In my intensive leadership programs, I ask executives to make a rigorous inventory of all the ways they numb themselves.
I normalize this practice because these are strategies we all use to manage raw emotion. In workplaces that draw sharp lines between the personal and the “professional,” and in corporate cultures that are largely disembodied and non-relational – asking people to wall themselves off from feeling – we resort to small, habitual “micro-hacks” to manage emotions that would otherwise arise naturally.
Their lists are long, often shared with a tinge of embarrassment or shame.
We numb ourselves in countless ways. Working too hard and too much. Spending time on social media. Worrying and procrastinating. Lowering our ambition. Staying alone and isolated. Engaging in shallow conversation. Exercising compulsively. Overeating. Binge-watching Netflix.
We numb ourselves by yelling at our kids, staying perpetually exhausted, caretaking others, distracting ourselves, rationalizing, and minimizing our own reactions.
Of course, there are truths leaders don’t always dare to share in the group and confess to us in hushed tones off to the side – I have affairs, I drink too much, I watch a lot of pornography.
Activities that break their own alignment with their values and vows and cost them in soul and self blessing.
When they begin to inventory the costs of this widespread numbing phenomenon, their answers create a hush in the room. We lose vitality, creativity, closeness, attention to what really matters to us – we’re not the good partners, parents, leaders we want to be.
Executives breathe a sigh of relief at that moment when they realize they’re not alone or the only one facing such consequential downsides of a collective habit.
Somehow, secrets feel less heavy when they are confided in a safe listener, a loving community of witnesses prepared to receive them without judgment. Destructive habits are met with more compassion when they are held within a wider, systemic context of understanding.
Sometimes, this conversation becomes the sacred beginning of a long path of recovery from an addiction that is costing them their life force and freedom. Addiction of all kinds. More often, it is a sober moment when leaders begin to see that operating within an organizational culture that is performative and transactional carries a real cost to human experience and intimacy.
If we want to help leaders unlock potential, we start by helping them inhabit their own hearts, tolerate their own pain and one another’s hurt, and commit to the slow, steady work of un-numbing. On the other side of that softening of the heart is an organic joy, a quiet river of love, a renewed pulse of imagination and dreaming, and the capacity to meet life unguarded and undefended.
They smile. They laugh. They dance. And they begin, in earnest, to lead the way toward a new future.
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Amy is co-leading an upcoming workshop at MEA with David Whyte and Chip Conley
Leading From Soul: Inner Wisdom for Transformational Impact, March 26–29 in Santa Fe. This workshop is for leaders ready to do the inner work that makes real impact possible.