The Leader's 3-2-1: Three insights, Two Questions, One Statistic.
Topic: Charge Your Resilience Battery
What I know for sure about every leader's journey: at various points, you will feel fatigued, stressed and overwhelmed. Challenges, setbacks, slow-downs, failures…all part of the role, no matter your level of experience or expertise. Resilience energy for these inevitable experiences is like a battery. The more charge you have going into them, the more capacity you have to thrive in the face of them. In terms of charging their resilience battery, I've noticed that leaders, especially new ones, often overlook battery maintenance until it hits the red or loses all charge. Learning the early signs for battery maintenance and taking relevant action is key to thriving. The three resilience battery zones and coaching for each in 3-2-1:
Three Insights
Green Zone In the green zone, challenges are balanced evenly with comforts. You still face difficulties, but you have an equal capacity to cope. Maintaining this delicate balance between mastery and vulnerability is essential to staying in the green. To do so, leaders must be mindful of, and responsive to, signs for self-care. Early signs of escalating stress that happen in the green zone are easy to ignore or underestimate. Self-Coaching for Self-Care Signs: How can I rebalance? What needs to be delegated? Where is a “B” effort sufficient? What would feel like a luxury today? Yellow Zone In the yellow zone, challenges begin to outpace comforts. Stressors have begun to compromise your ability to cope. Vulnerability fatigue starts to set in. Your environment suddenly feels unpredictable, uncontrollable and overloaded. Signs of burnout, or intensified self-care symptoms, are emerging. Self-Coaching for Emerging Burnout: What is mine to own? What is mine to let go? What needs to be discarded or outsourced? What does support look like right now? Red Zone In the red zone, challenges have overwhelmed your ability to cope. Capacity for self-reflection, problem solving and decision-making is offline. Brené Brown sums up overwhelm and its cure: “[When overwhelmed] your life is unfolding faster than your nervous system can manage…The cure is nothingness. There is no other way.” Self-Coaching for Overwhelm: If acute, retreat and find stillness for at least 10 minutes, potentially longer. Do not make high stakes decisions. If chronic, taking leave and/or building residual stillness into your schedule is essential.
Two Questions
What are your unique green zone signs for self-care? Managing stress in the green zone is essential for thriving. Attune your awareness to your body's subtle signals. How do you experience early signs of escalating stress? What is one small shift in your schedule that will charge your resilience battery maintenance most? Use the law of minimum effort, maximum effect as much as possible. One or two small shifts in approach can make significant impact on resilience battery.
One Statistic
53% “Practicing stress reduction activities has a positive impact on resilience — 53% of those workers practicing daily are resilient, compared to 31% of those practicing less than once a week or never, a 22-percentage point difference.” Cigna Resilience Index: 2020 Report
