474: Emotionally fit leadership for product managers – with Dr. Emily Anhalt

How to become an emotionally fit product leader

We are talking about mental health for product managers and leaders—specifically product managers moving into leadership roles and those who are already in leadership roles. We’ll call this emotionally fit leadership.

Dr. Emily Anhalt is a psychologist, emotional fitness consultant, and the co-founder and Chief Clinical Officer of Coa, your gym for mental health. For the past fourteen years, Dr. Anhalt has been working clinically with executives, founders, and tech employees and has conducted extensive research with prominent psychologists and entrepreneurs about how leaders can improve their emotional fitness. She has collaborated with some of the fastest-growing tech companies in the world, including Google, Asana, Github, Unilever, and Bloomberg.

Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers

[2:55] What is emotional fitness?

Emotional fitness is an ongoing, proactive approach to working on your mental health. It’s the equivalent of going to the gym instead of waiting until something is wrong and then going to a doctor. With physical fitness, we know you should eat healthy, sleep enough, and exercise, but we don’t have a lot of clarity around what exactly you should do to build a proactive mental health practice.

I did a research study in which I interviewed 100 psychologists and 100 entrepreneurs and asked them, “How would you know if you were sitting across the table from an emotionally healthy leader? What does that look like? What does that feel like? What do they do? What do they not do?”

Out of this research came the seven traits of emotional fitness. If you practice them in an ongoing way, you will build stronger emotional fitness.

[4:03] Why is self-awareness important and what should we know about it?

Self-awareness is important because it’s hard to change something if you don’t know it exists. To improve ourselves, we first have to see what we’re good at and what needs improvement. This looks like having a sense of your emotions, strengths, struggles, biases, and triggers. The more you know about them, the more agency you have to make change.

Leaders set the ethos for their entire team, often their entire company. The more aware they are of themselves, the better it is for everyone. Leaders need to do this work to be aware of what they need to work on and aware of what they’re good at. Then it’s less likely that the leader’s struggles will leak out to the team.

[5:47] Why did you do this research study?

I did the interviews about nine years ago, before mental health had quite as much spotlight on it since COVID. It was clear to me that there is a huge population of people who are not struggling with some extreme diagnosable psychological disorder, but who still have a lot of things in their life they wish they could change. A lot of those people don’t think they deserve to go to therapy because they don’t think they’re broken enough. The idea that something has to be wrong with you to prioritize your mental health is a big problem.

I wanted to create some language that would normalize the idea that everyone should be thinking about their mental health. COVID legitimized the idea that none of us is going to see every tough thing coming. No matter how healthy we might be, we’re all going to be in a position at some point where we need to draw on our emotional resources to get through a tough time. The more work you can do proactively, the better a position you’ll be in when life throws you a curveball.

[7:54] What are some examples of self-awareness?

One piece of self-awareness might be saying, “I really like being an individual contributor. I don’t necessarily want to take on the task of telling other people how to do their work.