Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to the Fulfilled Leader Podcast, the podcast to strengthen your emotional resilience and find fulfillment at work. I'm your host, jean Balfour, master Certified Coach, with over 5,000 hours one-to-one and tens of thousands of hours in groups. I've coached incredible leaders like you to overcome their biggest work challenges and go on to lead resiliently, finding the type of fulfillment they never knew possible. They are leaders people want to work for and organizations want to hire. In this podcast, we have conversations about the psychological and emotional struggles of leadership. You're going to hear neuroscience, psychology, leadership models and evidence-based approaches that all have an impact in helping you be a resilient and fulfilled leader. Every week, you learn ideas and tools that will shift the way you lead and live your life, making change possible. Let's start the show. Hello and welcome to the Fulfilled Leader.

Speaker 1: 1:10

How many times in the past few days have you been slightly annoyed by an email you received or a message on instant message, or maybe a little hurt by a comment a colleague made in passing? Maybe your boss gave you a small piece of input to something and it's something you're proud of and you feel like you shouldn't even bother. And maybe you had a minor reaction. It passed quickly. Or maybe the feelings played on your mind after you left work and even into your sleep, maybe even into the next day work and even into your sleep, maybe even into the next day. Even the littlest events can trigger strong emotional reactions in us, and few of us are exempt. It is a fact. It's a key part of our human condition and big emotional events can really impact us for a long time and they stop us from functioning well at work. And what matters is not the event. These events are going to happen all the time. People are always going to annoy us, think mistakes we make are always going to upset us. But what matters is our ability to manage ourselves, to manage our emotions when they appear to be able to notice that we're knocked over emotionally and very quickly come back to be able to focus on work.

Speaker 1: 2:32

And as leaders, we want to be good at not only managing our own emotions, but also to be competent at supporting our teams when they're feeling anxious or worried or have heightened emotions. When they're feeling anxious or worried or have heightened emotions At the moment, it feels like pressure's still rising, volatility is everywhere and we're living in such a lack of certainty about the future and sometimes it feels like even about tomorrow. And in the presence of this pressure and unknowing, it's common for us to feel increasingly unsure, worried and concerned, and of course, this isn't new for you as a leader, but right now I do believe it's increasing. It's been just slowly increasing over a long period of time and in and of itself this is a bit worrying, but it's not impossible. It's in this moment of pressure, when little events can seem bigger and we can experience strong emotions anger, worry, anxiety that we can learn to manage them, that we can learn to change things so that we're better able to lead and to work. And the good news is that we can. We can learn strategies to manage ourselves so that we feel an internal resilience and an ability to manage our emotions, so that we can think clearly when the pressure is high. And some of you listening will know that you have this already, but others of you will feel the need to work on it, to build more emotional resilience, and this was certainly true for me, and I'm going to share more about that as we go through this episode. I do believe that, whether or not we're naturally resilient, every one of us needs to learn some strategies to manage our emotional well-being, because every single leader I've coached has at one point found themselves badly emotionally derailed and struggling to feel strong in their inner world. It is part of us being human, and we need the ability to continue to lead, even when we would rather hide under the duvet, in order to help our teams to navigate this difficulty, and so in this episode, I'll share more of my own experience, along with some practical strategies for building your own emotional resilience, and these are things that you can develop so that, when things do become difficult, you know you've got the tools to manage. But let me start first with my own relationship to emotional resilience, because it's been a bit of a journey.

Speaker 1: 5:15

The most difficult piece of feedback I ever received at work was related to just this, and both the feedback and my reaction to it weren't very pretty. I was in my early 30s and I just finished and launched an organization-wide 360 feedback process. That was very deep and granular, and every leader in the organization had gone through this process and received their feedback many of them from me and then someone pointed out that I hadn't gone through the process myself, so it fell to the organizational psychologist I was working with on the project, to gather the feedback and to give me the feedback, and it was mostly OK. There were lots of positives, there was some stretch and some nice to have, and one piece of feedback that absolutely bowled me over. My boss and a few people in my team had described me as being emotionally demanding. Apparently, I constantly needed others to reassure me, and I was overly emotional in many situations. Me, I said, and then I cried and cried and cried for an entire weekend. I got the feedback on a Friday. I was angry and the feedback wounded me badly and it hit me right at my core, and, of course, my reaction to the feedback crying and being angry was, in and of itself, emotionally problematic, and so this was a big deal. Some of my emotions fell about at work, so it really wasn't a good scene.

Speaker 1: 6:57

After I'd calmed down, which took some time, I slowly began to see that my response had, in and of itself, lacked emotional resilience and that the feedback was true, and I couldn't hear the feedback because I was being emotionally demanding, exactly as she described me, and so I couldn't be a better leader. I couldn't learn to overreact, to spray my emotions everywhere, unless I worked on it and I knew I needed to do it, so their helpful and very painful feedback set me off on a path to work on my emotional life and to be better able to regulate my emotions at work. Because I'm ambitious, I want a good career, still am, and I wanted to learn to be different with this and manage the job at hand, and so becoming emotionally resilient became a bit of a mission for me, and I can honestly say that it's something. It wasn't something I was born with. The crying wasn't something new.

Speaker 1: 8:05

I'm used to crying and my close friends often describe crying as doing a gene with a little bit of humor and some seriousness. And I'm still easy to tears and, whilst I actually believe that tears are good, there were and have been many times when I've been so flooded with emotion that I couldn't function at work, and this is not a good thing. And I've talked before about my struggles with low confidence and this was all pulling against my ambition because I had these internal emotional struggles that were stopping me achieve what I wanted, and these inner emotions would stop me being able to focus, and it was many. I was experiencing fear or worry, wanting to get it right with others. Perfectionism was showing up, I was reactive and I could go either way either to being overly expressive or I could withdraw and feel very sorry for myself and I was exhausted by the swaying of these emotions.

Speaker 1: 9:12

And today, as I've said, I'm still emotional but I've learned to mostly be able to regulate it and I'm much more appropriately emotional at times when it matters, when it's important, and other times I'm aware of my emotions and I don't let them impact me. I'm able to function in the world and at work in a different way and I can honestly say I have significantly better emotional resilience and the benefits of this at work have been really huge. Because of my ambition, I have become a stronger person and it's enabled me to focus and get more work done. I don't believe this podcast would have happened without it. As a leader, it's enabled me to lead through some really stressful times, including some very challenging business moments, and in my coaching I'm able to really be fully present with my clients without my emotions interfering. And you know, things happen in life. Right now in life, there's a lot of things swirling around in my external world and I'm able to manage that and come to coaching and come to other bits of my work with focus, and the curious thing is that I have more energy than before, so I'm much older, but I'm less worn down by the internal mess. So this is my experience and I wonder if it's resonating with you. Some of you will think, no, I've already got that cracked. I'm really emotionally resilient. Others of you might be thinking, ah, it resonates.

Speaker 1: 10:50

Or even just yesterday I was triggered by something that happened, and over the 25 years that I've been coaching, I've worked with many, many leaders who were struggling with their emotional life, and this has had different expressions. So some, like my expression of it, were about being overly upset or needing approval and reassurance to calm their anxiety. They were lying awake at night worrying. Some others were overreacting in situations, and I've coached many people who have received feedback that they might have been intimidating people at work and it might be at an extreme shouting or lots of impatience and pressure and driving others beyond what they were comfortable with. I've also worked with leaders who were struggling because they weren't really in touch with their emotions and that meant that they were finding it hard to show more empathy and they found it hard to connect with others, and so, whether or not we see ourselves as emotional. Being in touch with them actually really matters, because they might and will surprise us.

Speaker 1: 12:04

Even those of us who are the least emotional can be caught out by our own emotional outbursts, especially if they're internally triggered by stress or something at our core. And when this happens, psychologists talk about us being derailed, and it has happened to all of us at work at some time. You may not have externalized it, but it may have been that you've become very quiet and very withdrawn, and I wonder if you can think back to a time when this happened, when you've reacted to a situation and it's caused you a lot of emotional stress. Maybe, like me, you received feedback in a blind spot, or maybe you were under so much pressure you snapped, or you find yourselves, or we found ourselves underperforming and we don't know why, and that can cause all sorts of emotional upset. Sometimes it's the way others behave, maybe it goes against our values and that triggers us emotionally, and sometimes we're just simply exhausted, and when this happens, when we are derailed and either overly emotional or withdrawn, it can bring us some shame.

Speaker 1: 13:18

We can sometimes feel not only all of the emotions but regret for the emotions. I know that's true for me. I feel like, oh, why do I have to be like this? Why do I have to react in this way? And sometimes those outbursts can even go as far as causing us a problem in our career. So there is a cost, and I think we need to learn to manage this, to recover in ourselves and find a way forward. As leaders, we are on show all the time. The people we lead are looking to us for how we behave and react, and our ability to be emotionally appropriate is key to helping people sense that we are well in ourselves and able to lead well, and we want to be able to do that. We want to be able to feel our emotions and manage them well so that we're more on an even keel for our internal world. So even when the wind is blowing really hard, we know we can still sail our boat, we know that we can sleep well at night and that we don't waste hours with worry running through our minds. So I want to sort of explain what I believe emotional resilience is, and then I'm going to share five strategies for how we can work on it. These are only five strategies. There's hundreds out there, and in upcoming episodes of the podcast I'm going to share a few more to help you develop them.

Speaker 1: 14:47

I define emotional resilience as the ability to adapt to stress, setbacks or challenges without becoming overwhelmed, reactive or disconnected. And as a leader, this means staying grounded and composed under pressure, navigating uncertainty with clarity and recovering quickly from emotional or professional knocks without losing connection to ourselves. You will have heard how people can respond and not react, and the ability to do that often suggests that the person is emotionally resilient. And it's really not about never feeling stress or pressure. It's about how quickly and skillfully you can return to center. It also doesn't mean we don't show emotion. That's important. It's that we're aware of it and we're appropriate in how we show it. And so if we're struggling or under a lot of pressure, we know how to get the emotional support so that we can lead well through the pressures of work.

Speaker 1: 15:50

And I think the impact of not having emotional resilience both on ourselves and others as wide. We can find it hard to experience feedback or criticism without emotion. I'm a living example of that. We can worry about events after that happened, even just worrying about something you said in a meeting, and they can play around and around and around in our head. We may not be able to think straight, especially when there's a crisis, when it hugely matters, we might be looking for clear-cut answers to things, when actually there's a lot of ambiguity or complexity in the situation. When we are flooded, we also lose connection to what matters to us. We lose connection to our values and purpose, and so we can feel like we're a bit off track, and those of us with please people or perfectionist tendencies might be inclined to over-please or to become obsessed with getting things right. And all of this stops me from being well as a leader, feeling fulfilled in myself and also functioning well as a leader, and we often end up very drained and not feeling like we're leading from our best selves. I am living proof that we can build emotional resilience. Each time we experience something, we can learn to build the muscle of it so that we can use it next time, and new experiences can feel so hard, but when we go through them, we build the foundations to be ready for the next phase.

Speaker 1: 17:19

And so here are the five strategies to help you build emotional resilience. They're here to help you in moments when you're emotionally triggered and when you want to work out how to respond appropriately, and I suggest that you try them. Try each of them and then choose the one that works best for you, or find others that work well for you. And I also suggest that you practice them during an ordinary day, when things are going well, because it is a learning exercise and it will take a few attempts for them to feel natural, and we don't want to be trying the first time when we're under masses of pressure. So I suggest trying them in low risk situations first, maybe at home, so that you can see how it goes.

Speaker 1: 18:03

The first of these is to notice and name the emotion, and this can seem really counterintuitive. Isn't it better to ignore them and hope they'll all go away? But no, the neuroscience tells us that they hang around, and one image that can help you think about this is to imagine holding a beach ball underwater. So, of course, you can hold a beach ball underwater, but it's going to want to force its way out, and it can take a lot of energy for us to keep it forced down. And the same is true for our emotions they're likely to keep popping up or leaking out, no matter how hard we try, and so we want to learn to get better at noticing and naming them, because actually we know that when we do that they hold less power. It's so counterintuitive and yet it's really magic. I do it a lot myself.

Speaker 1: 18:54

So you might want to start by saying just even right now, what am I feeling now? And see what you notice. Is there an emotion that pops to mind? Is there something that's worrying you, that's hanging around at the back of your mind? There's a very simple tool that supports this and that is to ask am I mad, sad, glad, bad or scared? So mad is, am I angry, maybe I'm upset, maybe I'm irritated. Sad, I might be feeling pessimistic, gloomy, miserable, maybe a bit depressed, maybe a bit low. Glad, of course, is happy, cheerful, calm, contented with life. Bad is about feeling shame, or maybe guilt. And scared is where anxiety, worry and fear sit. And these five are very helpful because you can just write them down and just even thinking oh, what I'm feeling is bad, I'm actually feeling guilty about this decision I've had to make, or I'm anxious, I'm scared. Just those five words can help you to identify feelings very quickly.

Speaker 1: 20:03

The second strategy is to use your values and your purpose to help you come back to equilibrium. So, for example, if you're in a stressful situation and you notice the feelings rising, consider what matters most, aligned with your values. For example, if someone's giving you feedback which is triggering defensiveness, you could start to think first of all, how important is it for me? What's my value about relationships and keeping the relationship going? And then, what are my values around personal growth? So if I'm receiving this feedback, is this a growth moment? Maybe a colleague's been unpleasant towards you and in this case, you may have a value of respecting others, even if you don't like their behavior, and you can remind yourself of this. You can remind yourself of you wanting to behave with respect, even if that behavior doesn't seem to warrant it. I know for me, coming back to my values can be a really powerful thing. What matters to me here, what's most important? And if you're at home and you're worrying and distracted, maybe you can remind yourself of how important your family is and how important your friends are, or how important it is to have time for yourself and to see that those values are there and that the worry maybe needs to just go and sit in the corner for a little while.

Speaker 1: 21:31

The third strategy is to find a pause. Now. This can be really hard in the moment, but it actually works really really well if we practice it. And the best way to do this, I believe, is to have some sort of grounding exercise that you go to, and so this might be a breathing exercise. You, like Many of my clients, like something called box breathing, which is where you breathe in for four, hold for four, out for four, hold for four. You might have a mindfulness activity, like looking around the room looking for something yellow, blue, looking for things, maybe using your five senses. Another one that works really well for me is just to notice my feet on the floor. So try this now Notice where your feet are, are they flat, and make sure they're flat on the floor, and then just straighten your back and notice how you're sitting or standing, and even just doing that will shift your breathing and bring you back out of your mind, out of the emotions, and it can give you that moment and pause and finding that moment. Then you can say, oh, I notice, I'm feeling this and I notice, I want to respond like this. Another very simple one is just to blow out very slowly and quietly, as if you're blowing out through a straw, and this apparently signals to our nervous system to calm. You could try this now. This is like magic, this one, and it's one I go to a lot to calm myself, to find the pause in those moments.

Speaker 1: 23:05

The fourth strategy is rooted in psychology, and this is that we can learn to unhook from the challenging thoughts that are triggering the emotions, and psychologists call this defusion. It's that I'm I'm unfusing from something that's going on. And here's an example. So I'm in a meeting and I suddenly feel very anxious about the presentation I'm about to give. I might be flooded with fear and worry and I'm not able to think, and I think that I won't be able to speak. And so the thought going through my head is I'm not good at presenting, I'm going to mess up or I'm going to freeze.

Speaker 1: 23:42

And what we can do to unhook from this is the first step. It's a three-step process. The first step is just to notice oh, oh, look, I'm thinking I'm not good at presenting, I'm going to mess up, I'm going to freeze. And so we just see that we've got this thought I'm not good at presenting and then you can maybe write it down. Even if you're just in the meeting, you could just write that thought down quietly somewhere where no one can see it.

Speaker 1: 24:09

The second step is to write the thought again, but this time write. I'm having the thought that I'm not good at presenting and I'll mess up. So you write it down or you just think it. If you can't write it down, I'm having the thought that. And then the third step is I notice that I'm having the thought that I'm not good at presenting. So this is an exercise I offer to coaching clients all the time and what they've found is that as we go through that step so I'm having a thought I notice that I'm having the thought we actually become the observer of the thought and it holds less power for us and we're unhooked from it, and then we're able to think, in this case, ah, wow, I noticed I'm really worried about this presentation. But actually you know what? Last time I did a presentation, it was okay and I'll be good enough this time, and maybe I can just remind myself to breathe so that I feel calm through it. So you could try this one now with a thought that's bothering you and maybe triggering difficult emotions. Write the thought down, write I'm having the thought that and then follow it up with.

Speaker 1: 25:16

I notice I'm having the thought that the fifth and final one is just to have small recovery moments, and again, this is something you might want to plan in advance, and these can be very simple things knowing that a stretch works for you, or a two minute breathing meditation exercise. I once heard a story of a senior exec who was doing back to back media interviews after the annual earnings report and he paused between each interview for two minutes and did some breathing and did some quiet meditation, bringing himself back to center so that he could go on to the next interview. I'm lucky enough to work in a room with a view of the sky and clouds, and I love clouds. I could look at them for hours, but just even a minute sometimes can be enough for me to experience a bit of awe, connect in with myself and calm my emotions. It's a good pause. Or do other things go and get a coffee, talk to somebody who helps you feeling good. Anything that's going to give you a pause and a recovery moment in that space is really good. Maybe even just two minutes of journaling can help in the day. So those are the five strategies I'm suggesting to start with. The first is notice and name your emotions. The second is come back to your values, your purpose, what matters for you. The third is find a pause. The fourth is learn to unhook, so begin to become the observer of your emotions. The fifth is have a plan for pauses, for recovery moments.

Speaker 1: 26:55

I'm going to share a couple more strategies in more depth in upcoming episodes, and the next one I'm going to talk about how journaling can help. I talk about journaling a lot, but it's such a powerful tool, and in a few more episodes I'm going to explore how triggers, how we get triggered, and how learning about our triggers can actually help us to become more emotionally resilient as a leader, and as a final thought, always remember that talking to someone about how you're feeling and having them listen, or asking somebody else how they're feeling and listening to it, can often be all that's needed, or sometimes all we need is to externalize the feeling. So don't forget that and, as a leader, you can offer that to your people when they're under a lot of pressure. As a coach, at the end of sessions, the most common thing that people say to me is I feel better, and in that session we may not even have talked about emotions, but it's the externalizing of what's going on inside us. That helps us to connect with what we're feeling, it helps us to make sense of it and that is really helpful in helping us move back to clarity, presence, focus in our work.

Speaker 1: 28:12

I look forward to hearing how you get on with your own strategies for managing emotional resilience. There will be more information in the show notes and, as I say, I will be sharing ongoingly a few more strategies about how you can come back to your best strength as a leader. Thanks for listening to the Fulfilled Leader. If this episode resonated, share it with another leader or friend and don't forget to follow the podcast so you never miss an episode. You can even rate and review. You can find more support and resources at jeanbalfourcom or come and say hello on LinkedIn. Take care and keep leading with heart.