The level of anxiety we face worldwide is extreme and escalating due to a confluence of many complex issues. As a leader, you are the one people look to for clear direction, encouragement, and stability.
What Can I Learn About My Reactivity? The positive, healthy kind that keeps us alive and flourishing and hyperreactivity that can do us in. On the individual level, there are telltale signals of reactivity that can alert us that we are carrying around an unhealthy level of anxiety: a racing mind, tension in your neck
Communicating a Calm Presence Sometimes a simple change in how we communicate is all it takes to begin the process of calming an anxious system. One organization we worked with was experiencing a rise in both acute and chronic anxiety, and many employees (including some of the members of the senior team) were displaying reactive
Reactivity, Which We Call the Public Face of Anxiety The resilient leader is one who has learned to watch for subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) signs of reactivity in her/himself, and in the organization s/he leads. What do we mean by Reactivity On the individual level, here are some signals of reactivity that can alert us
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Fear is adaptive. It teaches us to be safe and avoid danger. Anxiety is maladaptive. It’s our brain being over active when we are short of actual facts.
Through Resilient Leadership certification I learned more about the Rational System and the Emotional System. I learned that we are generally unaware of chronic anxiety and so we tend to just react unconsciously to it in any Emotional System (think relationships.)
The amygdala triggers the fight, flight or freeze response, like slamming on your brakes to avoid a car accident. This anxiety response has passed down virtually unchanged from the earliest vertebrates on earth.
Leaders who act as step-down transformers understand this distinction and work to practice skillful inquiry rather than interrogation.
In these VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex Ambiguous) times, it is essential for a leader to embody a sense of urgency not anxiety in their presence. Here are some thoughts on what to do and what to avoid. Pick a few (maybe 3) from each list to work on right away. You will see and make a difference!
Chronic anxiety is always with us. Anxiety is not, in and of itself, either good or bad. It is a largely an unconscious state of mind that has its origin in the oldest part of the brain, sometimes called our “Lizard Brain.”
