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Yesterday I was talking to a couple of leaders that I was coaching in a group coaching session and the topic sort of naturally came up about leading with confidence in unpredictable and uncertain times. These leaders work in manufacturing and sometimes because of the pandemic they don’t know whether they're going to have a full crew when they get to work or accurately predict what they need.
So they have to be very flexible and I was, I was observing how much pressure is on a leader at the moment, not to get anxious about things when orders increase or decrease although you know the work crew is smaller or, or not what you expected. And so we just started talking about how do you lead with confidence, during times like this and not let the anxiety get to you.
Here are two thoughts I shared with them:
1) Do you know how you are wired in relation to anxiety? What does it do when you you know the people around you actually experience the fruit of uncontrolled anxiety in your life? Maybe what you do is you express it. Maybe not in a clear way to people but it comes out in being sharp, or short, or just sort of pushing through and being overly busy or just looking overly busy or getting frustrated more easily. Do you just swallow it, but inside it's tearing you up. It's affecting your home life and things like that.
So I think the enneagram is a really good tool for you to really examine what you typically do with anxiety and work out ways that you can mitigate the full effect of that anxiety so unpacking your enneagram could be really helpful and that's a thing that I offer here at enliveleaders.com
2) Also the other thing is, I think it's really important to develop support systems and there is sort of an outlet for when you do feel anxious. I know in my own life those support structures are really important and I speak about five healthy support systems that I believe every leader should have. You can learn about this from our Non Anxious Leadership Course at enliveschool.thinkific.com. You can also download the free Road Map to Self Aware Leadership which introduces you to many of the concepts we talk about.
Being a non anxious leader is absolutely critical at a time like this so I hope you check out those things or you contact me personally, if you like, you can email me or go to the Enlive Leaders Facebook page and we could talk about how we might be able to help you with this.