Like it or not, your personal life impacts your leadership. So often when leadership is discussed, a heavy emphasis is placed on strategies, goals, communication and performance metrics. While these are critical, we look at how stress impacts and can diminish your leadership presence and influence in this article. 

Sorry folks, what is happening in your relationships, health, finances, and other stresses come with you into your workplace.  Without getting too touchy-feely, can we all agree on that?

So now that we have settled, let’s look at what can be happening and what can you do about it.

What is the Impact on Your Leadership Presence?

When we carry stress into our meetings, conversations, and presentations, we can experience a lower emotional intelligence in that moment. Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand, use, and manage your emotions, see and understand how those around you are responding, and modify your responses and behavior.  Most highly effective leaders, (not all leaders) are pretty adept at navigating team dynamics, interpersonal interaction, and communication styles while maintaining their leadership presence. It’s a critical skill to have, develop and manage.

When you’re stressed out or your personal life (real life) is carried into that meeting or conversation, it has an effect.  This influences how you show up.  It’s not a weakness, it’s human nature. 

Everyone is different, but some common symptoms can be short patience or avoiding people or situations. For others, we act with increased caution, avoiding risk, or delayed or procrastinating on decisions. Lower emotional intelligence can often be the cause of misinterpreting signals from staff, business trends, or completely missing non-verbal communication cues in meetings. These behaviors can lead to a noticeable deviation from your normal clarity, direction, support, or other aspects of your normal leadership qualities.

We all have bad days, bad moods, deadlines, and tough situations. I’m not minimizing any of that.

That said, if you’re leading others I encourage you to ask yourself these questions.

• How would I rate my interactions with my co-workers and relationships? 
• Is my team or staff managing or avoiding conversations around my mood, attitude, vibe, or tone?
• Have we stopped making progress in addressing, confronting, and solving challenges?

Awareness 

Start small. 

Just being aware that your entire life is integrated and connected is a start. As much as we have been conditioned to believe can compartmentalize work and life, it doesn’t work like that in the real world.  I’m not suggesting trekking to the Himalayas for greater awareness, just take a moment and look honestly at how you’re showing up in your most important relationships and your work. It’s on you to understand, find, and create the balance that is best for you.  

Self Care – It’s Not Touch-Feely

Self-care gets a bad rap in the workplace. I think it’s because it again seems like a very touchy-feely topic. Honestly, this is too bad, because if you aren’t going to take care of yourself, then who will?   Get real about how you are doing and take some steps to improve the maintenance level of yourself. 

There are so many small steps you can take to better care for yourself from how you eat, take a break, sleep, take a walk, yes, dare I say even meditation. You may be surprised by how much better your focus, productivity, and interactions are when you do!

Support 

Do you have people who you can lean on, connect with, or share with?  Isolation doesn’t typically help anyone.  Establish, re-establish, or nurture your support system which can include family, friends, and even colleagues who can be powerful allies and supporters during challenging times. I bet they are more willing to listen and help than you expect.

Resources

The Leadership Podcast

How Great Leaders Inspire Action” by Simon Sinek