You may have read my missive a few weeks back about leaders’ important job of holding space and carrying emotional burden. In reality, I think the most important job of leaders are 3 things: To practice self-care, to spend time alone arriving to a deep conviction of their vision, and to hold emotional space for their people.

I could go on and on about the first two, but it’s the last one that has been coming up a lot in my coaching conversations so I’ll spend some more time there.

Tantrums, Teenagers & Parenting Ourselves

It is wild (and also, not surprising) to know how many parallels there are between good parenting advice and the consultations I offer to leaders I coach. One thing that is currently happening for my 3 year old, Maisie, is she’s becoming more aware of her body and her emotions. During this developmental phase, she doesn’t have the capacity to regulate them. Apparently, some version of this will keep going until they are in their mid-20s, when their prefrontal cortex is fully developed. No wonder teenagers are dramatic sometimes 😆!  Everything can feel intense, almost immediately. Many emotional experiences can still feel new for Maisie and her nervous system has never dealt with it before. Therefore, she is reactive. When she feels anger, her whole body acts out; and when she is sad, her whole body collapses. There is no medium and it seems like everything is extreme. Her emotions will become her whole reality.

It’s during these moments that parents are invited to sit with the child’s feelings and hold space. According to child psychologist, Dr. Siggie Cohen (@dr.siggie IG), a tantrum has three parts: a beginning, a middle and an end. She encourages parents to allow the child the space to complete the whole cycle for themselves. They began the tantrum and they must be given space to own it and eventually, end it. The healthiest thing we can do for the child is to hold that space for them and allow them the time to end it.

There is another part to this that’s not quite explicit in the parenting books. What they don’t clearly say in the manual is to the extent that we hold space for our kiddos is the extent that we’ve held that space for ourselves. The question we are asked then is,

Do we take time to go within, during our most difficult moments, and hold our hearts the way that we’d want to hold our child’s? Do we take the time to learn how to parent ourselves?

From my experience, if we don’t do this work for ourselves, we’re not quite set up to go into the various arenas of our lives and do it for others.

You don’t have to have children to be invited to go into this inner work. It’s likely that in some part of your life, it is already necessary for you to hold space. It might be for your partner, your siblings, your direct reports or your colleagues. If you spend significant time with any human, you will be invited to hold space.

Training Our Nervous System

So then the invitation is to train your nervous system to hold space for yourself first. This is essentially what meditation is. It’s the training and preparing of your nervous system to be with hard things. So when the hard things do come up, you’ve already trained yourself to be with it, without being consumed by it.

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For example, the trap that I’ve always fallen into my whole life is feelings of limitation. I’ll come across this feeling when I’m not happy about my job, my bank account, my marriage, my ability to find free time, my inability to watch the whole basketball game, my inability to get away from my kids — it really doesn’t matter what the external circumstances are; if I’m not taking care of myself, I’ll make up that something in my external reality is trapping me.

What meditation has done is it’s allowed me to focus my attention inward with gentleness and kindness. My previous way of being would be to escape, to avoid or to deny the feelings of being trapped. By cultivating mindfulness, I’ve trained myself to slow down and go within. I can be with the feelings that come up. I can sit with them and I can just let them be. I can hold my inner child. Just like Maisie’s tantrums, my cycle has a beginning, a middle and an end. When I give myself space, the cycle will complete itself. I can feel into the depths of my pain or my loneliness. I can let the feelings be a part of my reality and I’ve learned not to let them consume me.

I’ve discovered that as I’ve expanded my capacity to do this for myself, I have become more generous and compassionate with others when they’re going through something challenging. I can just be with them. I’ve done this for execs, founders of multi-million dollar startups, ex-Olympians, my closest friends, my kids and my loving wife. The same thing always happens when they are given the space to complete the cycle: they come back to a regulated state of being and they become more confident in solving whatever problem was in front of them.

So my dear friends, my heartfelt invitation is this: Go inward. Build the capacity to deepen your awareness of what’s happening inside you. Cultivate your ability to just sit with it all, without judgement or wanting to repair. Just sit. You can train your nervous system to do this through silence, stillness and solitude. You can do it through meditation. It can be a super Zen meditation or it can be spending weekends at the beach. It could be taking walks in the morning before you work. It could be journaling or having a gratitude practice. It could be hiring a therapist to receive healing from your trauma. It could mean hiring a coach to mirror things back to you. My wife loves to take baths, sit in stillness in the backyard or go to acupuncture. Whatever it is, take that time for yourself, invest in yourself, and nourish yourself so you’re prepared for when the hard things come.

You’ll find that to the extent you cultivate this within yourself is the extent that you actually experience true success in your life.

This is the ongoing invitation for all of us and it’s a lifelong journey too. We are invited to go into the depths of ourselves and witness how beautiful the whole experience of our humanity can truly be. All of it. The good, the bad and everything in between.

Warning: The truth will set you free, but first it will sting.

But that’s the kind of sacrifice true freedom requires.

I believe in you. You can do this. You can be with hard things.And they won't destroy you.

Your freedom is waiting.

Fiercely loving you,

Jomar

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