THE fundamental Leadership Skill
Leadership Coaching Skills: Take care of yourself. The best leaders lead well because they know what it’s like to go ‘through it’. Those who have known loss, heartbreak, dark days or years, those who have turned to face the despair in their own lives in order to assimilate it and heal, these are the people who can support others in their transition. If you are one of these awesome people then please remember to attend to yourself and your own needs too. You cannot give away what you haven’t got’ is a saying that might resonates
So I shall share with you what my supervisor encourages in me. This is the notion of ‘aggressive self-care’. Actually, it means that we need to do for ourselves what we often suggest others do for themselves. Some of those are simple but if you are anything like me you might resist them greatly.
Leadership Coaching Skills: Take Care of Yourself
- Get off Social media early and go to bed snug with a book.
- Get out there and take exercise – it’s amazing how much shifting the ‘energy in motion’ = emotion can help us be free to receive the answers we need
- Get out in nature – literally, take your shoes off and stand on the earth and let others emotional baggage drain away. You will be carrying it but maybe not even aware of it until it leaves.
- Celebrate success: with your team or by yourself, get into the habit of routinely celebrating success and reflecting on what you have learned. This way you begin the next cycle of learning anew.
- Learn to receive: take compliments, breathe them in. Book a massage and let yourself be held in time and space. Create the spaces for ideas to come. Those liminal spaces where brilliance creeps in. Take time over food and allow the tastes and textures to stimulate and ground you. Breathe… be in the moment and I’d that takes someone holding space on your behalf then show up at yoga and still your mind, just for an hour. Give. Give. Give is unsustainable.