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Hello and welcome along to Management Matters. I'm bringing you this episode today from the allotment. I'm just pootling around planting some spring bulbs and so I thought I'd turn on the mic, have a little chat with you, and the theme that came to mind for today's episode is peace of mind.
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Peace of mind. What a lovely thing to contemplate while on the allotment. It's morning time and the birds are singing. It's very still and quiet, apart from the birds and the insects and the busy bees. There are no people here, and it's just lovely.
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And I don't know about you, but I really pursue peace of mind and two things really: peace of mind and freedom of movement because I typically have quite an active brain. I'm one of those people who my sort of go-to over.
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If you are familiar with my work, you'll know the the "overs" that I talk about are overthinking, overworking, overwhelm, and overgiving. And these are our typical go-to responses when things get stressful or when we are operating from our conditioning rather than our really sturdy core being.
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And overthinking is one of mine. I get really into this space of kind of cyclonic thinking that is where I'm like my brain works really hard to fix problems. I don't even necessarily have it like just really, I don't know, kind of it's like right well I must figure this out.
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Like maybe there isn't actually anything to figure out at all and you know my coach supervisor and business mentor is sometimes like, "Oh Fiona you're always having ideas for things" and I'm like yes it's because I'm always trying to fix problems or kind of you know think things through and she's like what if nothing's gone wrong here.
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What if actually everything's fine? Just need to like keep plodding along. I'm like, oh, be okay. but that's a bit, sounds a bit too simple. So, I really aspire to peace of mind, and I think it's the same for a lot of my clients. I think it's also why so many of you have signed up to strategy hour, right?
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It's like one of the places where you can come along and figure your stuff out and feel like you're kind of in control of stuff, like you're making decisions, making progress, and things feel good. And I think one of the mechanisms, let's say, that can really help us with finding peace of mind, I think is what, in therapy terms, they call congruence.
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And congruence is the alignment or the matching up of who you think you are, how you think about things, what you do about those things, and I think when those three things overlap, like who you think you are, what you think about stuff, the quality of your decision making, and then what you actually do is really the root of peace of mind when those things are all aligned when you're in congruence.
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So, you know, you have a particular challenge come up instead of slipping into massive overthinking and you know squirrely, oh, what shall I do? I don't know. Maybe I should do this.
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Maybe I should do that. Blah blah blah. All the kind of "should" options that spring to mind. Instead of all of that, it's just like right, well, I know what to do. This is aligned with who I think I am and how I think I show up in the world and what people expect of me, and then you just go off and do it.
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In fact, you might not even have a very conscious thought process about it. You might just get to action and go and do the thing, and that is congruence. And I think that is where peace of mind really lives is in.
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When those things are operating well for you and you're just bobbing along doing your stuff, things are going well. So, so why is that so hard? I hear you ask because that is certainly what I ask as well. And I think why that can get feel so hard is because of, I mean, on a sort of day-to-day level because of conditioning, right?
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So the things that we have understood from our family of origin, from our family that we have now, not even you know, even if we've kind of built our own family, from friends, from the media, from school experiences, from social media, from employment experiences.
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Any experience you've gone through where you've received a message about who you need to be, and how you need to show up, and also what should happen in this circumstance, and what will happen if you go against that social norm.
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All of that stuff, that kind of conditioningy stuff, is where the overs come from. It's like, if I work hard enough, then I'll be able to avoid whatever this risk is, and yeah, in that spot of the overs and you know everything being kind of conditioned and starting to respond from a place that you're not necessarily recognizing yourself or it doesn't feel like what you would do if there were no negative repercussions.
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That's the bit where we lose this peace of mind idea, right? Because we're out of congruence. The gap is in the space between who we know ourselves to be, what we think about ourselves, what we know we really want to do, what that part of us that knows ourselves really well and knows what good solutions are, what that part of us wants to do and kind of what the social norm is, what people tell us we should do, like what people like us can do, what's available to us that kind of stuff.
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When those, oh and then also like the what you actually decide and do, what action you take. Like, you know, it happens all the time. Like a really easy com- comparison is like diet and exercise, right?
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I know I talk about this a lot on the podcast as an example, but it's just because I think it's quite a universally well-understood example. But I'll try and give some work examples as well. Diet and exercise. The conversation that you might have with yourself about how you should be exercising, or you should be eating well, and then the reality of the fact that the time comes around for you to take that action and go to the gym or cook a healthy meal, and then your behavior is actually you stay on the sofa and doom scroll or watch another episode of your TV or overwork instead of going to the gym or, you know, whatever.
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That gap between what you think you should do, what your true self really knows would be the best option for you, and then what you actually do, that gap is lack of congruence. And I think those are the spaces where peace of mind gets gets tripped up.
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And it's the same in work, right? So it might be that you Think your team member needs some more development to overcome a challenge that they're experiencing. Your boss is like, no, this is ridiculous.
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It's a disciplinary issue. You have to discipline them, and you're like, eughh, I don't want to do that. That is a lack of congruence because if you do the thing that you really know you, in your like heart of hearts know to be the right thing, which is support this person, give them some more development.
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But you also know that if you do if you do that, then your boss is going to be like, "I thought I told you to discipline them," and it turns into a big thing. That gap, you know, the inner conflict that you experience in those situations, that's where the lack of congruence is.
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And so, I think if we're pursuing peace of mind. We need to also be pursuing congruence, and we need to find ways to close the gap between who you believe yourself to be, how you think about things, and what you actually do.
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And this is such ripe territory for coaching because we can work at any of those levels. So it might be that we find ourselves doing some identity work by what kind of a leader or manager do you want to be? And then what actions or behaviors does that type of leader or manager take?
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Are those options available to you? Can you practise doing those things until you feel comfortable that your identity has upgraded through that practice and through building that evidence for yourself that you actually can take those actions? Or you could work at the level of thinking, so it might be that we untangle how you think about something by introducing a distinction or opening up a black and white thinking, or it might be that we explore things from different perspectives or whatever.
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You know, there's loads of different ways of doing that, but we're considering the mode of your thinking. And kind of updating some of those mental models. Or it might be that we're changing what you're doing. So it might be that you're like, "Well, this doesn't really feel like me, and this is not really what I think I should be doing.
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But I'm just going to experiment." And so, you know, I'm not going to force anyone to do things they don't want to do. But I think there is real scope and usefulness in experimenting and play and going "well, what if I just do this thing and see what happens, and then bring it back the next week or the next time we have a session and unpack?" Well, what did you try?
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How did it go? What was the result? What does that tell us about who you actually are and what's available? What options are available to you? And so, that's where peace of mind can come in when you go through that process. I've talked in previous episodes, and I'll link some up below in the show notes about why that can feel so gross, right?
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There's like it can be really difficult to establish change in any one of those three layers, but I think it can be really worth doing, particularly if you are somebody who's aspiring to peace of mind and congruence.
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I think the other place that peace of mind can get sort of tripped up is in mismatches between basically anywhere that your stress response arises, right?
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Your stress response does not facilitate peace of mind. That's not what it's there for. And so, what we want to do alongside what all the things, the three options that I just given about thinking about identity and thinking models, and action.
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The other place that we want to think about is how well are you resourced, and how are you at handling stress. If you're really well resourced, you can handle quite a lot of stress actually.
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And stress is one of those things that I think gets talked about, like we should try to get rid of it. Actually, like some of some of the people who are doing the best work experience a lot of stress. You know, they're working in really high pressure environments, and yet they are well resourced.
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They are, you know, handling that stress well. They are doing things that they know will help themselves to be able to respond well to that stress, and you know, I kind of hate, I don't hate, but I've I find concepts around resilience quite problematic.
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I'd much rather come at this kind of stress management situation from the perspective of mental fitness, sort of adjacent terms rather than resilience, like I don't think we should just be expected to cope with bad situations forever and ever and ever.
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And actually, a large part of, you know, that peace of mind and the congruent stuff we were talking about is knowing that you're taking care of yourself in relation to those high pressure situations or demanding workloads or whatever that is and so I think as people get more senior, actually looking after yourself becomes not just an act of self-care but also an act of leadership.
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Being able to keep yourself well enough resourced to keep your stress response in check at a manageable level to release stress on a regular basis is so key to leadership success so that you're able to retain access to your all of your executive functioning so your decision making, your communication, your emotional processing, all of that stuff that is like the stuff of good management and leadership goes out of the window as soon as you get really stressed out.
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And so, what we need to do is make sure that as you develop in management and leadership and as you're aspiring to this peace of mind, that you're including things in your routines and ways of living that allow for that, right?
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So, might be that you spend time in the mornings pottering around on your allotment or in your garden or, you know, whatever the thing is for you. But I really want us to consider that stress management and retaining access to our cognitive functions should not really be thought of as like an added extra to work or to leadership or to management, I think it should be considered as an integral part of because it's really important and if you don't do it then things go badly quite quickly and then everyone's, you know, in in difficult situations and your team are not getting great leadership and all of the stuff.
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I don't know if this has been a helpful episode. I feel like I've just sort of wumbled around the subject a bit. If you too are aspiring to peace of mind, I will link up some episodes below about that kind of relate to this topic.
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And come to Strategy Hour if you feel like your to-do list is out of hand and you think actually having some support to figure that stuff out on a weekly basis would be helpful. Strategy Hour is completely free. Just sign up once and then show up anytime that you're available.
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And if you think actually some kind of longer term support would be helpful, if you like the way that I think about this stuff, then drop me a message and we can have a chat about ways that I might be able to support you.
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Thanks so much for listening and I will speak to you soon. Bye.
