156: Leading With Self-Compassion
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This week’s episode is about a little spoken about topic in leadership; self-compassion. We also include the most common leadership challenges known to every leader and the most commonly made mistakes that every leader makes. This data from the Center for Creative Leadership.
First, let’s talk about self-compassion and what that means for us as humans and leaders. Self-compassion is simple a way of relating to ourselves kindly. It also includes 3 components; treating ourselves with kindness versus judgment, recognizing our common humanity and mindfulness or being with what “is” in the moment and turning towards ourselves in times of challenge. This is very different from self-esteem.
Self-esteem has several pitfalls that self-compassion does not, one of which is that self-compassion doesn’t ask us to judge ourselves as a good person or not. Subsequently, it also doesn’t feed into narcistic behavior either. Too much and too little self-esteem can be a problem obviously.
How do we build self-compassion? Well, this is closely related to mindfulness practices. Loving-kindness meditations are one example and looking toward our shared humanity is another. Maybe as a leader you think, “I’m the only one who struggles with this”. Well, data from about 165,000 leaders would probably have you think differently.
Here are the most common leadership challenges: Difficulty giving feedback, not making enough time to spend with your team to get to know them and listen to them, being too hands-off, being too friendly and unclear about boundaries, not establishing clear goals and role clarity, misunderstanding motivation (i.e. that they are only in it for the money), hiring too quickly, not delegating, not being clear about your own role, not developing their team, struggling with how to make changes
So, if you’re a leader and you think you struggle, you are not alone! And all the more reason for us to cultivate some self-compassion!
How do you source self-compassion or don’t you?