Anxieties Blockers ...

Anxiety can be a killer ... of ideas, relationships, and progress.

Our reptilian responses to stress as primitive and ancient as the reptilian brain stems we still carry. Fight or flight, but no play, (ever see a crocodile laugh?)

Fact is there’s a little reptile in all of us. OK, more in some then others. Still, anyone is vulnerable as are entire organizations. Businesses too, though they don’t do well against the competition: too slow, doze off too much.

Ok, enough of the analogies.

Point is if leadership is an opportunity to define the future, it carries with it the responsibility to give people a fighting chance to be a part of it.

And limiting anxiety and the emotionally driven resistance so characteristic of it is critical.

Not with programs, edicts, memos. No one ever got talked down from anxiety or talked out of resistance with a memo. Don’t laugh, it’s been tried.

Rather, the difference is made with initiatives you take to jam the emotional circuits that fuel anxiety; offer alternatives; and here’s the key — insist on them!

Here are three, anxiety blockers all. Take as needed; repeat as required. Non-transferable, effective only as administered by you.

• Goals: have them, communicate them, live by them. Insist on the same in others. Nothing frustrates anxiety more nor dissipates resistance faster than a leader willing to offer direction and lead with it.

• Clarity: give it, get it, share it. Tends to rewire communication; more fact finding, less finger pointing. Enough and you’ll have more inquiry and dialogue. Then what? More shared leadership too? Likely.

• Limits: know, stick to, and protect. May be less useful to focus on how much change people can take than on how much resistance you’re willing to endure. Fact is people can take more than you think and may need you to take less than you are.

Goals, clarity, and limits: the structure change demands, the qualities of leadership people require to follow in your footsteps.
A rising tide, indeed, lifts all boats

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