It’s 8pm, you take another expresso, your heart rate increases, you tense your shoulders and you are ready for a few more hours of work to finish that client proposal… One thing that we often observe in senior executives is a habit of using adrenalin-based energy to drive results. Also when stepping into corporate offices, we often sense a collective adrenalin ‘vibe’ that is present. It’s almost like the office is ‘buzzing’.
How to manage your leadership auto-pilot?
“Perhaps you can change that font and color on that slide thereâ€, I hear myself telling one of my team members. There I went again, trying to add some marginal value and get an internal fix of being productive. Looking at the face of my colleague, I just realized that my ‘added value’ wasn’t worth it and I probably reduced his ownership and excitement about the presentation significantly. This is just one example, but all of us have developed certain tendencies and habits in our leadership that actually are not as useful for our career as they were at the moment that we programmed them into our personality.
How to stop your thoughts and emotions from dictating your life
A client in one of my TeamUp Triad Coaching sessions was dealing with anxiety, and he would often get caught up in anxious rumination listening to his mind saying things like “I’m going to lose my job, I will never get a new job, I’ll end up poorâ€. He became almost paralyzed by his thoughts, and he would have a very hard time getting out of his head once this started. We worked with mindfulness principles to change this; whenever he would start feeling the thoughts and anxiety come up, he would breathe deeply and try to look at the thoughts like they were clouds on the sky.