EP93: The Importance of Your Leadership Health
WHOLE PERSON HEALTH
Your leadership health is just as important as your physical health!
Enjoy!
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(The notes below are only a brief summary of what is discussed in the podcast. Be sure to listen to get all of the goodness! If you would like a full transcription of the episode, please send an email request to: angie@angie-robinson.com. We’d be happy to provide that!)
I see a chiropractor on the regular. I go every two weeks. When I first started going, many, many years ago, I needed an initial assessment. That meant some scans, an evaluation and a conversation with Dr. Tyler, who is my chiropractor, so he could really understand what my concerns were, what my lifestyle was and to understand kind of what was going on. It was a way to really dig into the why and the what. And now I go every two weeks for maintenance.
However, there are times when I just cannot wait the two weeks. For example, a few weeks ago, I traveled down to Florida for a conference and some fun. With that, I slept in a couple of different beds, had a couple of airplane rides, and walked around the Disney parks a lot. It was just out of my regular routine and I was doing a lot of things that was impacting my back - it did a number on me!
As a result, I needed some extra chiropractic care to help alleviate the pain that I was feeling when I got back from the trip. There was no way I was waiting the two weeks and so I did an extra session.
We do this a lot in the world of our health, don't we? Sometimes when something happens, we have to react - like if we get sick, we break a bone or we get injured. In those cases - we need to immediately go in and see a doctor, go to the hospital or urgent care. It’s a reaction to remedy the immediate need.
But we also do maintenance on our health. (Note: I realize that not everyone has the same approach to their health maintenance and not everyone has the same means and health care available to them. I'm talking about this is in very general terms).
For me, doing maintenance to my health includes things like seeing an eye doctor every year, the dentist two times a year, getting a mammogram once a year and a physical annually. It’s a proactive approach to maintaining health. We do this as a check-in to see if anything has changed or is there anything that is undiscovered that needs addressing. We might get some tests, run some labs done or images taken so we can get clarity on if something needs our attention. We can also maintain our mental health through therapy or other strategies.
It's similar in other areas of our life, too. We might get regular maintenance on our vehicles, like getting an oil change, the tire pressure checked and our brake pads replaced. If something happens where we pop a tire, we need to take it in for immediate repair.
Or it might be things around the home. Maybe it's maintenance of our yards like landscaping or mowing, or getting things ready for the winter. Maybe it's replacing our fire detectors in our home.
Leadership Health
I think that we should be doing the same for our leadership and/or entrepreneurship . That is where leadership coaching comes in. Leadership coaching, or any coaching for that matter, can be likened to those regular checkups and maintenance visits that we make to our various medical professions or other areas of our life. So just like I visit the eye doctor for my vision and a chiropractor for my spine and a dentist for my oral health, leadership coaching, or coaching in general, serves as a vital practice for maintaining and improving our leadership and entrepreneurship skills and abilities.
It's similar to how we consult these healthcare specialists to catch potential issues. Early leadership coaching can really help leaders identify and address challenges and blind spots and areas for growth before they become major problems. It's really a proactive approach that promotes self awareness, personal development and then just really continuing that improvement in our leadership and in our business. It's also a way to maintain and elevate our leadership impact and our effectiveness.
When we're going through coaching and we're learning some tools and we're understanding some strategies and we're learning about how our brain works, that is a way to really be proactive. So when new situations do come up, we might need a bigger adjustment. But we also already have some tools in our tool belt to deal with those.
When something comes up, something out of kilter, something that is out of our routine, something that we weren't expecting, we can address it with coaching versus just trying to muddle through and hope for the best. So just as our bodies and our health benefit from these specialized checkups and our vehicles and other areas of our life really do benefit from this maintenance, you can greatly benefit from coaching to enhance your performance, your communication, your decision making skills, your confidence, your ability to connect and influence the team members that you work with. All of these things can greatly be benefited by coaching.
Think of it as a professional maintenance that keeps you in top shape, ensuring that you lead with clarity and empathy and effectiveness, ultimately leading to a healthier and more successful organization and really, a more successful and healthier you. We are a whole person. Addressing or giving attention to your leadership health is part of the whole person approach. It's just as important as everything else.
I really want you to be the most impactful leader, business owner, CEO that you can be. To do that, I believe you need to be really, really clear on why you're doing this in the first place, be really clear on what you bring and be really clear about what is getting in your way. We can then implement strategies to get you there.
There are so many training programs and models and processes available to us in order to be really good leaders. But what I notice after working with hundreds of leaders and leading an HR function in organizations and going through this myself, is that there is often a gap. Because what's going to really make all of those tools and processes the most effective is what you think about them…what is going on in your brain and what you think about yourself. All of that is where there is a gap to becoming really the best leader that you can be, and quite frankly, for you to be the most satisfied you can be in the work that you're doing. Of course, is going to have a ripple effect into every other area of your life. So it's really that combination of the tools and the models and the processes and the academics and the mind management piece that makes the difference.
It's that self awareness component that fills the gap.
Trust me, you might think, you don't need something like this, and I get it. But there is always something that we can work on that we don't even typically know about.
What do you think?
What questions do you have? Do you see how your leadership health should get attention?
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