth it.
Speaker 2:And, like I said, look for resources outside of me. I'm not going to claim to be the expert, be all, end all on this side of me. I'm not going to claim to be the expert, be all, end all on this, and ME especially for you. Pick a couple, practice them, see what happens. How are you feeling? What does your body feel like? What does your mind feel like in those moments? With that, let's move on to a little bit of what we want to be doing in a healthy mindset, and that's more of this exploration piece, because we know our brain got hijacked.
Speaker 2:When we're in that stressful situation, when we're in the calm situation, is the time we want to focus on that growth piece, that really personal exploration of what's happening. And there are some things to consider. When we're more common, rational and even if you notice yourself sometimes in reflection of these things, you might notice yourself getting elevated because you're poking at things that were kind of dormant at those times, and if you notice that you can do that breathing, you can do that grounding, come back to calm when you're in a safe space and then you can continue considering these pieces. So what would you do for personal reflection? There's lots of different ways you can do this, but just to start with a basic either journaling or writing out some thoughts. We're just going to do some reflective questions and there's a couple different ones I might consider.
Speaker 2:So what, first of, are your beliefs about what a leader needs to do to be prepared? What would make a leader not an imposter? What kind of skills do leaders have that you want to ensure that you have, that you're displaying with your team? What makes you uncomfortable about leadership and why? Where else in your life is there this feeling of imposter syndrome, or where else in your life is there feelings of anxiety? What benefits do you get from imposter syndrome and what benefits do you get from anxiety? What negative or positive impacts might your team be experiencing based on your leadership? That one might be a little harder to think about, right, that one might get the blood pumping.
Speaker 2:What else would you like to know about your leadership journey? There are so many questions you can ask yourself. You can look into. We'll talk about, of course as well. Choose maybe one or two every time you take a little bit of time to reflect, write down what comes up, consider it, give yourself that space and then from there maybe you do choose to take some action, because there are potential actions that might come up. Right, if you believe that leaders do need to have some sort of training before they can be a good and effective leader, great, you can look into training, maybe through your job, maybe it's on your own time, because this is important to you. You want to look into those resources, obviously.
Speaker 2:Obviously, there may be actions that are more like doing check-ins with your team, maybe something your anxiety and imposter syndrome comes from thinking oh God, they hate me, they must hate my leadership? Why am I doing it Right? And those kinds of thoughts you can address by talking to your team a little bit more. We've done some great episodes on feedback. You can go listen to those. How are you getting that feedback from your team to know if you're doing a good job with them and helping them or what would they like to see shifted?
Speaker 2:And there may be actions. Of course, that will also help you reinforce some of those positive thoughts and move away from some of the negative mantras that are kind of repeating in your head. So when you have imposter syndrome and you're telling yourself, why should they even listen to me? What's something else that you could tell yourself that might also support that? And when you're doing work like that, I do just want to warn that there can be a fine line between starting to create this space of positive thoughts and ways of reinforcing once you have done this exploration, once you've really sat in and understood this piece. And there's also a way that sometimes people try to ignore what's happening, bury their head in the sand a little bit and just say positive things and hope that'll work. Now, not that positive things won't help your brain it's a really healthy thing, but they really do work best together. They work much better when you've had that chance to kind of explore the icky stuff.
Speaker 2:And then two, in this whole process, just be gentle with yourself. It's hard work, it's going to take some time. Nothing's going to be instantaneous that you're suddenly going to be like oh why was I? Everyone knows about imposter syndrome. Why was I feeling that? Of course, I'm super qualified and happy? Probably not going to happen right away. But as you explore these pieces, you'll start to get more comfortable in yourself, more confident in yourself. And then, when those harder moments come up, you've built more skills, you've built more of a resource base that you can go oh man, now I'm feeling uncomfortable again with this new thing. Okay, I'm going to calm myself down. I'm going to reflect on what's happening for me that's bringing up that discomfort.
Speaker 2:This is, like I said, some deep work. Certainly, if you have other support for it, if you have a therapist, if you have a coach, someone who's helping you understand this, or even a friend that you can talk through some of this reflection with, that'll help as well. Bring it forward into the world. Bring forward some of those icky pieces, though it might not be that comfortable, so you have to look at them if you want to ever move past them. So I hope this helped.
Speaker 2:I certainly want to help more, emi, and I'm very much looking forward to our conversations, because I've got some other tools I'd like to share with you as a reminder to all our listeners. If you have a story that you want to share, we would love to have it. And as a thank you for that, I provide some time after, so we make sure your question is fully answered as a way of saying thank you so much for sharing with us. And I finally want to thank you for listening and learning with me and hopefully you're thanking yourself for putting in this kind of effort to do that personal development work. Like I said, it's absolutely critical for leaders. So thank you so much for doing that. And as we close, remember to ask yourself what kind of cripples am I going to create this week?
Speaker 1:We hope you enjoyed the episode. Make sure to subscribe, comment and connect with Leah at meetleahca.