Flexible leadership

Holding lightly in coaching performance

At a recent major incident training event, a long-serving member of the emergency services remarked how few retirements and multiple decades of career celebrations seem to happen these days.

A stark contrast to our experiences when first joining the service.

In discussion with others, some time was taken to explore how those few staff that continue to prevail manage to do so. Our consensus was that it related to how staff relate to their roles – how tightly wrapped up in them they are. Those who endure appear to have a very healthy relationship with their professional lives. Indeed, it seems that the lighter the grip the better.

Falling from well-being to illness

I have been very open about my own well-being struggles and wrote about my own journey on the wonderful St Emlyns site (here)

A personal reflection has been how tightly wrapped my personal and professional identities were. The impact of a professional challenge (psychological trauma) then had a disproportionate impact on my personal well-being – and health. This manifested visibly: my social media handle at the time was “paramedrusty” – a contraction of my profession with workplace nickname. The result was a life-threatening degree if mental ill health.

Gripping tightly (too tightly) can present a risk to our health and well-being. Of course, individuals vary greatly as to how tightly or loosely they may optimally grip such identities. There is also dynamism at play. At any given moment, the ability to grip lightly varies from many factors.

The principle holds true – there is an optimal degree of gripping onto something.

How tight for leadership superpowers?

Through my own journey back to health, development as a coach and growth as an educator, I keep coming back to the same conclusion – the lighter the better. No doubt there is “too light” (laissez-faire perhaps).

Lightness creates openness. It is the openness that drives the leadership superpower of deep listening. The depth can ultimately create insights – pure joy as well as real value to self & client.

So where can coaching support some lightness of being?

Five levels of coping – a coachable approach

In the first instance, let’s examine the management in the moment. We will explore the underpinnings in a subsequent blog.

There is a really useful tool whose origins are in the teaching of Buddhism – the five stages of calming afflictive (strong) emotions. These stages can be applied in differing levels of emotional distress.

The strongest of emotions are overwhelming. The coping strategy in this moment is recognition. In other words, identifying that there is an emotional tempest might be all we can do. This is not always simple – it is perfectly possible to be fully lost in the emotion with the energy of that emotion fully dictating our actions. Recognition – that self-awareness – is sometimes all we can do. Having recognition is better than its absence. This might just be noticing, nothing more than that. There are, however, other levels of coping that are possible as well as being more impactful on us and those around us.

At the next level, underpinned by recognition, is acceptance. Acceptance requires a degree of detachment from the emotion – this is where the lightness of grip starts to become important. With this initial, tiny increment of detachment comes some lightness of grip. They interplay of course. Acceptance can help create the conditions for us to be freed from the emotional state that has arisen. The alternative is for the experience to dictate our actions.

Acceptance of an experience opens the door to embracing it. To embrace an experience is to be able to be present with it – whilst still being recognising and accepting. Embracing an experience (consider it really really deep acceptance for now) is the first step in reducing the impact or intensity of that experience.

If we can embrace safely we may be able to look deeply at an experience – to understand it. Why has this emotion arisen, why has this experience shaped up this or that way?

At the highest level, we are able to generate insights – to understand patterns. To understand not just the first-order effects (what happens at first) but second and other (indirect effects). So too patterns may emerge with enlightenment

These levels can be coached through awareness and then scenario-based learning.

Coaching Lighter Touches

Simply saying “grip lighter” isn’t sufficient. If it were, we’d all already have it nailed & the conversation would be somewhere else.

Getting help – through coaching – is one of the ways to get better at this. Our education and cultures often do not quite set us up for success in this domain. It’s nuanced, there is both art & science in the paths to success.

Sometimes all we can do is hold on, and recognise the experience. Emotions can be so powerful at the moment that nothing more is possible. Unless we increase our skill in gripping less tightly: detaching.

In the next blog, we will look at some of the traits & behaviours that are in and around gripping lightly.