How Insecurity Kills Productivity And What To Do About It

You'll know insecurity is festering in your workplace when you start loathing the next meeting you go to… and worse, when you leave that meeting feeling frustrated, angry or tense.

If your boss was leading that meeting, watch out. Don't expect him to change. Don't attempt to change him.

My best advice is to move. Move sideways. Move up. Or move out. Your life is too short to be stuck in a quagmire of backstabbing, belittling and bullying.

But, if you were the leader of that awful meeting, it was your fault. And you can fix it.

Insecurity as Productivity Killer

Where is this feeling of insecurity coming from?

Your world of family and friends has expectations of you. Can you meet them? How much you doubt yourself, you'll feel insecure.

But know, most of us have at least some sense that, "Someday, we'll be found out… I'm just masquerading through all this." It's okay to feel doubt. A little can boost your productivity.

But too much insecurity? This will lead to:

• Stifling curiosity and extinguishing innovation
• Too much short-term focus, and not seeing the bigger long term plan
• Wasting energy by always trying to impress people
• Growing insecurity in your team members, because people tend to mirror the behaviours of their leaders

It's quite likely you've got all the logical and analytical skills to do your job. You have the IQ. All too often, though, you lose your compassion and empathy when you step into leadership positions. It's stemming from your insecurity.

And if you're feeling too much insecurity, you're likely weak in the area of EI.

Emotional Intelligence Is The Cure

In the 1990s, Daniel Goleman popularized the concept of Emotional Intelligence (EI) in his book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (1995, Bantam Books).

Goleman defines EI with four ability dimensions related to your emotions and the emotions of others:

1. Being self-aware of your own emotions in the present moment
2. Managing your emotions in the present moment (like staying calm in stressful situations)
3. Understanding the emotions of others through empathy and organizational awareness
4. Managing your relationships with effective communication and extending an honest helping hand to others.

High intelligence isn't as valuable as being self-aware, level-headed, empathetic and anxiety-free.

Mean, aggressive behaviour is not a character trait that pays off over time. (Sorry Gordon Ramsay. You make for entertaining TV, but you're nothing we should be modelling in real life.)

So what should we be modelling?

How To Cultivate Emotional Intelligence

Goleman asserts that we can all learn EI. It isn't something relatively fixed at birth like IQ.

It starts with awareness.

The goal is not to become a self-control brute who keeps emotions under control. Change comes from being aware of your emotions.

Be in the present moment and be intentionally aware of your current thoughts and actions.

Start with meditation. You don't need to go to lotus-land to do this. You can sit still. You can go for a walk. You can go for a run or a bike ride. Focus on your breath.

Whatever your modality for meditation, you need to get to a mind state where your background information processing comes to the surface. And then you tell it to go away.

Think about your body and what it is doing right now, in the present moment.

Intruding thoughts will inevitably be about some past or future concern you hold. Acknowledge the thought, but tell it gently, "Not right now. Be on your way."

With practice — even just five daily minutes of mindfulness — you can grasp stability and self-possession. This allows you to hear subtle messages in your conversations with others. And it can keep you from reacting with immediate passion to those messages. You'll be calm when it's really needed.

It's this type of dispassionate thought that Yale psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer found correlated with success outcomes in their 1990 experiments in EI.

And cultivating mindfulness is what US Congressman Tim Ryan advocates in his book A Mindful Nation: How a Simple Practice Can Help Us Reduce Stress, Improve Performance and Recapture the American Spirit (2012, Hay House).  

Leaders Beware

When you find yourself as a leader, in any position of power, you'll lose some EI. You'll tend to focus on your own needs. You'll begin to think the principles of EI no longer fully apply to you. You'll be thinking, "Hey, I'm in control here now." And you'll be wrong.

You need to continually work on the neural pathways supporting your self-awareness. This will help you to build even better social skills.

There's a story about Gandhi to consider here. He would spend at least an hour a day in meditation. One of his backers told him he was far too busy to meditate. Gandhi replied, "Well, then, I now need to set aside two hours a day to do meditation."

By Kevin Rokosh

References:
strategy + business: Tea and Empathy with Daniel Goleman
Daniel Goleman: How To Hear Your Inner Voice
strategy + business: Don't Let Insecurity Infect Your Business

Why You'll Never Succeed At Work-Life Balance

Do you have a job, or a calling? This is the key to unlocking the mystery of Work-Life Balance.

At the end of your workday, are you looking forward to leaving the desk behind? Or would you rather spend a little more time there because you really don't want to shut down? Your mind is still bubbling with ideas.

But if you can't wait to head home, for the sake of a sane life I hope you'll find your calling.

Life is far too short to be punching clocks the whole way through. Yes, a certain degree of going through the motions will be necessary. Discovery is a sweaty process. Dangerous even. Just look what happened to the Franklin Expedition. Self discovery can be like that too.

Surprise and disappointment are sage — and sometimes sadistic — teachers. Learn from these philosophers.

But while you're working — or should I call this exploring — look for clues that point you in the direction of your calling.

Capture the clues. Keep a journal every day. Use a voice recorder. Even a simple stack of index cards works well for recording ideas.

Schedule a weekly review appointment with yourself and cull those clues.

Yes, make it an appointment on your calendar. There's about a 75% greater chance you'll do the review if it's placed on your calendar.

It'll be messy at times. Embrace the mess.

But once you find your calling, you'll begin to smile. Happiness and fulfillment will follow. And those emotions are infectious. Your friends and families will also begin smiling around you more often.

Forget looking for work-life balance. Find life in your work.

While engaged with friends, keep the ideas bubbling. You can have fun and think at the same time, can't you?

Just have a system for capturing those ideas as they arise while dancing through the rest of your life. Remember the journal, the voice recorder, the index cards.

The world needs your ideas, your energy. Don't turn them off. Work and life don't have to be separate. Guilt is born from thinking they should be.

You'll never succeed at work-life balance because there is no balance.

There is only life. It's calling. How will you answer?