What to do so your current challenges positively impact your performance.
Have you ever experienced difficulty performing at your best at work because of how you felt physically or emotionally? For example, as a result of not sleeping well, stress and anxiety, or pain and illness? Or perhaps as a result of larger uncontrollable events such as life during the COVID-19 pandemic?
Anyone who’s suffered from the common flu knows that how we are physically can impact our emotions, mental clarity and performance. Chronic disturbances have a much higher impact on our wellbeing and potentially our work performance. You may have been told to 'leave your personal issues at the door' when you show up to work but the reality is that they always have an impact. Sometimes however we are able to hide it from others or even ourselves.
Once we accept that it’s impossible to fully isolate the impact that our health and wellness have on our ability to perform at work and home, the next step is to meet them intentionally. The challenges we face - getting that next promotion, navigating complexity as a leader, health and wellness issues and personal upheaval brings us into contact with our growth edge. We encounter growth edges when we need to adapt and change the way we view the world and ourselves.
A leadership growth edge in action
Consider Carlos, a leader who is responsible for managing a team and delivering critical outcomes in the organization. Recently they stopped sleeping well and, as a result, find themselves exhausted during the day. While they don't think they've made mistakes as a result, they don't feel at their best.
What to do? Wear exhaustion as a badge of honor? Work harder? Live with the discomfort and wait for things to get better? Drink a little more to fall asleep at night? What would you do?
If they embrace this as a growth opportunity they might begin to be curious about the whole experience and what's really happening. Why aren't they sleeping well? Might there be important skills or lessons to learn that would support better sleep? What's happening as they interact with others from a place of tiredness? What qualities might they be developing?
As they become curious, they discover that they are doing so much during the day that there's no space to process, decompress and integrate everything that happening. This leads to waking up in the middle of the night with lots of thoughts: worries, concerns, problem solving, planning for tomorrow, etc. They discover that tiredness makes it more difficult to be patient and be present and listen to their team.
These discoveries open up a number of opportunities to develop. One starting point would be to acknowledge that rest and sleep aren't an enemy to productivity and are worth pursuing. They might begin building in some processing time at the end of the day so they can do some of this work before trying to sleep. They take up a simple breathing exercise that enables them to put their body into a more conducive condition for resting.
What surprises them is that by learning to self-regulate and take more space for processing, they start to have fresh ideas for handling challenges at work. When they're triggered at work by challenging situations, they use their breathing practice to step back and gain perspective in the moment. Their team begins to report that they feel heard more often and that they sense their leader is a calmer presence. As a result, the team feels more engaged at work and less stressed and begins to make better decisions together.
Navigating your growth edges
Growth edges invite learning, development and ultimately a transformation in which we transcend and include. We let go of part of what we were certain we knew about ourselves and the world behind and allow new information and ways of being in. Developmental edges are often encountered as our career grows, in our personal lives and when we face health and wellness issues. While we can try to navigate these moments alone, it’s often more effective to navigate them with a trusted partner.
The impact of successfully navigating one growth edge impacts the other areas of life. As we transcend and include developing new skills and capacities, we are able to use them to meet our other challenges. This awareness is at the heart of one of the many reasons I have studied and integrated yoga therapy into my coaching practice. I saw professionals repeatedly struggling to navigate career and health as if they were separate and unrelated. As a holistic coach, I take a whole person approach and wanted to ensure that I had both the biomedical knowledge and the practical tools necessary to increase my effectiveness in navigating my personal growth edges and as a trusted partner for my clients in their development, health and performance.
3 tips to try daily when navigating a growth edge.
Are you currently navigating a growth edge? Here’s 3 tips to try daily. Try taking 5-10m for each one.
Tune in to your reactions and discomfort. Every developmental edge brings up numerous physical, mental and emotional reactions. Instead of ignoring or avoiding, pause to stop and notice what reactions have come up without trying to change them.
Approach it as a gift. You’ve reached a growth edge. Great! This is an opportunity for transformation. One of my mentors used to say, “find the gift in the shit”. Whatever your challenge, let your mantra become, what gift can I discover here? Cultivate gratitude by making a daily habit of writing down any possible gift you can think of.
Set your intention. Determine what’s most important to you as you face this challenge. Who do you want to be? What values would you like to express in this situation? What’s a concrete step you can take today to practice bringing these to life in a concrete way?
Take action
And a bonus tips: involve someone else. Find a friend, colleague, coach or someone else who can be part of your support system.
Take a broader perspective
So, the next time you find yourself at a growth edge in your personal life, remember that facing it might be exactly what you need to meet a current or upcoming challenge in your professional world. If you are a professional or leader in an organization, you can go a step further by remembering that everyone else in your organization is navigating their own growth edges - personally and professionally. You can normalize asking for support and making space for these conversations, valuing the contribution it makes to the organization to support people in meeting these challenges just as we might with other developmental challenges. If you’re in the position to you can encourage the organization in offering support resources to employees. Finally, you can model intentionality in meeting your own growth edges, telling the story of how they link together and when useful, working with a trusted partner earlier rather than later.