Mental health tips for Leaders

Leadership is full of stress, and the further you go down that path — the more challenges you face. People tend to associate leadership with fun work to do, but, adapting some ancient words “with great fun comes to a great responsibility”. When we face stress the natural human reaction is to minimize the cause of it. But this won’t work for leaders as the core value they bring is actually dealing with challenges, pressure, expectations and conflicts. So instead of avoiding such tough situations, the trick is to welcome those and deal with them in your personal way. In this article, I’m going to share a few tips and tricks I learned in my career that helped me to carry on.

You can’t control everything. And the only thing you can do about it is accepting it. The harder you push to gain control over every possible detail of your domain — the harder it will backfire to give you one valuable lesson: some things just happen, no matter how hard you try to avoid those. And foreseeing some hypothetical situations that could occur in the future and trying to resolve them proactively most likely will become the biggest energy drains of yours.

Learn to let things go. As a logical outcome of what’s written above. Letting go is not easy because we feel vulnerable to something that could follow. It comes from the perception that bad things will happen if we let things go but good things happen either. It doesn’t mean that we should sit back and do nothing about our jobs, this means we allow some space for new things to happen and we don’t resist it. It especially makes sense for some conservative projects or companies where certain workflows are likely to be repeated over and over again. These workflows could be still the best thing to do, but if we don’t allow something new to come and challenge those — we would never know if it’s still the best.

Making a step back when resistance is too big. Sometimes there could be situations where the pushback is too tough to handle and we feel like we hit a big wall each time we insist on something. Trying harder in this situation will make things only worse but making a step back and trying again later could be a healthy thing to do. Resistance in its nature is a reactive process, so removing the trigger could be the best way to reduce it drastically. And next time we try — we will choose a different path that could cause no resistance at all. Spend your energy wisely.

Know how and when to disconnect. Hyperengagement is a big deal for leadership as we tend to stay on top of things or be available for immediate action in case of an emergency. In my previous blog post, I shared a few ideas on how to make more of our time. But constant availability has long-term consequences that can end up in burn-outs and lead to depression. Disconnecting from work is not bad if we know when and how to do that, so the trick is to find the formula that works well for you. One of the practices I use time after time in the evenings is writing down all the things I did today, reading those acknowledging some good progress and then shutting down your laptop till tomorrow knowing you did a great job today. Also, make sure you make good use of your time off. Next time you go on vacation try not to check emails and slacks, trust your team they will reach out in case of emergency and give yourself some space for the new thoughts to arise. You’d be surprised how many interesting ideas will follow if you give yourself a good break.

Hard times you go through with someone make your relationship stronger. Every time some big problem comes out of the blue and hits a group of certain people I know it’s a good thing because such challenges will harden our relationship. And yes, we will probably have some busy days to make things work but when it’s done, we will trust each other more, know each other better and will certainly have a good memory to recall while having drinks any other day together. Don’t be afraid of those challenges — there’s always a positive outcome even in case of failure.

Pressure is the part of the game, don’t take it personally. There are always going to be some time constraints or high expectations or escalations. Of course, some people would have unrealistic expectations, overoptimistic demands, or would underestimate the effort drastically. Whatever come next — it’s not about you, it’s about business. Pressure is a part of the game and we should treat it respectively — do what we can but at the same time don’t sacrifice our sleep and mental health for it. Instead, we should make good use of our communication skills to manage the expectations and be transparent about the environment we’re dealing with.

Address lack of self-confidence with education. There could be situations where you don’t feel qualified for certain tasks. My tip would be to address those issues via education and invest time into reading the web or books to gain more knowledge of the given topic. Learning something new is always good and we grow when we do that. Use the lack of self-confidence as the motivation to gain the new knowledge and experience that will allow you to master the skills. Turn your weakness into a strength.

Accept and integrate your weaknesses. Everyone has a weak spot, it’s impossible not to have it. Don’t go into the dangerous path of trying to eliminate the weaknesses — this is too expensive. Here’s simple math: let’s say you have skill A which you do really well, say 4 stars out of 5. And then you have skill B which you’re not so good at, say 2 stars out of 5. What would you do? Improving skill B up to 5 stars will take you 3 times more effort than improving skill A up to 5 stars. And trust me, it’s better to be a rock-star in one particular skill rather than the mediocre one in multiple. Prioritize wisely.

Couple of more tips which I simply would mention here as no additional description would be needed:

• failures are inevitable so the best thing you can do about it is learned from it
• trust other people to do their part of the job
• don’t be shy to go into therapy if you need it
• pick your battles and don’t spread too thin