Leading well despite the uncertainty and discomfort

As a leader of a team, and someone who works with leaders to help them stay emotionally well, I’ve witnessed how uncertainty and discomfort can be difficult to handle for leaders – especially during a global crisis. But I’ve also seen how simple skills and strategies can help us lead effectively while managing difficult thoughts and unpleasant emotions and still showing up for our teams with optimism and compassion. 

Now more than ever, leaders are working hard to handle the adversity and uncertainty while trying to keep their mental and physical health steady. They have to make risky decisions in a very limited time. Employee jobs, physical health, and mental wellbeing are at stake. They’re focusing on tomorrow while trying to react to the immediate challenges and fixing daily crisis situations. They need to take care of themselves, their teams, and their loved ones, all at the same time.

Trust me; it’s only human to feel a range of unpleasant and difficult emotions when things are tough. There is nothing wrong with you if, as a leader, you feel sad, angry, frustrated, or guilty from time to time. These feelings are real and valid, and being a leader definitely doesn’t make you less human.

What really matters is how you relate to your difficult inner experiences. How do you, for example, respond to a situation or a person when you feel upset or disappointed? What do you do with your anger? How do you act when you have such thoughts as “I won’t be able to solve this problem”, “I’m an incompetent leader, or “They don’t like me”? When you’re anxious or worried, how do you show up for your team?

What most of us have been taught about what to do with such difficult inner experiences is either to push the ‘bad’ emotions away or to control them, to avoid or fix the difficult thoughts, or to run away from our memories. Unfortunately, even if they might give some momentary relief, these solutions are not effective in the long run. For example, a leader I’ve worked with constantly distracted herself with work because she felt anxious due to the uncertainty about her team members’ job security. However, because she pushed her feelings away by distraction, she wasn’t able to do what she actually wanted to do: get clear answers from more senior leaders, and have compassionate conversations with her team to listen to their fears and concerns. The struggle with her emotions took her away from her values and created a tense environment among the team.

Leaders need more effective ways of dealing with their inner experiences, which can help them respond to situations more flexibly. Psychological flexibility skills can allow leaders to focus on the most important matters because, through these skills, they can have a better relationship with whatever they are experiencing internally. These skills are based on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and are not only powerful in helping us maintain our emotional and physical health, but also in having better relationships with others (Bond et al., 2006). I’ll discuss some of these skills and how you, as a leader, can use them in your professional life.

Stop the struggle with your inner experiences

Do you ever find yourself trying to control what you’re feeling or fixing them? Does any of the following sound familiar?  “I shouldn’t feel angry”, “Let me hide my sadness”, “I should stop worrying” “Feeling guilty is bad.” 

As a leader, you might find yourself in very stressful situations where you need to make risky decisions which will affect the lives of many people. The pandemic, as we all know, has created one of the biggest uncertainties in many respects, as well as situations that are quite sensitive and hard to handle. For example, leaders deal with diminishing team morale, grieving employees, letting some staff go, and creating a calm space for everyone. Like everyone else, you will feel overwhelmed, afraid, frustrated, angry, or sad at times. When people experience such difficult emotions, they might have a tendency to try to control or fix them. The thing is, control of inner experiences is a trap and will make you ignore what really matters to you, your team, and your organisation.

What do you mean by control strategy?

A few examples come to mind; constantly distracting yourself in order not to feel anxiety or sadness, procrastinating your tasks or conversations with others, constantly avoiding certain situations where you know you will feel uncomfortable, comfort eating, overthinking or overanalysing, endless scrolling of your social media feed…We will, for sure, use some of these strategies at times but, if they become habitual, they won’t let us maintain a healthy emotional life and they will start preventing us from doing the things that we want to do.

However, if you let go of the struggle with your emotions and your thoughts, you can create more room and space for yourself to deal with what really matters the most. A constant battle with your inner experiences will drain your energy and further frustrate you. On the other hand, if you can take a step back, and become mindful of what you are feeling or thinking without fighting them, you can create time and space to make better decisions which are aligned with what you care about. Control strategies are okay only if you use them in moderation, and only if using them won’t stop you from doing the things you value in life.   

If you find yourself using control strategies to manage your emotions or difficult thoughts, ask yourself the following:

• Is my control strategy becoming habitual?

• Am I using this strategy to escape unpleasant feelings?

• Can this strategy be creating more problems?

• Does it prevent me from engaging with my team?

• Is it preventing me from doing meaningful things? 

Good leadership doesn’t mean that you will put your personal experiences away. Compartmentalising your emotions can limit the actions that you need and want to take. It will also leave you exhausted and affect your mental and physical health. Letting ourselves feel a range of emotions, no matter how unpleasant they are and without defending against them, helps us take the most appropriate actions and feel less anxious.

When you feel unpleasant emotions in difficult situations, rather than wasting time trying to fix or change them, notice what you’re feeling and remember that our internal experiences do not have to be changed prior to any action or response. That means, you can act in a way that is in line with your values despite those experiences that are painful. Emotions and thoughts come and go; they are temporary. You can have them and still do what you want to do if you approach them as experiences to be processed rather than as threats to be avoided or eliminated, or problems to be fixed.

Open up to discomfort

I worked with a start-up founder who had difficulty managing his anxiety in uncomfortable situations. One of these situations he had to face was talking to an employee who was dealing with loss. He feared that he would say something that would make his employee upset. He wanted to show his compassion and offer support, but he was too anxious to do that. In order ‘not to feel’ anxiety (i.e. to avoid or fix his anxiety), he avoided the situation and the conversation he wanted to have with his employee. Even though this gave him some momentary relief, he felt more anxious in the long run and failed to manifest what he valued.  

Distress and discomfort are inevitable human experiences, and they are not inherently problematic. They themselves do not interfere with wellbeing. What causes pain and suffering is our unhealthy and unhelpful attempts to get rid of or avoid distress, and the lack of ability in being comfortable with discomfort. Instead of engaging in activities that can satisfy us and give meaning to our lives, we choose to waste our time avoiding the uncomfortable. 

It might sound counterintuitive, but the ability to accept pain actually reduces the level of distress (McCracken et al., 2013). We can learn to focus on what may be the best for the long-term, rather than choosing the momentary satisfaction provided by avoiding discomfort. You might not like the guilt, disappointment, or sadness, but you can still become willing to feel them. You might not want to think that the world is not fair, but you can still make room for that thought.

That start-up founder I’ve worked with learned to stop the struggle with his anxiety and open up some room for the discomfort he felt about the situation. We worked on several skills around acceptance. The first step is becoming aware and pausing to fully notice whatever you’re feeling or experiencing. Is that sadness or fear? Is that warmness in your body, or tightness in your chest? Whatever you’re experiencing, just pause for a moment and notice it, and then name it. Simply labelling it can decrease the intensity of the experience. Then, just try to observe, whether it’s an emotion, a thought you’re not comfortable with, or a feeling in your body. Rather than being any of those things, see them as other separate, concrete entities. Look at them from a distance; this will give you the opportunity to put a space between yourself and your difficult experiences. You will get to see that the unpleasant experiences can be around you, somewhere, but you can still do what you want to do.

“Yes, I’m feeling some fear, I feel this heaviness on my head. But, I can still have that conversation, because that’s what I care about.”

 We might not be able to change certain circumstances, but we can open ourselves up to them and become willing towards them. This is also about finding meaning out of pain and discomfort (Kashdan & Rottenberg, 2010). There is a lot we can learn if we can practice curiosity rather than judgment or avoidance, and we can turn the discomfort into something we can grow from.

Take perspective

It’s very easy to fall into the trap of not being able to see things clearly. Sometimes we need to clean our glasses and look outside one more time. That’s the way we notice how different things can look depending on our perspective.

Perspective taking can allow you to shift your perspective according to the demands of the situation and to respond more flexibly. Research shows that perspective taking can help people deal with difficult thoughts, accept discomfort, and become more compassionate towards themselves (Boland et al., 2021). For example, you might perceive yourself quite negatively as a leader, and make harsh judgments about who you are, thinking that you’re not good enough. You might also think that other people view you negatively. At other times, you might be beating yourself up for not finding a solution to an important problem at work.

With perspective taking, you step outside of yourself and start looking at things with a curious and open mind, and from a distance. You get to see that you might be in pain and in need of some compassion. You discover that there might be other ways of thinking about someone or something. You realise that you can perceive others in a more flexible way and respond in a kind way even though they create discomfort for you.  

In order to practice perspective taking, the following questions can be extremely useful:

• Is there another way to think about this situation?

• What is it that I need to understand about this event?

• What would my future self tell me?

• What would he/she do in this situation?

• What would I say to a friend who was in a similar situation?

Remind yourself your values

In order to take action that will satisfy you and your team, you need to know where you’re going and why. That is, you need to know your core values. If you start your trip without studying the map, you might get lost, and become tired, frustrated, and annoyed, which might make you act on those emotions and respond in ineffective ways.

Values are about qualities that define what kind of a person we want to be, and what sort of relationships we want to have. It’s about what we want to stand for. As a leader, it’s very important that you identify your own core values to create your journey and how you want to show up. When you’re not clear about your values, you act in ways that you do not actually care about, or you later regret. Living in alignment with your values doesn’t guarantee that you’ll necessarily feel comfortable, or everything will turn out to be in line with your expectations. But, you will know that you’re on the right track as a leader, and even though you may stumble from time to time, you’ll be experiencing a richer, and more meaningful life that is congruent with the person you want to be.

Such questions can be helpful in identifying values:

• What kind of a leader do I want to be?

• What do I want to stand for as a leader?

• What qualities do I want to bring to my leadership?

• How would I like to act when I am with my team?

• How can I make the lives of others better?

Values help leaders take action even in the face of uncertainty and adversity. They also allow us to become able to accept inner experiences because values are the reason we are being willing to feel those difficult emotions or have those unpleasant thoughts. Instead of struggling with your experience, or avoiding it, you can accept it and take action despite its existence, because you have a journey, and you need to take action. There will be discomfort and pain, but at least you know that you’re going where you want to go.

We don’t regularly give ourselves the space to think about what really matters to us, and what our core values are. Set aside time in your life to regularly visit your values.

Show up with Compassion

Leadership is equated with being tough, strict, and even harsh. That means that a leader usually doesn’t show their feelings, or readily be vulnerable. However, good leadership requires that you act in ways that are in the best interests of others, your organisation, and yourself. It also requires acting in ways that are in line with your values, no matter what the situation demands. Being too strict and showing no emotions might sound like real leadership, but research shows that compassionate leadership, and being vulnerable from time to time, can create more engagement amongst your team, facilitate wellbeing, and decrease intent to turnover (Shuck et al., 2019). As a result, your team members begin to express themselves more freely and discuss how they feel. The act of compassion by leaders can also encourage employees to act compassionately towards others, too. This can create positive work cultures, and help people handle hard times better.

Compassion is about seeing another person’s suffering and wanting to relieve this suffering. That is, you not only see that your employee is having a tough time, you are also motivated to help them, and you take action to relieve the pain. Perhaps you ask them to take some days off, give some emotional support, or you delegate some of their work to others.

Compassionate leaders can ease people’s pain, especially during times of collective pain, with small acts, which can make people feel genuinely cared for. Don’t be afraid to lead with compassion. 

The Takeaway

A great leader will neither run away from uncertainty, nor their difficult inner experiences that come with uncertainty. Rather, they will develop a different relationship with them. They will also acknowledge that they are human who has limitations and vulnerabilities and cannot make everything certain. They will do their best to help their teams and organisations to deal with uncertainties and challenges, but they will realise that they don’t have total control to create certainty.

Psychological flexibility skills can help leaders become more aware and accepting of their inner experiences, while shifting their attention and actions towards what’s important and within their control. Regular practice of such skills will not only help you maintain your mental health, but also become a much better leader.

References

Bond, F. W., Hayes, S. C., & Barnes-Holmes, D. (2006). Psychological flexibility, ACT, and organizational behavior. Journal of Organizational Behavior Management, 26(1-2), 25-54.

Boland, L., Campbell, D., Fazekas, M., Kitagawa, W., MacIver, L., Rzeczkowska, K., & Gillanders, D. (2021). An experimental investigation of the effects of perspective-taking on emotional discomfort, cognitive fusion and self-compassion. Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science.

Kashdan, T. B., & Rottenberg, J. (2010). Psychological flexibility as a fundamental aspect of health. Clinical psychology review, 30(7), 865-878.

McCracken, L. M., Sato, A., & Taylor, G. J. (2013). A trial of a brief group-based form of acceptance   and commitment therapy (ACT) for chronic pain in general practice: pilot outcome and   process results. The Journal of Pain, 14(11), 1398-1406.

Shuck, B., Alagaraja, M., Immekus, J., Cumberland, D., & Honeycutt‐Elliott, M. (2019). Does compassion matter in leadership? A two‐stage sequential equal status mixed method exploratory study of compassionate leader behavior and connections to performance in human resource development. Human Resource Development Quarterly, 30(4), 537-564.