5 Ways Executive Therapy Can Transform Your Leadership
Being a leader can be both rewarding and challenging. Workplace demands can easily spill over into your personal life and vice versa. Given the interpersonal nature of leadership, it’s also possible that career growth can enhance your personal growth. Executive therapy can be a powerful tool for overcoming challenges, integrating learning, and elevating leadership and life success.
Let’s explore five ways therapy can be an effective tool in your leadership development journey.
1. Developing Emotional Intelligence (EI)
Emotional Intelligence (EI) is a critical intelligence for leaders. EI helps you to identify, effectively express, manage, and productively use your emotions (Salovey & Mayer, 1990). It also allows you to identify and effectively empathize with the feelings of others. How often have you been in a meeting when a big feeling arises in a colleague, and the whole meeting is derailed? Leaders with strong EI are more effective at facilitating interactions where emotions are high and managing the triggers they personally face in the workplace.
We are social animals, so it is normal to experience reactions to one another that hit us at a deep level. Therapy opens the door to learning more about your emotions and reactions and developing skills for supporting yourself and others through emotionally charged interactions. In addition, greater EI translates into more effective relationships, giving you the skills to build connections, engage with compassion, and motivate your teammates.
2. Confidence Building
Many leaders face Imposter Syndrome, a phenomenon where an individual fears exposure as an imposter (fraud). This fear perpetuates feelings of self-doubt, high levels of self-criticism, and perfectionism. It can also lead to symptoms of anxiety or depression.
Therapy provides a container to explore the underlying thoughts, patterns, and belief systems that lead to a lack of confidence in the workplace. It also offers the opportunity for skill building around boundary setting, effective communication, and stress management, all building confidence.
3. Balancing Work and Life
The demands of leadership can take a toll. Therapy helps you explore and implement stress management techniques. In addition, it’s a space to investigate how to create and maintain a rich and full personal life, which we know to be a complement to professional success.
Exploring mechanisms for balancing work and life in a way that aligns with your values has incredible personal and professional benefits. This balance can bring more connection in relationships, opportunities to invest in physical and psychological self-care, and a flow of creativity and innovation from living in a more balanced space.
4. Career Development
Your career will change throughout your life - and that’s normal! Research suggests that it’s likely that you will experience several career transitions throughout your life (Masdonati, Fresard, and Parameter, 2022). While navigating the experiences of working across a lifetime, it’s important to consider how you frame these transitions for yourself. The narrative you build about your career's ebbs and flows will significantly impact how you navigate sometimes challenging or uncertain times. Some therapists are trained in career development theory and techniques, offering an opportunity to explore your internal narratives about your career transition and to assess the possible next steps in your career journey.
5. Self-awareness
If you search Google Scholar for research articles on self-awareness and leadership, you’ll find abundant research demonstrating that self-awareness is crucial in effective leadership. Therapy is about raising self-awareness to understand and functionally align our behaviors, patterns, emotions, and identity. Your reactions in the workplace to your colleagues or specific situations beyond your control are born out of the patterns and internal narratives built early on and reinforced throughout your lifetime. We are more likely to struggle when we react unconsciously to the world around us. However, we can respond more productively when we raise awareness of ourselves in these interactions.
Therapy isn’t just useful in times of crisis or for treating a mental health condition; it is a vehicle for transforming leadership and strengthening relationships, including your relationship with yourself. If you’ve been considering therapy as a way to grow in your life and leadership, I urge you to reach out to a qualified mental health professional. Reaching out for support and using our resources shows inner strength and courage. You hold the wisdom within you; embrace the power of therapy to help you access it.
ABOUT ME
Hello! I’m Karen, a psychologist specializing in supporting leaders to care for their mental health and improve their heart-centered leadership through a journey of self-discovery in therapy. I write blog posts like this to indulge my passion for writing and provide information to those interested in self-development. This blog is for information purposes only and is not a form of or replacement for psychological service or treatment. If you live in Oregon and are interested in working with me, please consider checking out my website to learn more about me and my services.
References
Masdonati, J., Frésard, C. É., and Parmentier, M. (2022). Involuntary career changes: a lonesome social experience. Front. Psychol. 13:899051. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.899051Salovey, P., & Mayer, J. D. (1990). Emotional intelligence. Imagination, Cognition, and Personality, 9(3), 185-211.
