Enlisting your power of calm

​In our Executive Change Leadership Roundtable recently, overwhelm was a common theme.

Roundtable members were dealing with 2021 budgeting frustrations, the balancing of staying informed with feeling emotionally hijacked by the news, helping kids doing distance learning and being cooped up working from home.

We talked a lot about how easy it is to get entangled in the revved-up world we live in these days.

Then I remembered what I diligently started working on a couple years ago.

It was the power of calm.

I deliberately decided I was not going to work from a place of angst and being as revved-up as the world is.

Up until then, I always thought that having that ramped up buzzy type feeling was needed to get things done. And that to be successful I’d need a type A personality.

I made a commitment that I was going to work from a place of calm and that as soon as I noticed the angst and buzzy feeling, I would immediately stop, breath and get grounded.

I have my grandmothers rocking chair in the corner of my home office, so I would go to the chair, sit down and rock and breathe until my calm returned.

I started to notice that I might have been all tensed up about emails I needed to send or a phone calls I needed to make. And after taking my calming break and coming back to my laptop, nine times out of ten, the people I needed to email had already emailed me, or the people I needed to call had already left a voicemail.

The first few times this happened, I thought it was a fluke. But it started happening a lot.

I started to pay attention.

I also read information that said when we’re emotionally charged, we don’t have access to the creative problem-solving part of our brain.

It dawned on me that when I let myself get all charged up about something, I was actually making it harder for the part of my brain that could help me, to do its work.

I decided right then and there that I was not going to make life harder for myself by emotionally hi-jacking the part of my brain that could do me the most good.

Over time, my body got accustomed to being calm most of the time. If that old buzzy feeling started to show up, I actually became uncomfortable.

That was a pleasant surprise.

These days calmness is a way of life for me.

And I’m deeply grateful for my commitment to a calmer way of living.

As leaders living and leading from a place of calm is helpful on more levels than I can name here. Give it a try.

If you’d like to learn more, reach out to me. Or join our Emotional Intelligence Friday afternoon practice group. 

I’m here to help.
​
Until next time,
Dr. Rita
612-598-6614 
Rita@wiseleader.net 
www.WiseLeader.net

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