Cultivating Spaciousness to Enhance Your Leadership: Is This You?
Are you feeling compressed? You sense the weight on your shoulders (or perhaps the twist in your stomach) the pressure of trying to do everything on your list
Are you feeling overstretched? You frantically run from meeting to meeting, task to task, trying to keep all of the balls in the air. If not you, then who, right?
Do these feelings cause you anxiety or worry? Is the stress keeping you awake at night?
Do you feel tired? Wrung out like a dry sponge, or drained like an empty cup, with nothing more to share?
Do you feel you always need to be on?
Do you feel you don’t/can’t bring your best self to whatever you’re doing and that makes you feel guilty?
What if it didn’t need to be that way?
What if you could have clarity, greater presence?
What if you could spend more time being, more often embodying who you want to be and how you want to show up?
Able to prioritize more clearly how and on what you focus your energy, without being reactive or falling into distractions?
Able to share yourself fully, confidently, your best self, the best quality you?
This world is entirely possible. Entirely within reach. It requires a little discipline because it’s not how our culture encourages us to be. Reaching this world requires creating spaciousness. When we allow spaciousness into our lives by prioritizing ourselves first we are able to give more to others because we’re operating from a place of abundance, not scarcity. Two questions I often use with clients to begin their reflections are:
“How much can you offer others if your cup is empty?”
“What’s the quality of what you’re offering with an empty cup?”
When your cup is full, the quality of the experience that others have of you is much higher. You feel calmer. You can more easily see your priorities and focus your energy on them and those around you.
This is essential in leadership because it allows you to be more effective, to listen to what needs to happen, and the development that wants to occur. Without cultivating spaciousness, you’re reactive, not taking care of yourself. When you’re reactive and not taking care of yourself, you’re much less able to care for others, or the direction of your team.
What does this look like IRL?
The spaciousness I’m talking about is both a quality and a practice. It’s the sense that overall you are focusing on the most important, and not urgent matters (Q2 in Stephen Covey’s Habits of Highly Effective People). It’s also the sense that you regularly give yourself sufficient time to think. To back away from the day to day tasks to regain perspective, reassess and prioritize. Quite literally, to feel that there is time and space to breathe and reassess.
As a practice, this means
committing to that regularly scheduled time for strategic reassessment. I recommend at least 2–3 hours weekly. More if the team and/or organization is growing rapidly
incorporating self-care time and becoming more attuned to what’s arising for you in the moment.
taking vacations
Self-care includes, but isn’t limited to eating healthily, getting exercise, and engaging in a regular spiritual practice like meditation, Qi Gong or T’ai Chi. If you’re religious and also pray, that’s marvelous. Prayer and meditation/Qi Gong, etc. go hand-in-hand beautifully.
Self-care practices like these help attune you to what is arising in the moment in your body. In the process of becoming more attuned, we become more present. When we become more present, our perception of time can change. We can experience the expansiveness of each moment. We have time to respond consciously to the situation.
Benefits of Spaciousness
We are what we practice. Everything big and small that we do trains our nervous system. Our culture trains us to be reactive. To respond from a place of scarcity, of fear. In contrast, when we attune more to ourselves, when we show up calmer, with greater clarity, it’s felt by those around us. In fact, our showing up differently invites others to seek the same spaciousness for themselves. Our showing up differently opens the door for richer interactions with others, whether they are friends, family or colleagues. It can help others around you feel safer, opening up opportunities for true collaboration and sharing of creativity. It makes you a more effective leader. Those opportunities, also foster a more effective team and organization.
What will you do to incorporate spaciousness into your life? Are there self-care activities that you want to explore, or be more consistent with? Will you block an extended lunch time to provide daily breathing room into your calendar, to step back and reassess? Or will it be something else?