Positive Leaders Create Space in Hard Times
Over the last decade or two, you have grown accustomed to working hard!
You have impressed teammates and superiors with your willingness to take on complex business challenges. You have built plans and solved problems under pressure ...all while advancing your career and caring for your family!
Your Relationship with the 3Ps
Tenacious planning, pleasing and problem-solving have become automatic for you. They are now what you do best because they are what you have practiced the most.
But what do you do when your plans don’t go as planned?
(Be honest…)
More Isn’t Always Better
If you are like most hyper achievers, you get right back to work!
You wrestle your way through grumpiness and then you double down on the 3Ps. You start building an even better plan, one that will solve problems faster and *hopefully* please people more.
But choosing to intensify your efforts comes with significant costs! Not only does it put you on a path to burnout, it also undermines your ability to make sound decisions. According to a study from the University of Singapore, rising cortisol levels [due to increased stress] reduce your capacity for analytic reasoning and increase the likelihood of decision biases, making you susceptible to:
Tunnel vision
…causing you to bypasses critical information
Impulsiveness
…causing you to compromise outcomes and relationships
So when your plans don't go as planned, what else can you do?
A New P for Positive Leaders
One of the most powerful skills I help my clients practice is to intercept their first instincts so they can make more leader-like choices.
By far the simplest way you can do this is to PAUSE.
Pausing may sound simple, but for a planner, pleaser, and problem solver, pausing can feel very risky and very uncomfortable. Panicky thoughts inevitably arise:
Don’t you dare give up! If you do, things will only get worse.
But here’s a clarification for your inner critic: Pausing is not giving up.
Pausing is creating space in the midst of your activity and choosing to get curious about two things:
Your relationship to the problem
Your relationship with your people
When you slow down and get curious about these two things, you start to broaden your perspective. You increase your chances of seeing what’s really in the way - including any intangible obstacles your plan may not have accounted for like emotions, assumptions, confusion, and fatigue.
And the more you practice pausing in this way, the better you get at recognizing what is needed from you, as a leader.
This simple choice enables you to be more than a planner, pleaser and problem-solver. It enables you to see a bigger picture, so you can relate, adapt, and get things moving again.
