Breaking Free from the Stress Cycle: Detaching Self-Worth from Performance
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Unlock stress-free leadership by disentangling self-worth from performance. Learn how successful CEOs break the cycle, leading to better leadership and healthier work environments.
The False Equation: Performance Equals Self-Worth
Lessons learned early in life lead most of us to equate our talents and accomplishments with how “good” we are — a measure of our personal value. This gets reinforced over time with every compliment and critique.
It also leads to wanting, even needing the approval of others, and for them to see us in a positive light.
We try to make sure we don’t fail because we don’t want to lose respect. And this places an out of proportion pressure on our need to succeed.
All of this generates stress which impacts not only us, but those around us.
As evolving CEOs, we can free ourselves from this cycle by disconnecting our personal value from our performance. Doing so allows us to be the high-functioning leaders we’re capable of being.
The Impact of Self-Induced Pressure on Leadership and Team Dynamics
When we are identified with our work, we wrongly believe that the quality of our work carries more meaning than simply being about the quality of the work itself.
The additional meaning — the belief that our success determines how worthy we are — is what generates all that unnecessary pressure we experience. That self-induced pressure can cause us to behave in ways that stress our team members, causing them to underperform or make mistakes.
In our leadership roles, rock-solid integrity is essential, but integrity can easily become compromised in a narrow-viewed pursuit of "success", which will ultimately bring suffering our way.
The irony here is that we think we need to succeed and not fail because we believe that it will mean something about us; but making ourselves or our team members miserable will certainly give us what we don’t want — to be viewed negatively, and possibly, a larger project or company failure. That’s a lose, lose, lose proposition.
Raising Self-Awareness: Removing Meaning from Success and Failure
We need to raise our self-awareness enough to stop applying meaning to situations where no meaning exists or belongs.
As conscious leaders, when we let go of defining ourselves by our successes and failures, we free ourselves to allow any success or failure to be an outcome of whatever work and circumstances were involved.
We can celebrate our successes, our performance, even our capabilities without any story that it makes us better people who are more worthy.
We can make wiser decisions and learn from the experiences where we succeed and don’t succeed without making it about our worth.
Taking Inspiration from Consciousness Teachers
A person once went up to renowned consciousness teacher, Eckhart Tolle, after one of his events and said, “Wow, that talk was incredible!".
Eckhart smiled and nodded his head, saying, “Yes, I thought so too!”.
I so loved this. Eckhart didn’t make the compliment about himself in any way. He simply shared in the delight that he, too, felt the work was exceptional.
Celebrate Your Success
You hold your positions at the top of your company because you’ve demonstrated excellence and success in at least some areas of your work.
Enjoy that. Appreciate it. Celebrate your good works.
And know this: from the day you were born, you were inherently worthy. And that has never changed.
Unleash your Brilliance as a Conscious Leader
It's my mission to support people in leading with unyielding integrity, clarity, and authenticity. If you'd like to tap into your deeper insight and practical wisdom to lead more powerfully and effectively, feel free to reach out at connect@evolvingceo.com to set up a time to connect.
To see what others have to say about the work we do together, please check out the testimonials here. I look forward to connecting.
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