Emotional Leadership Through Uncertainty

Photo by Colton Duke on Unsplash

We often think of leadership as how we show up at work and inspire a team towards a common organization goal. Yet we can show up as leaders in all aspects of our lives. Emotional leadership is how we we work through our emotions — negative, positive and all the nuances in between — and continue to show up as leaders for everyone around us. It helps us understand stress & anxiety and better manage those emotions. It leverages our curiosity, enthusiasm, and confidence to inspire others.

Emotional leadership is especially needed as we navigate through uncertainty and complexity. This year of 2020 has been particularly challenging. We’re facing multiple global crises on an unimaginable level — COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, climate change affecting severe wildfires in the American west, and this week’s U.S. Presidential election. This is a year of change where all the best laid plans get thrust out the window. We need emotional leadership more than ever.

Emotional leadership model

Leadership Starts with Me

Emotional leadership is inside-out. It starts with understanding and naming the complex roller coaster of emotions that’s within each of us. We often numb ourselves to emotions. When we feel a negative emotion—the most common ones being anger, fear, sadness, loneliness— we often suppress it and try to mask these emotions with distractions. I’ve spent many hours doom-scrolling through news sources or social media. I also turn to desserts and sweets to make myself feel better. Most toxic, I’m sometimes unaware of my negativity and instead gripe or lash out at loved ones around me. We all have our familiar patterns of negativity and how we try to distract ourselves from them.

Instead, emotional leadership from the inside-out starts with naming the negative emotions and recognizing that they exist and can’t be suppressed. One way to work through them is to use Tara Brach’s RAIN (Recognize/Allow/Investigate/Nurture) method which includes a 20-minute guided meditation.

Emotional leadership recognizes that emotions are simply states of our being and that we cycle through as part of a normal process. I’ve felt intense fear and anxiety before stepping onto the stage for a keynote speech, and I often feel the emotion turning into excitement and confidence as I settle into the rhythm of the talk. I’ve had moments of intense joy as I watch my sleeping children which can then turn into immediate fear and wistfulness — When will I lose her to sulky teendom? Is she growing up too fast?

We can better manage our emotional leadership as we focus on three interactions with sources outside of ourselves.

Three Interactions

When this model is applied to the workplace, the three leadership interactions span Projects (individual contributor work that the leader does), People (the team(s) the leader manages), and Organization (the leader’s impact on the overall org). When pivoted towards emotional leadership, these three interactions become Projects, People, and Community. Each interaction can be targets of emotional leadership and also serve to fuel you.

1. Projects
   Creation—making things— is part of our human birthright. The art, carved spoon, or music that you produce doesn’t have to be “good.” Creation is the act of ingesting information, processing it and then producing a thing. The output could be words, a sketch, a photo or video, or simply a spoken idea put out into the world. The creation doesn’t need to be profound. It could be a meditative coloring page, baking cookies, or a simple chalk drawing on the pavement. The pure art of creation allows you to express and move emotions from the body into an external object. It triggers a less rational mindset that can focus difficult emotions, and is also a positive distraction. Getting into a state of flow around the creation is its own fuel.

2. People
   We crave and get energy from the connection of interacting with other people. Certain people are natural maximizers — being with them amplifies some of your emotions. Other people may be more difficult for you and sink you into emotional negativity. Choose which people you want to engage with to reflect your state of emotional leadership.

3. Community
   Larger than individual people is the community to which you belong. The community system of multiple people and their collective agreements is a place where emotional leadership can shine. We show up in a different way when we’re serving a community. Helping others is well-trodden path to mitigate personal difficult emotions. We serve as an emotional leader for the community when we model how we react to events in the world.

If these three interactions are ways to showcase our emotional leadership, three principles help with leading through the uncertainty.

Three Principles

1. Embrace Uncertainty

Uncertainty is a fact of life, especially demonstrated by everything happening around our first global pandemic. As humans, we crave certainty. We make plans and want to be able to follow-through on them. However, life and especially life in 2020 is uncertain. As I write this on November 5, two days after the U.S. elections, we don’t have a clear-cut answer for who won the Presidency. We face more unknowns and uncertainty. In the face of the unknown, you can choose a rational or an emotional coping mechanism:

• The rational mechanism is contingency planning for multiple options. Having a plan A, plan B, plan C, D, E, etc. This can be helpful as it provides alternatives when something prevents the first option from happening. However, it can be exhausting to create and manage all the options, especially if you need to sell them to the multiple others involved in the plan. Yet creating the options can provide a mental source of comfort.

• The emotional mechanism is surrendering to the uncertainty. This requires being able to hold two contradictory thoughts simultaneously in your mind—I am able to have a goal and a plan, and I’m equally OK if it doesn’t happen. There is a gift in both outcomes. Everything will be fine in both outcomes

Emotional leadership is learning to live with uncertainty. It’s being able to adapt to each context based on your current state of being.

2. Create White Space

White space is unstructured pieces of space and time in your life. It’s the blankness and openness in-between the scheduled, to-do items. Rather than packing the calendar with events for for each hour, week, weekend, or month , white space calls for having blank stretches of nothing. There is a structure with holding time for nothing in your calendar, and it takes discipline and flexibility to not fill it beforehand. Many of my clients create a half-day chunk in their weeks. I’ve seen that time used for self-care, personal reflection, or a time to plan out the next 3 months of the work roadmap. It’s valuable unstructured time to think & feel.

The other aspect of white space is letting go of self-imposed, fake deadlines. Sometimes we are so eager to get something done that we create an arbitrary deadline simply to make ourselves feel better. Instead, give yourself permission and space to not-decide or not-do something. The reflection time in the back of your head may get you to a better solution. Not forcing a deadline may get you to a better solution.

Emotional leadership is knowing what parts of your life and work could benefit from more white space.

3. Lead with Compassion

Finally emotional leadership thrives most with compassion. Compassion is a precursor to empathy and allows us to feel emotions, or passion, for the suffering of ourselves and others. Life is hard. Especially so in 2020 with these uncertain times. Emotional leadership starts with having compassion for ourselves. To call-out our own self-critic, and stop berating ourselves for not being enough. Having self-compassion makes it easier to feel for other people around us. Leading with compassion recognizes that we all are having a hard time with uncertainty, that we are all human and in this together.

Bottom-Line

I often use leadership models with corporate clients. In this uncertain week of the U.S. Presidential election, within this uncertain year of 2020, I needed to remind myself of how to practice emotional leadership through uncertainty. Leadership starts with me. It’s supported by the three interactions with Projects, People, and Community. Emotional leadership is lived through the three principles of Embrace Uncertainty, Create White Space, and Lead with Compassion.

This article is inspired by multiple leadership conversations with Jim Herman and builds off his leadership framework.