3 Leadership Traits to Survive A Recession

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I'm your host Andy Maurer, and in this podcast I share my insights as a leadership coach and former therapist. I sit down with some of the highest level leaders in business, entertainment and human performance to help you pursue wholeness in your work life and relationships. Thanks for joining me.

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Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Pursue Whole podcast. At Pursu Whole we believe that leaders hold the power to change the world. But whole leaders will change it for the better. And yet at the same time, we understand that it's really difficult to change the world around us when we're fearful about what the future holds. Every week I hear something new about inflation going up, markets crashing, VC funding drying up, and how leaders are doing more now than ever before in order to stay afloat in these uncertain times when we have so much stress going on around us as leaders, we revert back to our very primitive survival brain, which doesn't see the world through opportunity, it sees the world through threat. What are you going to do in this time of uncertainty? You're going to pull back in fear or you're going to press forward with courage and at pursuit whole, we've actually decided to do the latter. In this time when many are pulling back out of fear, we're choosing to lean in, innovate and create the future through courage and wisdom. And this decision to lean in and push forward doesn't just happen when we're overcome by anxiety and fear. If you're like us at pursue whole and you want to lean in, you want to innovate and you want to create the future rather than get stuck in fear, then there are three leadership traits that you need to cultivate in your life. Now, it's important to remember, before I name these, that leadership is not something we just possess. It's not something we're born with, it's something that we learn and we cultivate. So no matter where you are at in your journey of life and leadership, there's, there's always opportunity to grow and evolve. And if we're going to evolve, these are the three characteristics that we need in times of a recession. Number one, we need a sense of resiliency. Number two, we need a curious attitude about the world around us. And number three, we need a long term perspective. So number one, let's talk about resiliency. This term has been thrown around a lot in the last couple of years, but at its core, resiliency is the ability to bounce back from adversity. The best way to think about this is A basketball. When you have a basketball and you throw it down against the ground, it bounces back up to your hands with a similar intensity. So think about resiliency as that when you get knocked down in business or life through adversity, disappointment, or loss, can we come back stronger than before? These last two years have been a petri dish for leadership. I've watched and observed leaders go through some of the most intense and disrupting times in their leadership and in their life. And if you look around at other leaders in your life, ask the question, are a lot of these leaders thriving or are they surviving? Which leaders have shown you that they have the capacity to bounce back? And are you one of those leaders? Resiliency happens when we face what we feel. We feel what we feel. Then we reflect upon the areas of opportunity as a result of that experience. So let me say that again. Resiliency happens when we face what we feel. We feel what we feel, and then we reflect on the opportunities based on that experience. Let's break these down. First. We have to face what we feel. Resilience is not the same thing as grit. Now, when you think about grit, I think about tightening my teeth, tightening my body, and muscling through something. Grit is about pushing through, it's about tightening up. It's about bearing through something. While there are moments in life when grit is important, it often diminishes rather than enhances our ability to be resilient. Now, why is this? Because grit is not about feeling. It's about pushing those feelings down and charging through. Grit is about survival. You can tell when a leader has developed a life of grit rather than resiliency because they have a very difficult time expressing what they feel. And at the same time, if you express what you feel, they often shut it down or they try to move to fix it very quickly. It makes them very uncomfortable. And in order to do resiliency, well, you have to face what you feel. You can't push it down, you can't avoid it, you can't bypass it, and you can't distract yourself from it. Grit will get you through something, but it is rarely about flourishing and thriving, and it's almost always about survival. So if we want to do resiliency, well, we have to face what we feel rather than push down what we feel. The most basic way to face what you feel is to ask yourself, how am I truly doing on the inside? What am I feeling right now? Is it fear? Is it loneliness, discouragement, anger, resentment or insecurity? Simply naming one emotion and being honest with yourself about how you're truly doing is a great start to resiliency. So the first step was to face what you feel. You got to put a name to it. But the second step is actually harder. You have to actually then feel what what you feel. It's not enough to simply identify what you feel. Leaders are oftentimes eternal optimists and have gotten where they are because of their ability to take a crappy situation and turn it into a unique opportunity. The problem though, is that we often skip over the step of sitting with and experiencing what it is that we actually feel. Worse yet, we even talk ourselves out of what we feel. So for instance, you might recognize that you feel lonely, but then another part jumps in and tells yourself, stop feeling bad for yourself. How can you be lonely when you have so many people around you, you're so popular, or you're famous, or you have all these connections around you. Or you might identify that you feel sad. But instead of telling yourself you feel sad, you actually say, what do you have to feel sad about? There are a lot of people in the world who have it worse than you. Look at the bright side. So we do a lot of work as leaders to talk ourselves out of what we feel, rather than feeling what we feel. And if you notice what you feel, but then instantly try to fix it or get over it, then you're not feeling what what you feel, you're bypassing it and you're often moving towards grit. The most basic way to feel what you feel is to remove distractions by going into a quiet space. Close your eyes and ask yourself, what do I notice in my body right now? So for instance, if you feel insecurity, you might notice yourself struggling to make direct eye contact. Or your shoulders might be hunched over and your body might feel like it has a weight on it, or it feels low energy. Or you might identify that you feel fear. And if you feel fear, your body's going to feel fast paced, it's going to feel restless. You might even recognize that your heart rate has increased. Or you know, you feel like there's just way too much stimulation around you. Now remember, feeling what you feel is not something where you need to stay in it for hours on end. You don't need to stay here forever. Simply giving yourself one to two minutes with where you're at and noticing your body. Noticing the sensations in your body is an important step to feeling what you feel as you do those one to two minutes. Remember, you gotta breathe. Don't hold your Breath. And this will allow you to stay in those uncomfortable spaces longer. Think about this like an ice bath. As soon as you get in, you want to tighten up. You want to hold your breath. You got to breathe through. And similarly to this, as you face those uncomfortable emotions, you have to keep breathing through them to stay in them. Now, it's the part you've all been waiting for. Lastly, after you face what you feel, you feel what you feel now, you can reflect upon areas of opportunity of moving forward. Remember that grit jumps directly to this stage. Okay? So what I'm trying to teach you to do is bypass grit and actually lean into resiliency, which is first the feeling stage and then the movement stage. Grit automatically jumps to movement first and bypasses feeling. So in order to become resilient, we have to first lean into what we feel and then act. The second character trait to develop and cultivate in order to make it through a recession is curiosity. When we seek to explore the world and people, rather than seek to find things wrong with the world and people, we open ourselves up to growth, opportunity, and innovation. Yet when we're under stress, it's very easy to revert back to criticism and black and white thinking, which usually causes us to look at our decisions and the decisions of others as either good or bad or right or wrong. And when we're in this kind of thinking, we believe that there's one right way forward for everything, and everything else is a wrong decision. Now, let's be completely honest. From what's happened over the last two years, no one really knows what the right answers have been perfectly. We've been trying to navigate all these first experiences over the last two years that a lot of us don't know where we're headed or why we're headed there, but somehow we've made it through. Instead of looking for the right answer or the right direction, I encourage you to look at it through the lens of curiosity. Ask yourself, what are the three best possible decisions that you can make moving forward with the knowledge that you currently possess today? So this type of question helps us understand that there are probably a couple good decisions on the table, not just one. It also creates opportunity for us to change our decision based on new information coming in over the next couple days or weeks or months. This is going to make you way more agile, flexible, and innovative, rather than rigid, critical, and anxious. When we get stuck in believing that there's one right way to do things, it paralyzes us and causes us to stop moving forward. And research on C suite executive actually bears this out. We did an episode previously where we talked about the four key strategies that make a successful CEO and those came directly from the CEO Genome Project, which was a 10 year study that looked at 17,000 C suite executives. Their goal was to find the four behaviors that most made CEOs successful and what they found was that CEOs who had the ability to make decisive decisions were the most successful. And on the flip side, they found that CEOs who waited to act were often paralyzed by fear and they were trying to find out the right way rather than open up to what's the next best step. The important thing to note here is that these CEOs they had a tribe of key advisors that they could go to quickly to gather insights and opinions in a short time frame to then help them make a decision. Moving Forward we have to keep moving forward as CEOs and leaders in order to accomplish the goals that we have set in front of us. We can't stop. And that's where curiosity helps us move forward. Instead of criticism and critique, open up to curiosity and exploration. Instead of finding the one right way, notice how it feels to think that there might be a couple great options moving forward. If you're going to survive these tumultuous times as a leader, you have to open up your perspective rather than get stuck in a right or wrong way of thinking. Lastly, the third most valuable leadership trait to survive a recession is your ability to have a long term perspective. When we're under stress, our focus becomes narrow rather than wide. We forget about all the wins and successes in the past and we focus on all the immediate stressors and fears right in front of us now. Some of the best moments for me have been when I zoom out and I realize just how small my world actually is. Beyond my business and even my family and friends. There's a whole world out there with billions of people who are going through adversity and somehow have made it out to the other side. I'm not the only one Yet. Sometimes when I'm struggling I feel like I am the only one and no one else understands. Yet everyone on the planet faces suffering every single day. If we're going to survive and even thrive in the hardest times of our lives, we have to maintain a long term perspective. And this is how I do it in my own life. Every month I reflect on life through journaling. I simply make a bullet list of all the things I'm grateful for and I intentionally reflect back on those moments when I would. I Actually didn't think I was going to make it through, but somehow I am better because of those hardships. And this is one of my favorite times of the month because it allows me to take a big breath, step back, and realize, oh my goodness, I've been through some amazingly difficult things and yet I came out the other side, maybe with some bumps and scars and bruises, but genuinely, I'm a better person because of that suffering. Once again, at pursue whole, we have this philosophy that pain is the pathway to growth. And this is just a way that I practice that philosophy in my own life. Another simple exercise you can do to get perspective is to imagine your life inside of one of those snow globes that you pick up and you kind of shake around. The snow slowly falls. Visualize the people, situations and problems that you're facing occurring inside of that glass sphere and place yourself in there. Give as much detail to the inside of that world as possible. Now imagine yourself outside of the snow globe, in a large field, holding that snow globe. As you look into that man or woman on the inside of the snow globe, what do you see? Are they frenetic? Do they feel lost or lonely? Now, from the outside of that globe, standing in this wide open field of possibility, what do you want to tell that man or woman inside of that globe?

Would you tell them that they've been here before and that they're going to make it through? Would you tell them that this is just a season and seasons always have a beginning and end? Whatever you say, say it with compassion and care and just sit there for a couple seconds to notice how it changes your body, your mood and your energy. Does it make you feel more afraid or a little bit more at peace when you can get outside perspective? This is an exercise I've done with myself and with my clients numerous times, and it helps me get outside of my small world and zoom out. When we zoom out, we can get perspectives. The fears of the world slowly fade and we come back to our purpose, our why, and what matters most in life, which is to love and be loved. So once again, there are three traits that leaders need to cultivate in order to survive a recession. The first is to lean into resiliency rather than bearing through with grit. The second is cultivating a life of curiosity rather than seeing the world through black and white, right and wrong. And the third is to remember to zoom out, to have a long term perspective and remember what matters most in life. So if you're to take an honest assessment of where you're at ask yourself, how am I doing with being resilient rather than just pushing through and surviving? Am I curious or am I critical and can I have a long term perspective or am I getting stuck in the anxieties that are right in front of me? We've gone through a recession before. Every leader has gone through very tumultuous times and made it through the other end. So this isn't new, but it is complex and it's difficult. There are difficult days ahead. But at Pursuit Whole, we believe that no leader should have to face these difficult times alone. If you're struggling to know whether you have what it takes to survive what is ahead, reach out to us. We'd love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit more and figure out how we can support you through coaching or other resources in order to help you become successful and that leader that you're seeking to become. Remember that in times of adversity, it will be whole leaders who change the world for the better. We invite you to join us on this journey towards wholeness. Take care everyone. See you next time.

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