Have you found yourself more stressed, tired, overwhelmed and/or irritable than you’d like to be? Have you felt like your capacity and/or abilities aren’t up to the leadership challenges you face? If so, it’s not all on you. The levels of VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) in our workplaces, personal spaces and the world continue to rise. Fortunately, there are ways you can tame the stressors of a VUCA world and harness your power skills to become a more effective leader.

This is part one of a two part series. This part focuses on activities that can help us navigate our stressors and regulate ourselves in preparation to access our “power skills”. We’ll dig into honing those power skills in part two. Let’s get started.

The Impact of Stress on Leadership

I’m betting you know quite a lot about stress. You’ve read about it, talked about it, and taken lots of steps to navigate it in your own life. But it’s also likely that in the midst of all the busy and the moments you feel flooded, overwhelmed, exhausted or apathetic, you can forget or deprioritize what you know. This can leave you neglecting or missing the transitions needed to access your power skills when they are most crucial.

When we are stressed, our ability to think clearly, to stay calm at our core and to remain empathetic and composed in our interactions, can almost vanish. This can have a big impact on our ability to access our highest cognitive functions (you know, the place where all of our empathy, composure, logic and clear thinking lives?) And when we’re in that place — with our prefrontal cortex pushed offline — our level of leadership effectiveness dwindles.

But, when leaders are able to navigate stressed out minds and bodies in healthy ways, we increase our capacity to access our “power skills”. And the more we help our bodies and minds navigate towards a feeling of safety and calm, the less stressed we tend to feel and the greater our capacity to perform well in the face of ever-growing complexities and uncertainties becomes.

Checking In with Yourself

To get in touch with stress triggers and access power skills, we can begin by pausing and reflecting. Depending on what’s going on for you right now and how much VUCA you’re feeling, this might be uncomfortable – and that’s okay. Give it a try and see how it feels for you. At any time if you feel too uncomfortable, it’s okay to stop.

Take a deep breath to get centred. Take a couple more breaths if needed.

When you’re ready, recall a situation that causes you, or has caused you, stress.

Once you have your situation in your mind, explore a little deeper. Recall the reaction you had to experiencing this situation. What did you think about it? What did you do? How did you react?

Recall what happened after the incident? Did you “bounce back” quickly and go on to have a great, productive day, where you accomplished all of the most important things in your personal and professional life? Or were you a bit more “sluggish”, feeling stalled and stumped. Maybe you distracted yourself or numbed out. Maybe you avoided dealing with the situation and it festered.

Take a moment to reflect on how your mind responded.

Tuning Into the Stress

Explore how your body reacted. Where do you feel that stress in your body? Your breath changing? Numbness? Pain? Getting in touch with what your body is feeling is such an important – yet often neglected – part of accessing your power skills. When we don’t acknowledge, and work to soothe, the way our body feels in response to stressors, we have less access to generate power skill behaviours.

Now, concentrate on that sensation you felt in your body. Was it tightness in your throat or stomach? Stiffness or soreness in your back, your neck or your shoulders? Tingling or numbness in your hands or feet, or maybe it was something else, like an ache in your hips? Here’s one thing you can do in the moment

If you can, touch that part of your body. Give it a little pressure. Allow yourself a moment to feel familiar with it.

Allow yourself to take 1-5 deep breaths while feeling connected to that part of your body.

When you’re ready, give that part of your body a gentle movement. Whatever feels right to you – perhaps a gentle shaking of your hands, rolling your ankles, stretching your neck, rolling your shoulders. Or just continuing with the light pressure.

How is that stress feeling now? By checking into the thoughts and feelings of our stress we have consciously created space to take in some new learning around power skills.

These mindful mind and body practices can be helpful to regulate your stress and to prime you for harnessing your power skills in part two of this series. Give them a try and see how they make you feel during your practice and after. If you’d benefit from having a thought partner with you on this journey just reach out to me, Crystal Henrickson, to explore whether a coach could improve your ability to hone your skills.