The Quentin Hafner Podcast

In today's episode, we’re having a conversation with a special friend of mine, Chris Williams, LMFT.  Chris is a leadership consultant, a relationship therapist, and the owner of a group counseling practice in Orange County, CA.

Chris specializes in relational and emotional health working with leaders all across the country. 

 
Here are a few of the ideas we chat about in this show: 

**Now more than ever, this is when being a leader is tough.  You have a group of people depending on you to “have it all together” in some ways, but you might not feel like you have it all together at all. You might be really overwhelmed too. What are you seeing with the leaders you work with right now in how they’re generally handling all of this emotionally?

**As the cliché goes, it can be lonely at the top.  Many leaders don’t have an outlet to be honest with their own emotional experience.  How should leaders process their emotions during this time, yet balance the need to be seen by the people they lead as not falling apart?

**If leaders adopt the mentality of “staying strong” by denying & suppressing their emotions right now, why could that be a bad thing and what is the potential hazards of not being honest with yourself.  (And conversely, what is the upside of being able to process your emotional experience right now?)

**Where are the safe places for leaders to really experience their emotions right now?

**What is the ONE piece of advice you would give to any leader right now that is feeling overwhelmed by the prospects of the future, but also needs to demonstrate leadership capabilities to their team?

Chris can be reached at:  https://www.renovaricounseling.com/chris-williams

In this quick 13-minute episode, I share a story about a friend of mine who's daughter is out of state in college quarantined in her dorm room and why she prefers to stay there as opposed to coming home to the safety of her family.

This story is applicable for any of us who are parents, or if we oversee people in a leadership role in our jobs.  I explain why hardship is a necessary ingredient to develop our character, our resilience, and our self-worth as people and how we can all benefit to look at the COVID-19 crisis through a lens of personal development.

I hope you enjoy this short episode!

If you’re married, then might have experienced a challenging time over the last few months with the advancement of COVID-19.  For many people, the COVID-19 experience has become a traumatic event triggering heightened emotional stress responses, i.e., flight & flight.  Whenever couples are experiencing fight & flight stress responses in a relationship, it can feel emotionally unsafe and wildly conflictual.

A fellow therapist friend, Kerry McCoy, LMFT, and I did a 45-minute podcast on how the worldwide collective traumatic experience of COVID-19 is impacting marriages and what we can do to stay connected to our spouse during this challenging time. We talked about the different responses people have to trauma and how this might show up in marriage.  

Kerry and I both practice a type of therapy called Emotionally Focused Therapy with couples and its main focus is to increase the security and sense of safety in relationships; something that is needed more than ever now.

At the end of the podcast, we leave you with 5 Connecting Questions During COVID-19 you can use to engage your spouse in a conversation around how this collective trauma may be impacting them, and how you can get re-connected and find your emotional footing.

Intro music by:
"Beauty Flow" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/