Welcome to the new Manager podcast. I'm your host, Kim Nichol. Hello and welcome. I'm glad you're here and I hope you're doing well. If you like this podcast, if it's ever helped you, do me a favor and leave a rating or a review. It really means a lot to me and it helps the show. So thank you so much for doing that.
So, you know, last week we were talking about emotional labor and then coincidentally on LinkedIn the other day, I saw this great post also about being a leader and emotional labor. And I wanted to share it with you. And this is from someone who is a vice president of marketing in their organization. His name is Evan Hughes, and he, you know, posted this to the public. So I'm sharing it and extending it even even further. And what he said was he said no one teaches you how much of
being AVP is emotional labor. Not strategy, not creativity, not the playbooks. It's walking into a meeting where sales is pissed and holding your ground without making it worse. It's checking in with a team member who says they're fine but clearly isn't. It's knowing when to speak up and when to let something slide. Even though it's eating at you. It's sitting with the pressure and not passing it down, the stuff that actually makes you effective. Most of it never shows up on a
dashboard. It's invisible. But it keeps the team running, keeps the trust intact, and keeps people from burning out. You learn quick that doing good work isn't enough. You have to carry people through the hard days too, and nobody claps for that. But that's the job. Keep going. When I read this, number one, it really resonated with me. That reminded me of my experience being a manager.
It made me think of you and all of the people that I work with who find me through this show who are looking for support as they're stepping into leadership roles. And clearly it's resonated with other people because so far thousands of people have been reacting and hundreds have been leaving comments on his post, including me, by the way, especially that part where he said the stuff that actually makes you effective, most of it never shows up on a dashboard.
It's invisible. That is so true, is so accurate. And I wanted to share it with you for a couple of reasons. One is it brings this perspective that I hope will be comforting and kind of restorative for you, which is that if you feel sort of overwhelmed or surprised or drained by the emotional labor part of your job, my hope is that you'll understand how common this is. It's not something that you alone might feel surprised by or might feel kind of overwhelmed by.
That Also, someone who is at a very high level in their career, who's working as a VP of marketing, they're also experiencing this. So it's not something that, oh, you know, the longer I do this, it will go away. It's not like, oh, this is just because I'm a new manager. And so I'm having to figure this out. It is a very ever present part of the work of leadership when you have that responsibility on your shoulders.
And it's it is one of those invisible skills that often is not called out specifically in a job interview or even in a performance review, but it's a very real part of how you get the work done. For as long as you're working and moving into leadership roles, you can expect to be doing emotional labor. So it's part of your leadership journey. And if no one else mentioned that to you, then you're not alone.
For a lot of folks, including me when I was a manager and including a lot of people on LinkedIn, yeah, that's often how it goes. And the other part is that because this is so if we know that a big part of being effective in the job of managing and leading, if we know that a big part of being successful and effective in that job requires emotional labor, then it becomes very clearly and vividly important that you are being mindful of your own mental health and your emotional well-being.
Because emotional labor is hard enough. And when we are, you know, really struggling with our mental health or with our emotional well-being, if we're feeling undermined in our own lives, in that space, then it makes the emotional part of work even harder. So it's so important that you are tending to and caring about your own emotional health, your own mental well-being.
And that can include everything from simply remembering you have a body and your mind works better when you put down the screen and actually like go for a walk or have a glass of water or take your dog outside or connect with your family or connect with a part of you that is very important. That has nothing to do with your career in the workplace.
Simply being mindful and connected to that part of you will help to give you that resilience, as well as that quality of internal calm and grounding that allows you to show up your best in all of these different situations at work. When I think about what helps me and what has helped me back in the days when I was managing people, really the ground from which I teach and coach and even
create this podcast for you. For me, it comes back to mindfulness because it's this very, in a sense, very simple kind of way of being, like very simple practice, but it becomes very useful in so many different situations. So to be clear, when I'm talking about mindfulness, I'm thinking of this as a quality of attention. So if your attention is frenetic and distracted, then you know, we're probably not being very mindful.
We're probably being more reactive or more activated or moving from more of a stress response. And for some of us, when our stress response get activated, we want to exert more control over a situation. Or for some of us, when our stress response gets activated, we become even more anxious as we're trying to predict what will happen. We're trying to plan for all the
worst case scenarios. For some of us, when our stress response gets activated, we go into hero mode or helper mode, which can cause us to lose sight of the big picture and instead focus on some more kind of narrow things. Like that's where when as a manager, sometimes we let go of that bigger perspective and understanding our role and instead we take on too much and we overwork and we, you know, feel this really heavy responsibility to do everything.
And that's not always the most effective way to approach things. So we want to be very aware of how is my quality of attention? Is it present? Is it someplace else? This is a, a big part of being mindful is simply becoming aware. Where is my attention and what is the quality of it? We also think of these three pieces, mindfulness as the quality of attention where you are present. Number one, you're in this moment, not in the future, not in the past, not, you know, someplace else.
You're in this moment and you are curious. So we suspend judgement for a bit, and we're simply interested and curious to learn more, curious to understand. I'm curious about, you know, what the experience is and kind. And this quality of kindness that we bring to our attention is what allows us to take some of the pressure off. And, you know, like pressure is not necessarily good nor bad. Some pressure can be very useful and very wonderful.
But when we find ourselves putting pressure on like from this place of judgment, that can often create the conditions for burnout, for chronic stress, for not becoming like fully rested. When we have that downtime, we want to bring a quality of kindness where we're recognizing, OK, I am a human and I have some clarity about my role. I have some clarity about my goals. And I'm going to approach this with the the best of my ability given the circumstances and given what I have to work with
right now. When we're able to approach ourselves with kindness, it allows us to reduce the volume on that internal critic, which can be very draining, can be very distracting. And it also allows us to approach from a more grounded place.
So when we're having a conversation or you know, when we're in a situation that might be a little bit tense, when we approach it from this grounded place of being present and curious and kind, I think of in the workplace, kindness is, is almost just this sense of hey, like we're here to do good work together. We're here because we all want this project to be successful. It doesn't mean you have to be
friends with everyone. It doesn't mean you have to be like best buddies, But it's this quality of we're on the same side, we're on the same team. We all want this to go well. That's why we're working together, right? Like can I bring this quality into the room, into the conversation or situation, even if I need to say something that might be hard to hear, or even if we are in a disagreement or we have very strong opinions that are very, very different.
I might be coming across in a way that feels very direct or very blunt, but I'm going to be doing it from a place of kindness, meaning I'm not attacking you. I might be challenging the idea or I might be challenging the process or the approach, but it's not from a place of being unkind. That's such a an important
distinction. So there are so many different situations that will happen in the course of your life and your work, and it would be exhausting and honestly impossible to try to predict every single one or have a plan for every single one. So I like the idea of having some kind of a foundation with some core principles that you can bring into a variety of situations. I find it just is very efficient, effective, elegant, and more likely to be used in the course of real life.
So mindfulness is this wonderful tool that you can think of. It's like a Swiss Army knife in your pocket. It's small, it does a lot of stuff. It's not too complicated and highly useful. And you're going to remember, OK, I need to need to start from this mindful place. Can I be curious? Can I be present? Can I be kind? And then bring that awareness into different situations. One of the ways I teach this and think about this is the difference between being and doing.
So doing is all of the actions that we take. But being, when we think about how are you being in this moment that is more about a quality of your presence, a quality of your attention? Are you being responsive or reactive? Are you being grounded or are you being volatile? Are you being critical? Are you being curious? Can you choose the attunement or the direction of how you want to be in this moment so that it serves whatever is arising? You might have heard me share
this on an earlier episode. It's one of my favorite stories. But many years ago, one of my clients decided that she wanted to practice being more patient, and she was in a senior leadership role. She was feeling very impatient with her team. She, you know, was just not really trusting their judgment or their decisions. And as a result of her impatience, she had a tendency to kind of overcorrect when something was a little bit off. And as a result of that, her team was feeling very
frustrated. And there was actually a lot of tension happening. And So what she decided to try, as we were working together, she said, you know, I'm going to try being a little more patient. You know, maybe it's even just like 10 percent, 15% more patient and a little bit more
curious. You know, she's like, if I can be more patient, that'll give me room to be more curious, to really hear out this person's ideas or their proposal or just let me stay with the curiosity and a little bit more patience and maybe I'll just try that for a week. It doesn't have to be a huge, you know, redo of everything. It doesn't have to be dramatic, but just, OK, I'm going to show up being a little more patient. And the way we practice this is
you choose this intention. How do you want to be? And then throughout the course of the day, you check in and you simply ask, how am I being right now? Am I being patient? I'm being curious, Am I being present? And if you are being those things, great, good job. And if you're not, then you simply correct in that moment and you ask yourself, oh, I'm not being very patient right now. How can I adjust for that given the circumstances and the
situation that I'm facing? Maybe it just means taking a breath before jumping in to share my ideas. Maybe it means I'm just going to hear this person out without jumping in with enthusiasm for my own perspective. So in that moment, you decide what can I do to bring a little bit more patients so that I can be a little bit more patient, a little bit more present in this moment? Let me just try that. So she tried that and she reported back to me that, you know, wow, things have been
really different. She's like, I had no idea that it would be so effective and changing the dynamic with my team. And over time, she became more trusting and more interested. They became more trusting and feeling more appreciative. And she ended up getting by surprise, a really great performance review. You know, she didn't, you know, she was doing OK, but she started to get really positive feedback, not just from her team, but from upper management who also had noticed this small
shift in how she was being. And so I want to share that with you because it can be easy to become overwhelmed with all of the tools and all of the ideas and all of the things that are happening really fast. And instead, you can think about how do I want to be in this moment? And it doesn't have to be a, you know, a complete change.
You can just think about how can I adjust 10 percent, 15%, something small and something in the way that you are going to be, the quality of presence and the quality of attention that you are going to bring into the moment. One of the cool things about mindfulness and about this work around setting intentions is that you get better at it as you continue to practice. It is a skill.
It is something that you can cultivate and develop and it can become more easy to do. And, and I like knowing that, right? It's kind of like wherever you start, you can begin to build right from where you are. So there's never a fear of, oh, I'm off track or oh, you know, I broke my streak. None of that. It's just in this moment, where am I? How am I doing OK and what can I do to adjust to bring me into greater alignment with that intention and to really show up
as the person that I want to be? Now, sometimes this is where it's really helpful to work with a coach or to work in a class with others who are working on this because we tend to do the thing we have done the most. We tend to repeat the most practiced thing. So if we're used to being very reactive or you know, being surrounded by anxiety and we kind of just absorb and then mirror that back. If you're used to doing that, then you will have an easy time
doing that again. And it will take a little bit of intention to start to lay the groundwork to shift that. So having a touch point where you can continue to both share your celebrations, share your intentions, notice who are the people or what are the specific situations that are the
trickiest for you. All of that can be easier when we're with someone, when we have a thought partner, a witness, someone to cheer us on. Because the other thing about being a leader is that it can get isolating and it can feel a little bit lonely because so much of the work that you're going to do can't be shared with the people reporting up to you. And sometimes it doesn't always feel right to make it visible or to share it with the your colleagues or with your manager.
So it's good to have that for yourself in some capacity. And remember, like again, this is not just you. This is something that I think of as a very normal part of the leadership developmental journey you're going to.
You realize how much emotional labor is required to do this job, and then you will need to cultivate for yourself a way of being so that it doesn't drain you so fully and that you feel more restored and can really be the kind of leader that you want to be. Well, you know, also being a happy and fulfilled human being as well. So that is what I wanted to share with you today. If this has been helpful, leave a rating or a review. If you'd like to do this work more deeply and fully with me,
There are two ways to do that. I am taking private clients so we can work one-on-one focused on who you are as a a person, focused on your goals and your situation. Or I do have a course coming up, so go into the show notes to find the link to that and be sure to sign up so that we can work together in that setting. All right, thank you so much for listening. Thanks for all the work you do. I hope you have a really great week and I will talk to you next
time. When you're more effective at work, you're happier in your life, and when you're happier in your life, you're more effective at work. I can help. Go to my website, kimnickel.com and sign up for a coaching consult. It can get better.