COVID-19 has been an emotional rollercoaster – One day you can feel empowered and creative, the other moment you can feel sad and frustrated. Managing feelings is tough. Many of those I work with when they experience this roller coaster of emotions they judge them. They say things like, “I need to be strong, I’m managing people,” “If I break down what will people think of me,” “you know I can be vulnerable now because many people are.” I had one client say to me that she felt like she was in a therapy session with a direct report when they were talking about how she was feeling about self-isolating.
See more in the video below…
If we are going to shift performance, then one of the accesses is to providing an environment for people to express truly the emotions and feelings they are experiencing. As leaders your role is to assist your team in articulating those emotions clearly and helping them find ways for themselves to self-regulate. I call this process of managing feelings, creating ways to reframe, refocus and realign, your perspective.
I have one client who was incredibly frustrated by the self-isolation with her family. The level of school work was overwhelming and one child was doing the work, one was overdoing and one not doing much. Managing her team was seemingly easy, managing her family was most challenging. She decided that self-isolating with her family was going to be a way to discover a new pathway of having a renewed relationship with her young children. She created an intention with her children of having more compassion and empathy. She refocused on speaking to her children about their schoolwork in ways that were more compassionate and heart centered rather than leading like a drill sergeant. She realigned even her tone to be less harsh and direct.
When we spoke about how to apply this to further lead her team she said – first I can really facilitate them sharing how they truly feel and allow that to fill the space of our 1-1 sessions for a bit rather than diving into work. As a result, her employees felt more heard, valued and even a few moved from negative to more positive self-talk.
Give yourself an opportunity especially now to pause and allow yourself to name and claim your emotional state. This doesn’t mean that you will implode. It means by naming it then you can identify the actions to take to move from here just like my client who moved from frustration into empathy and compassion and found the access to new actions for herself. If you are interested in digging deeper in what we talked about, the best next step is to fill out our Needs Assessment. I’ll be happy to connect with you. And remember…Better Leaders, Better People, Better Results.
