The self management capabilities and emotional intelligence of your leadership team directly impacts the culture of your organization. This post explore two skills your managers need to master if you are experiencing problems with morale.

That emotional intelligence (EQ) correlates with better interpersonal skills, leadership abilities, and stress management has been firmly established. Many organizations today, however, have heads that are not best suited to inspiring others, driving productivity, or engendering loyalty. If your company is experiencing high turnover, morale problems, or decreased motivation that traditional methods haven’t solved, look at your leaders and ask “are they leading from within?” Excellence in leadership requires excellence in self-leadership. The good news is that like business management, emotional intelligence, can be learned.

Let’s explore two cost-effective things you and your leadership team can do to develop emotional intelligence and learn to lead from within.

It makes sense that many top executives might not have strong emotional intelligence skills. Social and emotional learning (SEL) wasn’t formally introduced until the mid-90’s, so if you are in a leadership position now, mostly likely you didn’t grow up taking classes in emotional intelligence as you do with math and science and language. So organizations end up with leaders that are skilled at forecasting, analyzing, (re)structuring, and making tough decisions, all the things they learned and mastered in their studies, but these same leaders are unable to practice self management: gauging, controlling, and expressing their own emotions in a way that strengthens interpersonal relationships. The net cost of this missing skill set is high.

Good leaders are big picture thinkers who understand the patterns, see how all the pieces fit, and are natural problem-solvers. But first and foremost, you are human. You might go to work and solve hundreds of problems in a day, but you arrive at work just like the rest of the staff: with an energy level reflective of your mental, emotional, and physical landscape. How inspired you feel and how well you solve those problems will change from day to day based on the context of your life and how resiliently you are able to respond to challenges. Leaders who can interoceptively gauge what’s going on internally, understand how their context influences their emotional state, and proactively mitigate negative emotional states are able to lead from within.

Becoming Aware

The first skill of emotional intelligence your team should develop is awareness.

Leaders who have a high level of emotional intelligence are skilled at interception: they are aware of what’s happening inside their body. They can read the messages their body is sending them. At a basic level that means you are aware of your internal body sensations like hunger or thirst.

While you might say that of course you can recognize those states, how well are you able to recognize them before they become urgent? In the middle of a conflict, how able are you to sense the itchiness in your hands and connect it to your rising anger before you explode?

In the most basic sense, if you are interoceptively aware, you are able to be still and sense your heart beating. The ability to intuit what is happening inside your body, to receive the messages from your sensations, correlates with the ability to create social connections that inspire and engender loyalty.

If you’ve seen Spider Man, you could say his “spidey sense” comes from hyper interoceptive qualities. Mindfulness techniques are the most efficient exercises for strengthening your “intero sense”. Regularly getting still in meditation to practice listening to your heartbeat or noticing your sensations is very effective. If you aren’t able to be still and the thought of meditation brings up feelings of dread and the urge to get busy, remember that like all skills, it’s learned.

You aren’t an expert the first time you do it. And the harder it is, the more impactful the effects once you master it. So, give yourself grace and keep trying. You are a leader who has done hard things in the name of leadership. You can learn to lead yourself.

Mastering awareness is the first step. If you aren’t aware of what is going on inside, you won’t be able to use that data to connect where you are to where you want to be.

True leaders understand that showing up to a meeting flat and angry will negatively influence the outcome of that meeting. Where you recognize that you are flat and angry – which sounds easy but is very much impeded by how well you have mastered the strategies of disconnection and dissociation to keep moving forward – you are poised to choose what you want to do to shift into an emotional state that entrains your team into a higher energy and leads to a better outcome.

Shifting

The second skill of EQ that you’ll want to cultivate is influencing your emotional state.

Arriving at the office, you are aware that your tension is high: traffic was bad; you had a fight with your partner; and you are worried about the outcome of the new initiative you introduced. Interoceptively, you sense that your chest is tight, you are holding your breath, and your movements are a bit shorter and jerkier than usual. You notice that your thoughts are negative. You may even be aware that these factors impact your level of patience, your ability to creatively problem-solve, and your energy to inspire others.

All of this knowledge does not make you emotionally intelligent unless you can use it to influence your internal emotional landscape to engender a better outcome.

So let’s assume you’ve developed your intero-senses and you know what’s going on internally and now you want to learn to shift your emotional state.

The first part of the three steps in shifting is taking a pause.

How you pause and the amount of time you ask for will depend on context, but in almost every situation – except those that are life and death – there is time to pause. Usually the feeling that you must provide information or an answer or a reaction immediately comes from you. The pressure is almost always internally driven.

If you lay out a plan that includes a pause and gets you, your team, your child, or your partner, to the desired outcome – in fact, a better outcome than if you went with the initial reaction that came up for you – the pause will be accepted and even appreciated.

Rather than a knee-jerk decision in a meeting, you ask for time to make a considered decision. You ask your partner for 5 minutes or a day to be able to come back with a calm manner. A pause gives you time that you didn’t have in the meeting or during the fight to tap into your awareness and see what’s going on.

The second step is empathy.

This is the hardest one for most leaders – looking at my clients, it’s always the overachievers, the top executives, who are most strict with themselves. So, in the meeting when a conflict arises and everyone is looking to you to magically solve it, you feel the pressure. You feel the attention, the expectation, the weight.

On the days you are stressed or depleted you just wish someone else could take on some responsibility. Why is it always you who has to step in and fix things? Why can’t other people just do their jobs? Why can’t they step up once in awhile?

But then, you repress the anger, the frustration, and you pick up your over-sized mantel of responsibility and move forward because there’s no other choice. But the frustration and sense of weight doesn’t leave once you solve the conflict – it just takes up space in your internal emotional reservoir. This means you are going about your job from a place that has less space for patience, creative problem-solving, or compassion.

It also means that the explosive or dismissive reaction that comes from not having enough emotional bandwidth to cope with what’s in front of you is more likely to happen because you have less space to accommodate distress.

When you give yourself empathy – which will feel INCREDIBLY awkward when you first begin this practice – you are NOT indulging in self-pity. This is not a luxurious action, it’s a very practical strategy.

You are very purposefully reducing the resentment to free up space in your internal emotional tank to be able to continue to resiliently respond to adverse situations. Practicing empathy is acknowledging what’s there (this corresponds with the awareness piece above and gives you more data to be able to make better decisions) and validating your feeling. It’s normal that the pressure would feel heavy. It’s okay that you would feel tired of handling it all. It’s valid that you feel angry and frustrated.

And practicing empathy is not feeling sorry for yourself and will not derail your forward momentum. Self-empathy will not make you weak. A lot of my executive clients think they need to be harder with themselves – stricter, more disciplined – because if not, they will spend too much time, to use an American expression, “sitting on the pity pot.” They believe they will fall into the habit of wallowing, and this will disrupt their productivity and focus.

Practicing empathy, though, allows you to feel heard – at least by yourself – which the leaders I work with don’t have the habit of receiving (it’s lonely at the top) or doing. Most invalidate their feelings, thinking that leaders suppress their emotions and needs so they can continue leading.

But suppressing keeps those emotions locked in the internal tank, so you aren’t able to release them and lead from an empty tank that you are free to fill up with stress during the day. Studies show that reducing negative emotions and stress are critical for supporting high level cognition, which is critical for leadership. You can directly impact how well you are able to release the emotion by using self-empathy.

Which leads us to the third step – release.

You have to dump that tank. There are lots of different practices that can help you empty the tank. It’s crucial, however, to find what works for you. So where you try exercise paired with visualization and that technique doesn’t work, keep trying and assessing other techniques until you find the one that gives you the physical ease and relaxation your body needs.

Mindfulness practices like meditation, alternate nostril breathing, or 3 by 3 by 3 will help you reduce the accumulated stress, so you have more available emotional space to confront the challenges of the upcoming or next day.

Somatic practices like affection – the six second kiss or long hug – also signal to your body that you are safe from the stressor you encountered and it can release itself from the state of readiness to flee or fight. While the stressor might not have ended – disgruntled employees or child behavioral problems might be on-going – in that moment, you intentionally use affection to send a signal to your body that it’s okay to set the worry aside for the moment. The stressor may be there when you come back, but releasing the stress it induced, leaves you with space for the stress it will shortly induce – even potentially the next hour or day.

As there is a reciprocal relationship between the sympathetic nervous system stress response and the parasympathetic nervous system rest and digest response, when you turn off the sympathetic nervous system with belly laughter, or affection, or exercise that requires significant exertion, you give your body time to rest and repair.

If your professional or personal challenges haven’t been solved by anything you’ve tried to date and you’ve begun to question yourself or consider letting people go, I challenge you to try these techniques for a few months and learn to lead from within.

If you’d like to learn to lead from within, schedule a call with me to see what your personalized plan would look like.

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With gratitude to Camila Vianna for her thought provoking image “Biomechanical.” Find her here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/camilavianna/5594020068/in/photostream/