A New Week | Jan 8th, 2024
Embracing mundanity and repetition in your own leadership development AND stress resilience
Disclaimer:
The intent behind this essay is to inspire you to spend more time considering the interconnectivity of our system (body and psychology). The field of “leadership development” (I prefer the term “leadership unfolding”) tends to reduce the complexity of human growth to neatly packaged frameworks and quick fixes. Business schools, media companies, and leadership gurus offer quick dopamine by claiming to crack the code of “leading successfully“, when what most leaders actually need is a radical and continual renewal of our relationship to ourselves and the world around us. It’s only when we muster the bravery to deeply examine our stories and shadows that we become capable of changing the unconscious and inadvertent ways that we project ourselves onto others. To foster belonging, psychological safety, and dignity for our employees, constituents, clients, communities, and families, we first need to get out of our own way enough to foster in ourselves that same sense of belonging, safety, and dignity.
One of the most common conditioned tendencies that I observe in my work with leaders around the world is that most of them have immense gratitude (forced or not) for the life they have built, but very little embodied understanding or honest acknowledgement of what it took to get there. Out of touch with the messy humanity of their journey, they remain disconnected from their full wisdom, and struggle to live with true self-respect. As a result, their positive influence on others is limited.
Stop here. How does this land for you? Where? Take a moment.
Our leadership is influenced by how well we understand our own story, as well as the ways in which we continuously become aware of our own emotional and mental patterns. If we lack these types of awareness, then how can we authentically recruit others to work toward visions which only we at first can see? How can we understand what’s behind distrust, conflict, misalignment, and tactfully guide people back to harmony? How can we guide our people to rise collectively to new heights, together?
We must permit ourselves to appreciate where we come from—how we have fallen and risen through life. If we do, then we become able to is to sense, trust, and engage with others in a way that can spark and deepen relationships and collaboration.
Such inner contemplation can begin simply:
How did I get here?
How did I do it?
What are the values that I have upheld getting here?
What makes me “me“?
What has worked well?
What has not?
What has gotten me here that will continue to serve me and others?
What has gotten me here that will not continue to serve me and others?
What can I see that my people can’t?
I’ve reflected upon all of this a lot, and often walk myself home by going through these reflections myself. It’s vastly empowering to regularly re-acknowledge how I have gotten to a place of owning, and appreciating the beauty and wild messiness of my aliveness, recovering from immense hardship, and also still living with some of it from a place of acceptance and trusted unfolding, not shame and guilt.
Today I want to speak about one piece that stands out to me, and comes through in many of my sessions with others:
Especially in phases of change, transition, and growth (which for many leaders, are the norm), the best way to find perspective and momentum is through mundane and repetitive activities.
We may want to call this consistency, but there is so much more to it than just showing up again and again. In phases of newly required presence and/or action it is so easy to fall into the trap of reactivity, irritability, shiny-object syndrome and busy work without tuning into what our highest contribution in that moment truly is (note: it’s often simply our silence and active listening).
As we are settling into our new life in Portugal, I am reminded how beautiful and necessary it is to have pre-established rhythms and practices that remind you of what stays the same, and what is different. In that delta, we experience the most (sometimes subtle) potent moments of awakening, compassionate presence, and skillful action.
It is through my daily writing, movement, and grounding with my husband that I find regulation, clarity, and an ability to accurately communicate what I need or ask pointed questions to others. To be honest, I was reminded of the importance of this after the first three days in Portugal were extremely challenging for me. I felt like I was holding my own emotional load around the transition (and the stress of the last few months) as well as my children’s anticipation, joy, emotional imbalance and distress, while also needing to show up for my clients in a capacious way. More on that below.
Instead of trying to do more, new, better or different, we’re better off repeating what’s been working. Finding renewal, emerging excellence, and mastery in mundane efforts.
It is only when we design repetition in our lives, that we can truly witness and experience the change trajectory of our renewing gestalt, and continually re-establish personal homeostasis.
Let’s move into the somatic leadership realm of all of this for a moment:
We often experience change in our bodies around our edges, whereas our more established sense of self, our regulation, and deeper knowing sits in the center (gut).
I often refer to this type of leadership work as “edge work“:
How are the edges of you changing, what are the subtle things that you are feeling on the edges of your skin that feel new, uncomfortable, scary?
Is the expansion of your skin a good thing, but your body deep down perceives it as a threat (joy anxiety)?
Can you imagine your edges shifting outward as a way to feel into the change that’s coming? What becomes available from this place?
What makes it easy or hard to fully embrace the changing edges? How does it inform what you need to do next?
For us to embrace the shifts of our edges (change) more fluidly and expansively, we need to know what grounds us, what regulates our nervous system, and thus centers us back into “rest and digest”. In nervous system health, we call this ”emotional fluidity”.
This is why writing, meditation, prayer, and exercise are powerful. They ground us, while making us more receptive to the ambitions and challenges we are facing.
Most leaders I have encountered who struggle with their sense of direction, purpose, and clarity have either not been established or have fallen off the bandwagon of some foundational, disciplined practice that nourishes their entire being. They are busy “out there“ changing some parts about themselves, their team, their business, while lacking the inner compass what the most skillful, resonant action “out there“ might be.
We need the things that center us, to explode from that same center with new direction, clarity, and action. We need to allow ourselves to be still, repetitive, boring, and mundane for the voices, inputs, and impressions on our edges to settle.
The nervous system is neurologically wired to not just signal our body when it needs to digest food, but also to signal the body to digest information. Burnout is something that happens when we don’t allow this digestive process to happen over a long period - it’s when we don’t gift our body a repetitive motion that it can count on from us, something that you are always coming back to settle your body. In many leadership practices that I equip my people with, I remind them to pick one activity that they can do no matter where they are to signal their body that they are:
safe (grounded)
clear and capacious (regulated)
and servants (remembering their why, leading from a place of integrity to their people and mission)
Over the last few weeks, this was writing, walking, and restful breathing for me.
Writing grounds me. Period. It’s really that simple.
Walking gives me a sense of gentle forward momentum without overwhelming my nervous system when everything around me changes. I often include peripheral vision exercises while I am walking too. Focusing on widening your peripheral vision can stimulate/activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for the body's "rest and digest"- response. This stimulation can counterbalance the effects of the sympathetic nervous system, which triggers the stress response.
Restful breathing includes rhythmic breathing, intentional breathing and focusing on longer exhales, which also stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest). I do this every day, whether I am extremely relaxed or not. Because we want to practice things when we don’t need them, so they support us when we need it. At this point, it is a practice that my body uses as an anchor for stability. So any form of breathing such as coherence breathing, box breathing, or 4-3-8 breathing are great. The wonderful Conni Biesalski, who also lives where I live now, has recently summed it up in a great post.
Those 3 practices allow me to tap into my edges more calmly (mostly - still human :)) and with a more intuitive and informed way of acting and leading.
Coming full circle now…
Over time, your foundational practices will equip you with a greater sense of capacity:
You’ll know what needs change, adjustment, nuance, and iteration.
You’ll have more nuanced, compassionate, contextual language. You’ll be better at saying what needs to be said.
You’ll appreciate the wisdom and knowing that you have, and stretch humbly, confidently, and daringly into the unknown.
We don’t need to question every single part of ourselves in moments of tribulation and change. Graceful, embodied navigation of uncertainty allows us to be more truthful with ourselves—and with others, helping them to stay more fluid and explore new edges with us. After all, we experience with our fellow humans a shared sense of aliveness if we can explore new ideas, products, strategies, and life decisions together.
Isn’t that belonging after all? To rise and fall through the vastness of choices together?
All the love, all the power,
Franzi