4 Ways To Fortify Your Courage To Lead

The following is a guest piece by Shelly L. Francis.

Are you passionate about your work or cause, but trying to sustain yourself in the midst of heavy demands and the urgency you feel about making a difference?

It’s the question I found myself facing while recovering from a severe case of vertigo that laid me out flat. In the first week, I was barely thinking about anything.

During the second week, I had more time to reflect on what got me to that point. I felt like my inner teacher and inner ear conspired to stop me long enough for some honest self-assessment. I recalled the words of Vaclav Havel, “Someone who cannot move and live a normal life because he is pinned under a boulder has more time to think about his hopes than someone who is not trapped in this way.”

Vertigo forced me to stop doing everything else.

The urgency I had been feeling about my work had turned into a list of commitments and deadlines that were no longer feasible. The pace I was keeping of working long days and weekends also included dream-working on my book project, waking at 3 AM to write down my thoughts, waking up at 5:30 AM to catch the 7:00 AM ferry. I have said for a long time that creativity is my caffeine. I love being in the flow of writing.

But I didn’t realize that the crash after creative flow wasn’t just writer’s hangover. I wasn’t paying attention to too many clues because I was too busy being dutiful-obstinate about meeting deadlines and I didn’t consider the consequences of acting out my subconscious teeth-gritted mantra that “I’m going to do this if it kills me.”

Vertigo, that sense of the room spinning around, was asking me how off balanced I’d been lately. Of course, it was also asking me if I’d called the doctor yet, because ignoring physical symptoms is also a symptom of functional atheism.

Functional atheism is what Parker J. Palmer describes as one of the five shadows of leadership and it’s when we believe the world really can’t spin without us and nobody else exists to call on for help. We fall into the trap of believing we must be ever present and always capable, hiding our limits behind unrealistic affirmations that we have things under control.

He writes in “Let Your Life Speak“:

“Functional atheism [is] the belief that ultimate responsibility for everything rests with us. This is the unconscious, unexamined conviction that if anything decent is going to happen here, we are the ones who must make it happen.”

Feeling the urgency of making a difference—however you define that for your business, your employees, your customers, your community—can lead to fatigue and burnout if you aren’t careful to make time to care for your body, mind, emotions, and spirit. More than “self care,” it means care of true self.

As a leader you must be responsible, accountable and inspiring, but that’s neither effective nor efficient if it leads to your own self-destructive demise. Here are four ways you can fortify your courage to lead while staying wholehearted:

1. Replenish your true self
If you feel you’re at the end of your rope, or like your head is spinning with too much to do, try listening to your inner teacher. You might hear that it’s time to slow down, reassess due dates (quit calling them deadlines), be realistic about what you can do, take a break, go have fun, schedule time with good friends, or take a day off just for fun. When you love your work, it’s vital to trust that taking a break will help you regain your creative connection.

Self-care is more than care of our physical bodies. It’s important to replenish our energy with restorative activities that serve us deep down. Taking a respite, even an hour of some restorative activity, can help you recover and show up more fully.

2. Reconnect to your calling
What drives you to succeed? Reflect way back and remember what brought you to this point in your career? Why did you “fall in love” with your work in the first place? Ask yourself, what was the first step that took you in this direction? How does that fuel your vision and purpose today? It’s helpful to understand our own story, what got us here, the scars we carry, and what sustains us.

When we recognize what’s true with self-compassion, we can attend to what is unresolved. When you recognize what you’re feeling and what is happening internally, you can learn from it, process it and find your way through life with more courage.

3. Reflect on your interior condition
We care for true self when we listen to our emotions, our fears, those things we rarely speak out loud. By asking the right questions of ourselves about the underlying reasons for our soul-deep exhaustion, we can replenish our hearts for the ever-present challenges of being human.

That is how we build our resilience. It’s an ongoing practice to listen inwardly for those clues, not a one-time event. Self-awareness can grow when we make time for reflection. And it helps to have access to the nonjudgmental support of other people.

4. Relate by cultivating community
Where can you be yourself? Who are your people you can talk with in open and honest ways? Can you meet on a regular basis with the sole function to support each other’s life? Find a place to be listened to deeply and asked good questions, sometimes in a therapist relationship or at church, or in other ways. Look for places where it’s possible. When we risk letting people know us deeply, we may overcome isolation and gain a sense of belonging.

Fortifying your true self is an ongoing task, a way of living and leading with integrity. We often wait until something breaks rather than give ourselves a more preventive type of care. To live a conscious and most rewarding life, a practice of personal renewal must become habit. And that can result in more energy to bring renewal to the projects and places you care about most.

Shelly L. Francis is the author of a new book called “The Courage Way: Leading and Living with Integrity”. She wrote the book in her role as the marketing and communications director at the Center for Courage & Renewal, a nonprofit based in Seattle. To learn more, visit www.courageway.org.