Transcription

• Speaker #0

  Welcome to Your Path to Success with Ruth Kearns-Volman, a podcast that was created to inspire, encourage and equip you on your leadership journey. And I'm here today with the second episode of my series on healthy leaders, healthy teams. And I'd like to start today by telling you a story. Some years ago, I was part of a small leadership team guiding our organisation through a difficult transition. It was a tough period, there was a lot to process and there was still real uncertainty about what was coming next. I remember walking into a meeting room where there was a group of middle leaders who were anxious. They were talking fast, they were going round and round with the same questions and worries. Now I wasn't trying to be cold. I was trying not to get pulled into the spiral of complaining and catastrophizing. So I said something like, now is not the time to panic. We need to stay calm and focus on what we can control so that we can be there for others. And I'll be honest, it landed badly. Not because it was wrong exactly, but because it came across as dismissive. A touch judgmental even. What I hadn't really appreciated was that they hadn't had the space yet to process what was happening for them. They weren't ready to be calm. And what they needed wasn't someone telling them to pull themselves together. Rather, they needed to feel that someone understood what they were going through and could see the challenges ahead as they could. I've never forgotten that moment because it taught me something very important about what calm means and what it looks like in leadership. Now when I talk about calm as a leadership quality I'm not talking about the absence of emotion, I'm not talking about being unaffected or detached from what's going on. Calm for me means that I have had the space to process my emotions enough that I can be present for others calmly. I've done enough of my own internal work that I'm not spreading my anxiety and reactivity into the room. And this matters because when we are calm, when we process our own emotions, we are able to create the conditions for others to speak. to think and to put things on the table without fear of judgment. We create space to work through uncertainty together. But when we're not calm, when we're reactive, anxious or overwhelmed, that spreads too. Emotions are contagious. And the people who depend on us read our signals constantly, often without realising it. What I want to say clearly here is that it's not about suppressing your emotions, it's about learning to regulate them. Learning to recognise when you're having a strong reaction and create a pause, literally and metaphorically, to process what is happening before you express it in a way that might not serve your team. That's a skill and it's learnable. Now some of us grew up in environments where you We learn to regulate and co-regulate our emotions where there was healthy expression or feeling. Others grew up in environments where it didn't feel safe to express emotion, to disagree or to make a mistake. I know because I am part of that second group and I still catch myself monitoring, monitoring the atmosphere in the room, facial expression or body language. Checking whether it's safe to speak up before I do. So if that's you, you are not alone. In fact, I came across a statistic recently that stopped me in my tracks. Only 35% of Americans say that as children, they knew a compassionate, non-judgmental adult. So if calm and compassion don't come naturally to you, it's not a character flaw. Most of us are leading without a map. We were never given the map for how to do this. But the good news is that it can be learned. And the good news is that catching yourself self-monitoring doesn't mean you need to act on it and silence what you have to say. Calm on its own is not enough though. In fact, calm without warmth or compassion can come across as we said as dismissive or even a bit judgmental especially to someone who isn't expecting it which brings me to the next part of the conversation calm alone is not enough and I say this because I've seen leaders who are extraordinarily calm and yet something is missing they're composed they're measured but their teams don't feel seen their teams don't know if they've really understood what the problem is. Their teams feel managed. Someone commented about this on a recent newsletter of mine because she had experienced leaders who were calm but showed very little empathy and others who were deeply empathetic but struggled to hold themselves together under pressure. Our aim is not to be one or the other. Our aim is to have calm and compassion together. I want to make a little distinction about what compassion is. It's not the same as empathy. Empathy is feeling what someone else feels and being moved by that. Compassion goes a step further. It is about what I do with that sense of empathy. It is about recognising what someone is going through and responding in a way that acknowledges their experience, that moves towards action, even if I can't fix the situation for them. So if I go back to that crisis room, the calm I was trying to offer was real, but I was missing compassion. What the people in that room needed to hear first was not stay calm, but something closer to, I understand this is hard. It makes sense that you're feeling that way and we will find our way through this together. That combination, I'm steady and I see you, I see what's going on, is what creates the psychological safety. It's what allows people to move from panic to processing. And it's what makes it possible for a team to function well under pressure. There is a phrase I love. We need to care and dare. It's the idea that real inspirational leadership requires both. Care that says I'm with you and dare that says I believe you can do this and I will challenge you to grow, to step outside your comfort zone. Compassion is not softness, it's the foundation of trust and without trust The dare, challenging, feedback, setting high standards lands as a threat rather than an invitation. So how can we actually do this? How can we cultivate calm and compassion, especially in the moments where everything in you wants to react? This is where I want to share something I use both personally and in my coaching work, and it connects back to the six C's framework I introduced in episode one of Healthy Leaders, Healthy Teams. Before I can hold space for others with calm and compassion, I need to be able to navigate my own emotions. I need to be a few steps ahead. And the six C's help me describe that pathway. So it starts with calm. Taking a breath, slowing down enough, creating a pause so I can notice what is happening in me. Then after calm, I move to compassion, starting with self-compassion. Because if I'm having a strong reaction, whether it may be fear or anger or disappointment or even shame, my first job is not to judge that reaction, but to acknowledge it, to be kind to myself. name it, compassion towards myself is what allows the emotion to exist and to start to evolve rather than staying stuck. Next comes curiosity. Once I've acknowledged the emotion, I can start to get interested in what is actually happening. What's going on here? What can I be telling myself? What might be true that I haven't considered? We can loosen the grip of the first story that we were telling ourselves about the situation and see what else might be possible. Next comes clarity. What do I actually want here? What matters most? This is where we reconnect to our intentions for the situation, for ourselves and for others, rather than our reaction to the situation. That leads naturally to connection, connecting to myself, connecting to others, connecting to the bigger picture of what is needed here in this situation. And it's where we can begin to reach out, to listen, to create the space for others to process as well. And finally, courage to act, to have the difficult conversation, to make the call, to give the feedback, to say the thing that needs to be said from a place of groundedness rather than reactivity. Now, I want to be honest here. Sometimes this process is quick, you know, a moment just to catch ourselves, to take a breath and we're back. But sometimes it takes longer. Sometimes the reaction is stronger. It may be more rooted in our history and our patterns, in something that runs deeper than the situation in front of us. It may be a pattern in the organisation, a pattern we're perceiving in others that is causing deep frustration. And we all have parts of ourselves that develop ways of responding to protect us in situations of uncertainty or threat. And sometimes those protectors show up in our leadership in ways we may not even fully understand yet. That is human. There's no meaning to it in the first instance. It's precisely the kind of work that we would go to in coaching to take it deeper. But at the practical level, The question is always, what do I need in order to process this so that I can be present there for others? Sometimes we need to ask for a break. Sometimes we need to go for a walk. Sometimes we need to journal or have a conversation with a trusted colleague. Though I would offer a gentle watch out here. Be careful of the person who simply agrees with you and reinforces your reaction. Make sure you find someone who has helps you move through the emotion and not loop and get into rumination. Someone who's going to help you get the curiosity and the clarity, not just validation of your initial response. So as we start to draw this episode to a close, let me bring this back to where we started. The key here is to cultivate calm and compassion. They are not opposites. They are not in competition. They're companions for one another. The calm comes from having done your own work and your own emotional processing. The compassion that says, I'm here, I see you, I see the situation, I'm with you, I'm listening and I believe that together we will find our way through this. Together, calm and compassion create a foundation for psychological safety. They create space for your team to think, to speak. process and to perform even in difficult moments. They make the dare possible. They make it possible to step outside the comfort zone, to give honest feedback, to challenge ourselves and others to grow because people know then that it comes from someone who genuinely cares. Before I close, I want to leave you with a couple of questions. In what situations do you most need to cultivate more calm? Where does anxiety or reactivity tend to show up for you as a leader? And where does compassion for yourself or for others need a little bit more space? What support or practice will you put in place to help you navigate your emotions when it counts? You don't have to answer all those questions now, but I just invite you to notice over the next few days where calm and compassion are naturally present in your leadership and where they might need a bit more attention. If this topic is resonating with you and you want to go deeper, that is exactly what coaching is for. And I'd really be happy to have a short conversation with you, a curiosity call where you share what it is you'd like to work on. And we can have a conversation about what it would look like to go forward. Or if you'd like a structured opportunity to reflect on the first half of the year and where you'd like to reorient things in the second half, I'm running a free 90-minute Mid-year guided reflection session on Friday, the 26th of June. Details are in the show notes. You can register via the link and I will send you details of how to join that session. Thank you for listening to Healthy Leaders, Healthy Team on the Your Path to Success podcast with Ruth Cones-Volman. Until next time, stay curious.