As senior leaders, we’re paid to be in the driver’s seat. Our ability to make high-stakes decisions based on sound reasoning is what fuels our ongoing success and strategic impact. But let’s be honest, the pressure can be immense. In our fast-paced world, many executives feel like they’re playing an unwinnable game, struggling with overwhelm and the constant need to make tough calls with incomplete information. It’s a reality I’m hearing more and more from leaders at our firm.
That’s why on the latest episode of the Life + Leadership podcast, I dove into the wisdom of “grounded leaders”—those who manage to deliver top-level performance even in the face of overwhelm and uncertainty. We explored how to build resilience, cultivate a support system, and, most importantly, sharpen our executive decision-making skills.
This post will give you a glimpse into some of the key takeaways from this episode, offering practical techniques you can implement today. For a deeper dive into these strategies, be sure to tune in to the podcast.
The Overwhelm is Real. You Are Not Alone.
First and foremost, let’s normalize this feeling. The intensity of today’s business environment is new, and it’s not going away anytime soon. As a result, it’s not uncommon for leaders to feel a decrease in their confidence, especially when a tough call doesn’t work out as hoped. It’s a healthy and normal part of the executive experience to waver every now and then. The key isn’t to never feel overwhelmed or lack confidence, but to be aware of it, name it, and have a plan to recover.
A critical part of this is what I call “psychological hygiene”. It’s a mental discipline we must practice to avoid living in a constant state of what-ifs and worst-case scenarios. It means being able to take the scary-looking thing out of the box, work through it, and then put it back, giving your brain a much-needed break.
Leaning on Your Intuition: The New Executive Competency
For decades, the standard for executive decision-making was to “pull the data” and use it to inform every choice. But in our current climate of unprecedented variables and a lack of clear data, something has changed. Leaders are increasingly relying on their intuition and gut feelings to make decisions. I’m a firm believer that the ability to use our intuition has become a critical executive competency.
So, how can you start to tune into your intuition?
- Name It: Begin to acknowledge the moments when you are using your gut to make a call, even if you don’t have all the data.
- Discern Fear from Intuition: It’s a practice to separate what’s a genuine gut feeling from what’s a fear-based reaction. For some, fear can make it difficult to access intuition.
- Listen to the Whispers: Intuition can show up as a lightning bolt of clarity, but it can also be a subtle, nagging feeling that something just doesn’t feel right.
- Ask for Guidance: In a private moment, try asking your intuition, “What are you trying to show me? What do I need to know?” and listen to what comes up without judgment.
By practicing this, you can learn to trust your instincts more intentionally, turning an unspoken skill into a powerful tool for executive decision-making.
The Power of Your People: Crowdsourcing Clarity
While the buck ultimately stops with you, you don’t have to go it alone. One of the most effective ways to make decisions when data is scarce is to lean on the collective intelligence of your team and peers. This isn’t about abdicating responsibility; it’s about crowdsourcing clarity.
Here are a couple of ways you can do this:
- Poke Holes in Your Idea: If you have a potential direction, present it to your team and ask them to actively poke holes in it. This helps you stress-test your thinking and identify potential blind spots.
- Open the Floor: You can also open the floor without an opinion, asking your team, “If you had to make this decision, what would it be and why?” Then, simply listen to their perspectives without becoming a sparring partner.
Your job is to synthesize everything you’ve heard to make the final decision. Your team’s diverse brains and experiences are a powerful source of “data” when traditional metrics aren’t available.
The True Work of Executive Leadership
Ultimately, thriving as a leader in this complex environment is about more than just making smart decisions. It’s about building healthy habits and a robust support system.
- Physical Wellness: Top-performing executives tend to have a regular wellness practice that focuses on their physicality, whether it’s a dedicated fitness routine or simply cooking dinner every night. This commitment to yourself is part of what allows you to show up with energy and make better decisions.
- Safe Confidants: Senior leadership can be an isolating space, and it’s essential to have safe relationships where you can be honest about your overwhelm. This might be with a partner, a trusted peer, a therapist, or a coach. You must express your feelings somewhere in order to be well.
- Positive Self-Talk: When your confidence is shaken, it’s crucial to give yourself permission to not always nail it. Remind yourself that you’re doing complex, high-stakes work, and that “this is part of the gig”. The ability to recover is what truly matters. If you’ve made an executive mistake and need guidance, check out our recent episode on recovery strategies.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed or like your confidence has taken a hit, you are not alone. True leadership isn’t about always getting it right; it’s about how you get back up. This care isn’t a luxury—it’s part of leadership itself.
Ready to enhance your executive decision-making and performance? At Bright Arrow Coaching, we specialize in helping leaders build the resilience, clarity, and confidence needed to thrive. Learn more about how we can support you in making tough decisions with conviction.
In this Episode:
Tegan Trovato, Founder and CEO of Bright Arrow Coaching:
Bright Arrow Bio
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Podcast Transcript:
As leaders, we’re comfortable in the driver’s seat. That’s where we prefer to be most of the time.
And our ability to make decisions is based on well-founded reasoning. It’s what supports our ongoing leadership success. So, as we continue to develop and advance in our careers, that decision-making becomes increasingly critical and high-stakes.
So, in today’s episode, we’re going to let you in on the wisdom of grounded leaders who navigate these dynamics daily. All leaders face overwhelm. It’s their right to feel overwhelmed.
Understanding Overwhelm in Leadership
We’re in a chapter right now where I have heard most leaders, not just half of the leaders like it used to be, but almost all the leaders coming through our firm saying that they are overwhelmed and they feel like they are having to play an unwinnable game. And this intensity is new as of the last several months, but I don’t expect it’s going away anytime soon. And what’s tricky is, as our leadership culture in the United States shifts, it doesn’t always shift back all the way to where it used to be.
And the reason I’m saying that is that it’s opportune for us to be aware of this possibility so that we learn to navigate overwhelm differently if we need to. So, those leaders who manage to deliver truly top-level performance and manage through the overwhelm tend to have some practices in common. So, number one, they are aware of the overwhelm.
They name it and they normalize it within themselves. When executives feel gaslit by their boards or even their employee population or themselves, that is not a healthy place to be rooted. And so, what I mean by being gaslit is circumstances are out of control.
Like, the speed of change is impossible to keep up with. And so, we have to be able to say that to ourselves. It is impossible to keep up with this.
I’m always going to do my best, but it is impossible to be perfect, it is impossible to always get it right. And our stakeholders are not always saying that to us in our seats. And so, it is our job not to feel gaslit or to allow that to happen and to really stay clear in our understanding of how challenging our operating contexts are right now.
Practices for Performance and Wellness
So, I think that’s one. And that’s partly rooted in some wellness. Some psychological hygiene is a phrase that our listeners hear me use a lot.
So, let’s move into psychological hygiene a little bit. Psychological hygiene, a term I made up, it’s essentially our ability to practice healthy compartmentalization when we need it. And you’ve probably heard me in other episodes talking about, look at the possibilities, play out the scenarios.
How bad might it get? How well may it go? But don’t live in what’s possible.
Live in what we know is today and the near future. And we can’t, as execs, if we totally compartmentalize, we’re not doing our jobs. So, I’m not suggesting that.
I am suggesting that we develop and practice, because it’s an ongoing practice, the mental discipline to take the scary or ugly looking thing out of the box, look it in the face, name it, work through the thing, put it back in the box. And that thing could be, what if our numbers drop? What if we have to reduce employee headcount?
What if we lose our biggest client? Right? Like those are the things that keep us up at night.
What if we lose some of our top employees over some decision that has to be made? These are our realities. But we can’t live in the emotion of that constantly.
We have to practice psychological hygiene and give ourselves the break. Let our brains take a break. Let our emotions take a break.
So, I think that’s a big part of it. Another thing I see from executives who perform really well under this level of pressure and ambiguity is that they have some kind of wellness practice. And I’m not just talking about they eat well.
I’m talking about they live in their bodies. They move in their bodies. They have some regular ritual that focuses on their physicality.
And that may be that they cook dinner every night. Maybe they’re not moving their bodies as much. But there’s something that they tend to do.
Most of them tend to have some kind of fitness practice. I have one myself. I’m super devoted to it.
And I’ll speak from my own experience here to say that even when I’m exhausted, which I am from time to time, I still do my workouts. They may not be as intense. I may not want to brag about them later.
But it got done. And what it does for me is it raises my energy. So, even if I’ve only gotten a few hours of sleep due to whatever random circumstance, I feel better after I exercise.
And that bit of injection of energy makes my brain work better. I make better decisions. I then sleep better the next night.
So, look, I know how hard it is to get up and stay committed to your physicality when you are dead tired. But we know, and I know, and science tells us that if we can just do a little bit of it and keep our commitment to ourselves, we get some energy back. On the note of commitment to ourselves, that’s part of the practice.
It’s not just about your physical health. It’s about having the habit of keeping your commitments to yourself and having that gym time or always cooking dinner at night, whatever it is that is for your wellness and your well-being and your health. Continuing to do that daily is part of what being good to ourselves looks like.
And it is a habit that we need to wire into ourselves. On the note of overwhelm and not allowing ourselves to be gaslit by some of our stakeholders who think this should just be so easy. Where we get to share that overwhelm is really limited in the executive space.
And I think this is where some of us are really privileged to have partners that we can come home to and say, I am so overwhelmed right now. And if we’re lucky, they just say, I see you, I hear you, can I hug you? And it’s amazing how transformative that small moment can be.
And in times of overwhelm, you may need that more days than not. Ideally, that’s one of our safe places. And if we’re lucky too, in those partnerships, those are people who aren’t going to judge us either.
They’re just going to be like, I know how brilliant you are. And of course, it makes sense you’re overwhelmed and I love you. Another place that we can practice that vulnerability is ideally with peers with whom we have healthy relationships.
And this is again, I’m such a broken record on this topic. We have other episodes on this if you want to go back and listen to the importance of having healthy peer relationships at work. Sometimes those peers are inside your organization.
Sometimes they may not be. I mean, some of my peers, of course, are not inside of our company. And I hold counsel with them regularly when I need something or just need to air out a challenge and want a thought partner.
Thankfully, I also have Maggie, our COO, for that inside of our company. So it is worth making sure that you have developed and if you have not, that you begin to develop those safe relationships with explicitly stated norms between you, that what is shared remains confidential and private, and ideally is never used against you and that you’re in a culture where that’s not a thing. But we do have to own that at senior levels of leadership, it can hurt you to be honest about your level of overwhelm, depending on who hears about it.
And I hate to say that, but I would be lying if I wasn’t overt about that. But it has to go somewhere. So please hear that that is my follow up comment.
Be very discerning about who has the privilege of hearing about your overwhelm and understanding the contents of your overwhelm. And know that it must go somewhere in order for you to be well and whole. You may have to pay that person.
Maybe you have to pay a therapist or a coach to listen to you talk about your overwhelm. Nothing wrong with that. We must be expressed as humans and as leaders.
If we have to go constantly into the firing squad or into the fire, maybe there’s no firing squad, maybe it’s just hot all the time, all the things we’re having to deal with. We have to be held by someone in our private lives or in our friendships or in our peer relationships at work in order to be free enough to go and operate at that level of performance all the time. A couple of other key pieces that allow executives to perform at their peak despite overwhelm and just crazy context in the business is that they have organized the work through their teams and the teams are super clear on what they need to go and deliver.
If you cannot slow your spinning wheel down within yourself enough to go and explain with poise and calm and clarity what it is everyone else needs to do, you have missed the mark. So making sure that everyone who reports to you is super clear on the direction and the value they’re bringing is part of what frees you up to operate in the overwhelm, having trust that below you there are wheels spinning a little more methodically at a little bit more of a calmer pace than you may be feeling from your seat. So I think that that’s another big piece is providing that clarity to the rest of the organization and ensuring that progress is being made there allows you to then focus on the parts that only you can deliver on in absence of your team.
Navigating Decisions and Building Confidence
So let’s say you’re doing all of those things. You have the discipline of the practices for wellness, your teams are totally clear on what they need to be going and delivering, you’re keeping them updated as you go, you’re not allowing yourself to be gaslit, you’re staying anchored into the reality of what’s happening for you and to you and with you, then the next layer is upon you as an executive and that is that constant challenge of having to make tough calls with incomplete information. And I would venture to say that the need to do this exploded during COVID.
So I remember holding counsel with executives through that time and you know everything was unprecedented. You know that was a word I was ready to retire by 2022, unprecedented, unprecedented. Well the amount of decision-making that was happening without data was truly that.
Because the variables upon us had literally never happened before. We have never experienced a global pandemic in our lifetimes. We certainly had not had this level of business complexity to operate with those conditions alongside of us.
You could not predict which industries would swim and which we’re gonna take. It was madness and all the businesses had to keep running and all the executives still had to make decisions. So what I will say is that there’s a lot we can learn from that chapter that is still true today with the level of volatility we’re experiencing and the lack of data that continues to be here.
So here we are five years later and we have new business contexts that we have never been through before that we’re operating in. And some of it, they’re not new, but they’ve never occurred all at the same time. So once again, executives are having to find their way through it.
The Rise of Intuition in Executive Leadership
There’s a couple of buzzwords here. One is intuition. So when I first started coaching and I was in executive search decades ago and sitting with executives, we did not talk about intuition.
When I would ask executives how they arrived at decisions, their decision-making process, how they collaborated with their teams, all the questions you’ve heard asked in your interviews as executives, the answers were really consistently the same. You know, it was pull the data, use the data to make the decision, maybe got tested with a mentor. But now if I ask that question and as we hold private counsel with CEOs, the answer is often I’m working from intuition.
I’m working from my gut because there is not data. We have some data, but we’re still making guesses with that data. So I’m a believer that intuition and the ability to use our intuition has become an executive competency.
Now, Corn Fairy hasn’t named it yet, but I believe they will soon. You heard it here first. So I really do believe that the science around executive competencies is going to begin to acknowledge that, you know, a leader’s ability to sense beyond tangible assets and data and make decisions using that sensing.
It will be named as a skill if it’s not already being done more widely. I’m calling that out here for listeners so that you can start to acknowledge how often you are using your intuition. So we’ll sit with execs and I’ll talk with CEOs and I’ll ask, how did you arrive at that decision?
And they will use every word but gut and intuition because we’re still not wiring it in that, like, that’s actually what happened here. You synthesize as much data as you have, but the data did not give you a clear direction to go in. The choice you made was from your gut.
And so my challenge to you, if you’re listening, is to begin tuning into those moments when you are using your intuition or your gut and just start to acknowledge it more. Because by naming it, you can begin using it more intentionally and trusting it. That’s a coaching exercise, coaching homework for you on that front.
A couple of other points on intuition that are interesting to think about is that tapping into our intuition can feel a little different for each person. For me, if I am in a fearful state, I can often not access my intuition. I question what I believe is my intuition because I’m afraid.
Like, I’m afraid I’ll make the wrong decision. I’m afraid I don’t have enough info. Like, so we have this battle where getting clear on what’s intuition and what’s fear is part of the practice.
That’s why I always say to start naming your intuition. So I think that’s one thing to consider when we try to work with our gut a little more in the decision-making process. Also, sometimes intuition shows up like a lightning bolt moment where the clarity just strikes and you all of a sudden know the answer.
And for whatever reason, you are not questioning it. Again, you may not have anything tangible that’s telling you that is the right direction, but something in you spoke and you just knew and you are going forward with that decision. So sometimes it shows up as a lightning bolt.
Sometimes it whispers to us. It can be this nagging thing that you’re like, okay, everything I’m looking at here on paper tells me we might consider going in a particular direction, but something’s just bothering me about that. Something just doesn’t feel right.
That’s your intuition also speaking. This is another great question you could ask yourself. This is a coaching technique.
So ask your intuition in a private moment. What are you trying to show me? What is it you wish to say to me?
Like allow it to be embodied almost like another person and say, intuition, what do I need to know? What are you trying to show me? And whatever comes up, you don’t judge it.
Just hear it out. So it’s another way you can play with it and see how it shows up. Other ways to operate and to make decisions without as much data as you’d like is to start leaning on your next level of team more.
There’s a couple of reasons this is important. One, more brains is almost always better than one. Well, we can pool our collective intelligence.
We’re really unstoppable. We know that the buck ultimately stops with us. We can go gather all of the opinions we want from folks, but ultimately you still have to be the one that makes that ultimate call.
I do think it’s really smart to pull some great minds into the room. They could be cross-functional. They may not be all your direct reports and say, hey, here’s what I have synthesized about this business challenge or the opportunity, whatever the thing is you have to make a decision about.
Here’s what I believe in terms of where we need to go. Maybe you don’t have a belief. Maybe you’re simply saying, I don’t have a belief on where we’re going with this.
I want to source the room. One way you could play this is if you do have an opinion on which way you should go, ask them to blow it up for you. Poke holes in this like you don’t believe in it.
And then someone else build the case for why this is the perfect idea. Just see what happens. You’ll learn a ton.
And then the other side, like I said, is you could open the floor to just say, I don’t really have an opinion yet on where we go. I want to hear from you. If you had to make this decision, what would your decision be and why?
And just go around the room and crowdsource. But the key, if you’re gonna facilitate things like this, is to not then re-engage with them. Allow them to play this out with you and just listen.
You don’t want to become a sparring partner where they’re having to defend themselves. The point is, and let them be sparring partners together, perhaps. But if you’re going to facilitate and try to pull information from a room, be careful you don’t shut it down with your facilitation approach.
So I think that that’s another piece. And then there’s always the classic, like, pull in a mentor if you need to make a decision. Or a cross-functional peer can be really helpful.
Again, if you have the safety with that peer to say, I’m not clear. Here’s what I’m looking at. What’d you do if you were me?
And then also looking to past experience to inform the future. So asking yourself, have I ever been here before? If you really think hard enough, I’m not sure that at this point in our careers we’ll say, I’ve never been here.
We will have probably been in a similar enough situation to say, oh, what did I do before here? And are there other businesses who’ve had to make similar decisions? What are the case studies on that?
How did that play out? And then, of course, talking to mentors or peers and say, have you ever dealt with something like this or something similar in your own world to this business problem? Tell me your thoughts.
If you really have something complicated on your hands, you may do a mix of a lot of those things to arrive at your clarity. But then ultimately your job is to sit back and synthesize everything you’ve heard and make that decision yourself. I often have this visual and as an executive and as a strategic thinker, where if I could project my brain onto a screen, it would probably look like some of the sci-fi movies we saw 10, 20 years ago, where there’s like all the data maps popping up and all of the green lights going in squares and circles across processing.
I feel like that’s what happens in our heads as executives a lot of times. But if we don’t have the kind of data we’re accustomed to, meaning literal business data, literal financial data may not exist for the scenario you’re working on, go pull data out of other people’s brains, that is their previous experience and their opinions, and then synthesize that. See how that informs your decision making process.
Rebuilding Confidence When Things Go Sideways
One of the things I feel most humble about when it comes to leadership is that you can do all these brilliant things I’m suggesting, right? Like take good care of yourself, lean into your other stakeholders, be a super innovative thinker and decision maker, use your intuition, and you can do your best work every day and the hits will keep coming for you, right? That’s part of being a senior leader.
So it isn’t uncommon for leaders to feel a decrease in their confidence, especially if one of these tough calls you’re having to make just doesn’t work out the way we hoped it would. So if you are momentarily struggling with confidence, first and foremost, I want you to hear me say that I have yet to meet a single executive who doesn’t periodically struggle with this, and sometimes even frequently these days struggle with it. This is why we’ve been calling some of this business context an unwinnable game.
It’s hard to feel like you’re on top. It’s hard to feel like you got your footing and you got to keep it for very long. So what I’d like for you to do is to normalize yourself and that also remember that if we felt confident all the time, that would be a psychological disorder.
So high five if you do not identify with that. There is something called fantasized talent out in the executive world where you just unable to internalize that we do miss stuff, that we are not perfect. Take that into consideration, like it’s healthy to waver every now and then.
And it’s normal. It’s the recovery that matters. And some of the ways that you would recover, I would point you back to the very people I suggested you have as your support system for this.
Sometimes we need people to remind us of our greatness. I am not exempt from that. There are a couple of folks in my life, I will call and tell them if I’m having a hard time or I feel like I fell on my face on something and they know that’s the phone call.
They’re like, let me remind you, Tegan. Let me remind you of everything you did to get here. Let me remind you of what the world is experiencing because you’re doing X and Y.
Those are the friends we need. And ideally, for sure, oh my God, I hope that lives in our peer relationships at work because there’s really few people who understand more than your peers what it’s like at work. So ideally, we offer that to our peers and we receive that from our peers.
And hopefully there’s someone or someones, multiple people in our lives who are special to us and who understand us and really appreciate and honor how we walk the earth and what it is we’re doing in our day jobs and beyond that can just lift us up. So that’s number one. And that’s super intimate.
And I would argue that might be the most important piece. When you get down to the bottom of the barrel, sometimes you really don’t have the energy to pick yourself up. That is also normal.
And we can really isolate ourselves as leaders because we don’t want to have to talk about the tough stuff. We’re largely paid to have it put together and to make everyone else feel comfortable about the path ahead. And so that practice of being honest about not feeling confident is a direct conflict with what we’ve been propped up to do.
And I acknowledge that. So having that safe place and those people who cheer us on is super important. The other thing is the internal talk that we have around what’s happening in our business life.
So as we have discussed at length here, we’re dealing with things that most execs have not dealt with before, not in isolation, but the mix of the variables is kind of never been faced before by other executive leaders. And so it is important for us to be able to normalize that and remember that those who have gone before us have probably not had to lead the things we’re leading and have not required the amount of breathtaking resilience that it takes to keep getting up and going. And so I think our ability to have positive self-talk in that knowing of like, of course, I missed something.
Of course, it makes sense that something might have gone south. I made the best decision I could in absence of data and sometimes in absence of internal support. These are big, heavy, complex things that either lead to a win or a miss.
There’s very seldom a single variable that leads to a decision being a bad one. Outside of just a blatant ego driving you, you are making the best decision you can with a lot of variables that are out of your control. And so normalizing yourself in that and owning within yourself, this is part of the gig.
So when your confidence is shaken, the mantra is, this is part of the gig. I will get back up. And you should reflect on other times this has happened and remind yourself it is not game over.
You know, I’ve encouraged organizations via some of our other podcasts to really think about what we do as a culture when we fail. You know, like how do we support our employees and our leaders when we encourage them to innovate, but then it doesn’t go well. So we are never going to have a culture of risk-taking and innovation without the permission to not always nail it.
And you have to give yourself that permission as well in your personal life. And then also, a lot of times execs are being forced to operate in work streams or projects or initiatives that maybe are not their favorites. And all of us can identify with work that we love and work that we do because we must.
And so I think in times when our confidence is shaken, we can intentionally shift some of our effort and energy into the parts of the work that we really love that nourish us. Now, you have to be careful you don’t over index as a coping mechanism. So you heard it here.
That is a tendency under stress is to revert to work where it just really feels good. But I am encouraging you to intentionally dip into it as a way to get energy back and to remind yourself of your greatness and to rebuild your confidence with some quick hits. This can happen in a week.
You can attend a couple of meetings on a thing you really love and just feel like you made a difference and you’re back in your seat. So I think that’s part of it. And then practicing that psychological discipline or that psychological hygiene I talked about at the opening in times when your confidence is shaken is very important.
So this is my recommendation for all people. Instead of ruminating, conduct a time bound postmortem. So if the thing didn’t go well, put it on the page to look at where was the miss.
You can blame yourself privately. You can blame others privately. Whatever you need to do to work your process of like, where did this go wrong?
I think it’s healthy. You might learn something. But that’s a private experience I’m encouraging here.
Maybe you want to do something like that with your team. But in this moment, I’m talking about you and your confidence. So do a postmortem on the thing that didn’t go well and state your earned wisdom from it.
Here’s what I know now. Here’s what I got out of it. Here’s how I’m going to use it going forward.
Here’s how I’m smarter and better because I went through this. And is there recovery you need to do? Sure.
Talk about that to yourself. Think about that. And then give yourself permission to put it away.
I’m talking 20 minutes. You don’t need to spend much time on this. But the reason I encourage time bound is if you don’t do this and give yourself permission, just take it all apart.
Look at all the ugly stuff. Bless it. Thank it for the experience.
Gain the wisdom. Put it away. Then you are constantly thinking about it.
It’s in the shower every morning with you. It’s in your closet when you’re getting dressed. It’s riding to work with you when you drop the kids off at school.
It follows you into the office. It taints your mood. I mean, it is like a blanket.
And you will wrestle with that thing in your head. Also normal. It’s part of having a brain.
Part of being conscious is having some control over your brain by doing exercises like a time bound postmortem and putting that baby to bed. I’m not saying it’s not going to come back up, but I promise you with that exercise, it will feel less intrusive, less constant. So that’s another way to really try to work on getting that confidence back is to just sit with the ugly thing for a minute and see what wisdom it gave you and allow yourself to move on.
So if you’re feeling overwhelmed or like your confidence has taken a hit, you are not alone. This is the reality for so many executives right now. What matters most is that you stay aware, take care of yourself and keep practicing the discipline of clear thinking, reflection and recovery.
Build your support systems, lean on your people. And remember, confidence isn’t about always getting it right. It’s about how you get back up.
You’re doing complex, high stakes work. Be good to yourself while you do it. That care is not a luxury.
It’s part of leadership.
