Life as a leader can be exhausting. Maintaining your ‘CEO role’ requires a lot of energy. Actually being the leader and making those incredibly difficult decisions every day requires even more. Your work demands omnipresent clarity and stamina. Staying well-resourced is an absolute requirement for effectiveness. It’s about managing your energy a lot more than it is about managing your time.
As I said last year on poseyblog, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz’s great work is worth a long look. To quote from their classic Harvard Business Review piece, The Making of a Corporate Athlete, “Sustained high achievement demands physical and emotional strength as well as a sharp intellect. To bring mind, body and spirit to peak condition, executives need to learn what world-class athletes already know: recovering energy is as important as expending it.”
Loehr and Schwartz suggest specific practices to build physical, emotional, mental and spiritual capacity. Because brainpower is absolutely necessary, but it is not sufficient. Not when you’re taking on the world, willing your great idea into reality and leading a huge and diverse team through dozens of obstacles. Your body and your spirit need to be as resilient and strong as your mind.
It’s lonely at the top. Heavy hangs the head that wears the crown. It’s all true. Get help to take care of every part of yourself, to learn to embrace what the role of leader demands of you. When you are optimally resourced, you and your beautiful innovation will thrive!
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