If You Have No Emotional Awareness as a Leader, You're Limiting Your Success. Here's Why (and How to Fix It). Learn how to enhance your leadership skills by healing your mindset, managing your emotions and leading with intention.
By Sean Kim Edited by Chelsea Brown
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Nearly all entrepreneurs are looking for ways to optimize their workflow. However, it's common for business leaders to focus on solving problems externally in their business, instead of looking within themselves. The purpose of your business should not only be to fulfill a desire for success. Moreover, it's important that your workflow aligns with the deeper parts of who you are, what you stand for and what you wish to share with others.
As the CEO of Jumpspeak.com, I make plenty of small to grand decisions that can impact the direction of the business. I can tell you that the bad decisions I regret making are always the ones I've made with high emotions.
Business owners are on the road to burnout when they aren't leading with service. By understanding how to be emotionally aware as a leader, you can manage your emotions and expand into a place of abundance. In this article, I will share some tips on how to enhance your leadership skills by healing your mindset, managing your emotions and leading with intention.
Related: 5 Ways Emotional Intelligence Will Make You a Better Leader
Manage your emotions
As an entrepreneur, it's difficult to create boundaries when the lines between business and personal feel so blurred. However, when you ignore your emotions, they don't disappear. They get bottled up within you and may even create symptoms within your physical body.
Sofia Sundari, who coaches high-performing entrepreneurs on emotional mastery, says that anger is connected to the liver, so ignoring it will only cause deeper concerns with your overall wellness. Her advice is to stop running from your emotions and let them flow. If you are present with how you feel, you are able to be present in your business. Being emotionally aware allows leaders to make decisions that are true to their core since it opens gateways to a smarter intuition.
Reverse your scarcity mindset
People who are givers thrive when it comes to managing an abundance mindset. It's important to know that business is not a zero-sum game. One person's success will not affect yours. Oftentimes, it grows the entire market demand, making everyone more successful.
Everyone can benefit from learning to act from a place of abundance instead of scarcity, even if you have to fool yourself at times. Know that you have to walk the walk in your everyday life, which sometimes includes taxes, tipping, paying for cheaper tickets and more. When leaders emulate the leadership skills they strive to embody, they are able to step into their true authentic power.
Think about actionable things in your business, team and personal life that you have a limiting belief about. Then try to apply the abundance framework in that exact situation. You may be pleasantly surprised to find out that there are other solutions to your problems.
Related: 2 Keys to Improving Leaders' Mental and Emotional Wellbeing
It's okay to mix business and personal
Leaders who have an entrepreneurial spirit can struggle with maintaining both work and business relationships. The pressure leaders place on themselves ends up interfering with their ability to be intentional and emotionally aware in their work life. In Sundari's opinion, the dynamics of intimate relationships mirror business relationships.
She found that if her intimate relationships were going well, the business was stagnating, and vice versa. Instead of trying to keep everything separated, she made the decision to incorporate the two together, which proved successful.
Slowly start unraveling these limiting beliefs about how you "should" operate as a leader, and lean into what makes the most sense for your personal and professional priorities. If you are aware of what you need from the start, you can fill up your own cup and ensure your business moves in the right direction.
An emotionally blocked leader is not able to help themselves or their business, which is why it's important to create a roadmap for how you want to show up in your professional life. Analyze the different areas of your personal and business life to ensure everything feels right for you.
