Top Tips for being a Leader and Understanding Your Employees

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
• Draws attention to problems, deficits and inadequacies
• Is motivated by a fear of failure
• Is contemptuous, critical, frustrated, easily disappointed
• Increases chances of giving up, withdrawing from others, defending attacking

Compassionate leadership – Self compassion/safe brain emotions

• Tries to improve and grow
• Is forgiving and forward looking
• Draws attention to strengths, capabilities and achievements
• Is motivated by the possibility of success
• Is encouraging, optimistic, hopeful, resilient
• Increases chances of engaging with others seeking and accepting support, developing trust, expressing vulnerability

Five Top tips for practicing self-compassion

We can practice self-compassion each day, and the more we do so the more it becomes a natural part of our life.

The result is we feel more confident, less anxious, have more energy, and are drawn towards lifestyle choices and relationships that are good for us.

1. Manage your inner critic

Write an appreciative letter to your inner critic and in the same letter suggest a temporary separation – just as you might if it were a partner you love but need to spend some time away from.

2. Compassionate Letter

Validate your feelings by writing a compassionate letter to yourself which understands and accepts a problem, difficulty, or unwanted situation.  D

escribe why you feel disappointed, hurt or angry and show sensitivity and awareness of where those feelings might have come from. Try to avoid including solutions, as often this is where your inner critic, acting as a ‘driver’, activates again.

3. Go Back to the Source

Identify key people who may have put you on the road to self-criticism. Bring these individuals to mind and compassionately ask:

• Did you really have my best interests at heart?
• What was it in your life that made you so critical?
• This is how your criticism helped me and this is how it hindered me.

4. Self-Soothing

When you notice that you are attacking yourself, make contact with your body by stroking, holding or embracing it. This might sound strange, but research indicates that self-soothing in this way can activate our safe brain emotions.

5. Daily Compassion Checklist

• Is what I am doing today what I need to be doing in order to care for myself and nurture my growth?
• Am I allowing myself to mindfully relate to my feelings without blocking or getting carried away by them?
• What is the tone of my self-talk today? Is it harsh or soft? Supportive or discouraging? Appreciative or condemning?

About The Author

Nelisha Wickremasinghe is a Psychologist, Associate Fellow, Oxford University, and author of Being with Others: Curses, spells, and scintillation (Triarchy Press), out now, priced £12.75 from Amazon.