I'm Not Alone!

I was at a conference last week and one of the consistent comments I heard was, "It is so nice to know I am not alone!"  That got me thinking about leadership, isolation, and vulnerability.

Leadership

Let's be honest, leadership can feel very challenging. Sometimes that is a result of having to make tough decisions that impact other people. At other times it can be connected to the weight of expectations we feel from many different sources (people, the organization, decisions, responsibilities, the sheer volume of work, etc.). Regardless of the reasons, being a leader is hard work and can really require a significant amount of energy!

Isolation

I also know that leadership can feel lonely. Sometimes those tough decisions have very real implications on people and their work and lives.  It requires courage to lean in, but it can also produce those feelings of isolation. There is also a realistic amount of professional distance and healthy boundaries that are part of leading, and that can add to the loneliness.

Vulnerability

I heard one of the participants of the conference say, "Figuring out how to lead with vulnerability is critical to leading in a healthy way."  While this may seem contradictory to the previous idea about healthy boundaries, finding the right people and peers we can be vulnerable with, is absolutely essential to recognizing we aren't alone in our journey.  When we can open up and share with others in safe spaces, we quickly find that others are often experiencing the same things we are, and they were also feeling like they were the only ones going through it!

With all of this as background, the people I was with last week were all leaders. Some of them were at the top of their organizations, some of them were somewhere in the middle, but all of them were leaders, and all of them expressed a sense of loneliness and isolation in their lives. However, as we gathered together and began to open up with vulnerability, even if it was just with one or two others we felt safe enough to share with, almost everyone experienced a sense of feeling, "It is so nice to know I am not alone!"

Where in your life and leadership are you feeling isolated and alone? Who are the people that feel safe to you that you're willing to open up to with some vulnerability? How do you think taking some risks and sharing about your situation might help you both discover you aren't alone in what you are experiencing?

Here's to taking a risk and discovering we aren't alone this week!

Be Well,

Stephen

Center was created to support individuals and teams so they can live from their Purposeful Center.  We specialize in professional coaching and leadership development and we’d love to support you!  Click on our Services page to book a free consultation.

Anywhere!

I've been having a lot of conversations with people recently about feeling overwhelmed. I can relate! I actually think that feeling is a lot more common than we realize. We live under a constant barrage of information, our to-do lists never seem to go away, everything is getting more expensive, we just got that phone call, and we've got to finalize our plans for vacation so we can "relax!"

I also know that one of the side effects of feeling overwhelmed can be a sense of paralysis. Sometimes when things feel particularly daunting we may experience a sense of just being stuck, or frozen in place, and it almost feels impossible to even know where to begin.

I was chatting with a friend recently about this idea and they described it as the mountain. "I look at the mountain and it seems so big and overwhelming, I don't even know where to begin, so I just sit there and stare at it, and end up not doing anything!" Again, I can relate!

In those moments, one of the tools I use to help break me free from being frozen in place is to remind myself that Anywhere is a good place to begin! In other words, rather than trying to figure out what I should pull off the mountain first (and then getting more overwhelmed trying to figure out the best starting place, which leads to more paralysis!), if I just start Anywhere, I am actually making progress.  Then, once I am tackling something, that movement can help me make better decisions about what's next and what will be the most important thing to tackle next. It's like the movement of starting Anywhere on the mountain helps me figure out how to better prioritize the rest of the mountain, which begins to ease the feeling of being totally overwhelmed.

Do you ever have these feelings? What is your current mountain and is it causing you to be frozen in place? Would it help to just start Anywhere? Without really thinking about if it's the right thing, what could you pull off the mountain right now and get started on it? Would that help you figure out the rest? Could that be a small way to lessen the feeling of being totally overwhelmed?

Here's to starting Anywhere today!

Be Well,

Stephen

Center was created to support individuals and teams so they can live from their Purposeful Center.  We specialize in professional coaching and leadership development and we’d love to support you!  Click on our Services page to book a free consultation.

Healing

I am grateful to be back from some time away and sharing some thoughts with you again this week, but I must admit, I have had a hard time figuring out what I wanted to write, which is why this is just now coming to you on a Thursday!

Part of it is because I have been confronted with a lot of ups and downs of life that just seem to be connected to the complexity of our world.  Some of it is probably related to the fact that I tried to unplug from social media, news, etc. while I was gone, and now the firehose of non-stop information is flowing again (maybe we'll think about that in another message!). Regardless of the source, I have felt a bit overwhelmed to be honest. 

Then I stumbled across these words this morning, and I thought, "That is exactly what I want to share this week!"  I hope these words ring as true in your heart today as they have in mine!

This world will break your heart. There’s enough sorrow to go around and for everyone to have seconds. 

But this world has a thousand forms of medicine too. 

I’ve yet to find healing in: 

Self-pity, isolation, pretending I am not hurting, comparison, hardening myself, standing in judgment (although it sure feels good). 

But I have found it in: 

Eye contact with another person who is in a tender place, the rare moments I stop filling in the blank about another person, compassion toward myself and others, remaining open hearted in moments I want to shut down, … using my pain to see it in others rather than only in myself. *

Here's to being someone who is working to bring Healing into the world!

Be Well,

Stephen

* Nadia Bolz-Weber, “Humans Are Inconveniently Complex,” The Corners (blog), March 11, 2024.

Nadia is one of my favorite authors and I continue to be challenged by the beautiful way she sees the world in it's full complexity!

Center was created to support individuals and teams so they can live from their Purposeful Center.  We specialize in professional coaching and leadership development and we’d love to support you!  Click on our Services page to book a free consultation.