Leaders who want to sustain healthy high-performance cultures, particularly in the aftermath of Covid, need to support their employees.
This guest post was written by Nelisha Wickremasinghe
Many of our problems in and beyond the workplace arise because our bodies and minds are over-exposed to a real or imagined threat.
In the last eighteen months, all of us have had plenty of exposure to threats in our experiences of the pandemic.
Leaders need to understand and regulate their threat response in order to stay centered when experiencing, for example, workload pressure, performance anxiety, ongoing disruptive global trends, team conflict, and rapid change.
Understanding how our emotional brain works can help us appreciate why we react in the way we do and how we can regulate our feelings and thoughts to take care of our wellbeing and to become more effective.
Our Emotional Brain
The purpose of our emotions is to motivate us to take action so that we can achieve the basic goals of survival, accumulation, and relationship.
The threat brain, our oldest motivation system, enables us to recognise and respond to danger. Drive brain motivates us to seek out pleasurable and rewarding experiences, such as accumulating, achieving, and winning.
A safe brain motivates us to rest, recover, and form relationships with others.
We need all three emotion systems working together to balance and regulate each other.
Unfortunately, many of us get caught in unhelpful or destructive habits of feeling, thinking, and behaving because our emotional systems are out of balance, and usually the cause is an overactive threat brain.
Our personal and social problems can be traced back to this overactivity, this is not surprising and it is not our fault.
From an early age, we are constantly exposed to images, advertising, and narratives that insist that looking better, getting a better job, consuming more, owning more possessions, and accumulating more money is the way to become secure, loved, admired, and happy.
This triggers our threat brain into thinking we are not good enough and our drive brain into thinking that we must try harder and harder. However, the good news is that we can manage our threat brain by the simple act of learning to be kind to ourselves.
Research shows that self-compassion can trigger neurological activity in our safe brain that regulates threat and helps us feel calm, think clearly and take effective action.
What is self-compassion?
Self-compassion is difficult because we confuse it with self-indulgence.
Self-indulgence means doing whatever we want, whenever we want without thought or concern for the potentially harmful effects of that indulgence.
In contrast, self-compassion starts with the premise that we are already capable, loveable, and good enough.
When we confuse the two, we think that if we are kind to ourselves we are being weak, lazy, non-achieving, selfish, permissive, excessive, pampering, spoiling, or undisciplined.
However, research shows that people who are self-compassionate are more motivated, healthy, realistic, generous, and productive than those who are not.
Self-compassion involves:
Recognising what is good for us, what we need as opposed to what we may want
A mindful approach to life means not getting caught up in the extremes of our emotions and experiences – be they joyful or painful. We notice our emotions, we engage with them but we don’t get entangled in them. Emotions come and they go if we allow them to.
Recognising that making mistakes, failing, feeling inadequate and uncertain are shared, and inevitable human experiences. When we truly understand this, we stop taking our faults and problems so seriously or personally.
Self-Compassionate as a Leader
Self-compassionate leaders are more likely to create compassionate cultures that sustain healthy, high performance.
Shame-Based leadership – Inner critic/threat brain emotions
Tends to condemn and punish
Punishes past errors and is often backward looking
Dr...
