In Part One, we looked at Dr Emily Anhalt's research with 100 leaders and 100 psychologists. She identified seven factors that help measure how emotionally "fit" we are.
We covered the first three: learning our emotional triggers and biases, understanding the emotions of others and finding comfort in discomfort.
Now we come to the remaining four.
These move us from understanding ourselves toward something even more challenging: building meaningful connections, recovering from setbacks, asking others for help and actually implementing what we learn.
That last point may be the toughest of them all.
Why do leaders need a psychologically safe space outside work?
Leaders need relationships and environments where they can relax, lower their guard and simply be themselves.Constantly operating as "the boss" without somewhere psychologically safe to decompress can leave leaders increasingly isolated.
"Psychological safety" has become a familiar term in business, but leaders need it too.
Ideally, that safe space may come from family and close friends. Here is the rub: leaders are often so busy working that they don't invest enough time in developing those relationships.
I put my hand up for this one.
I am in permanent imbalance trying to get the balance right.
Work projects continually compete with family, friendships, hobbies and interests. For those of us working in Japan, there can be an additional complication because we may be thousands of kilometres away from the friends and colleagues we grew up with.
Isolation isn't a good long-term leadership strategy.
Do now: Deliberately invest time in family, friendships, hobbies and interests where you can stop being "the boss" and simply be yourself.
How can leaders bounce forward after failure and setbacks?
Emotionally fit leaders don't erase failure; they acknowledge what happened, extract what they can learn and refuse to let the past control their future. The objective isn't merely to bounce back but to bounce forward.
Being positive sounds easy.
We tell ourselves that failures aren't really failures. They are opportunities to grow and learn.
Except we often don't behave that way.
Instead, we beat ourselves up and keep replaying the video of the disaster in our minds. We remember what we said, what we should have done and how badly things turned out.
That mental replay starts interfering with the work sitting in front of us.
Our confidence shrinks. We take fewer risks. Our world of possibilities becomes smaller.
The memory may remain, but we don't have to continually feed it with worry.
That was then.
This is now.
Do now: When an old failure returns to your mind, acknowledge it, capture the lesson and consciously return your attention to what you can influence today.
How can leaders stop worrying about mistakes from the past?
Being unhappy about something that happened is different from repeatedly worrying about it. We may not control when an unpleasant memory appears, but we can work on whether we allow it to dominate our thinking.
This distinction is important.
We cannot magically remove painful memories. They have an irritating habit of popping up whether invited or not.
The question is what happens next.
Instead of climbing aboard the mental train and travelling all the way back into the disaster, note what happened and move on.
"Yes, that happened."
"Yes, I wish I had handled it differently."
"Yes, I learned something."
And then stop.
The circumstances have changed. You have changed. The world has moved on.
Leadership requires enough emotional capacity to deal with today's problems without continually dragging yesterday's problems along behind us.
Do now: Note the memory without feeding the worry. Extract the lesson, recognise that circumstances have changed and return your attention to the present.
Why should leaders express their needs and ask for support?
Modern leadership is too complex for the old heroic model in which the boss is expected to know everything, need nothing and solve every problem alone. Emotionally fit leaders recognise when they need support and are willing to ask for it.
I grew up in macho Australia.
The strong, silent type was the model. If you had needs, you sorted them out yourself. Feelings were kept safely out of sight.
Asking for help? Forget it.
The assumption was that rivals would despise you, bosses wouldn't trust you and your team wouldn't follow you if they detected vulnerability.
Business today is different.
Technology, speed and complexity have made the heroic boss a relic from another era. There is simply too much going on for one person to possess all the answers.
I tell my son not to be like Dad. Ask people for support and help. Don't imagine you have to do everything yourself like I did.
Do now: Identify one area where you are unnecessarily carrying the load alone and ask someone you trust for help, advice or support.
Should leaders show vulnerability and share their feelings?
Leaders can acknowledge that they are imperfect and still retain authority, but vulnerability requires judgement about what to share, how to share it and with whom.
Sharing feelings is tricky territory.
I don't think the answer is for the boss to suddenly unload every insecurity and emotional difficulty onto the team. Leaders still have responsibilities and their behaviour affects everyone around them.
We should be careful who we trust and how we express what we are feeling.
But there is nothing wrong with acknowledging that we are not perfect.
In fact, telling the team that we are still a work in progress can be healthy.
Leadership authority doesn't require pretending we have achieved some mythical state of perfection.
The team already knows we haven't.
Appropriate honesty can make the leader more human and strengthen trust.
Do now: Don't confuse leadership authority with pretending to be perfect. Use appropriate vulnerability to demonstrate self-awareness while maintaining your responsibility as the leader.
How should leaders respond to negative feedback?
Leaders should separate the useful information contained in feedback from the poor delivery, emotional language or invective surrounding it. Feedback can be painful, but even badly delivered criticism may contain something worth learning.
The problem is that very few people have actually been trained to give feedback properly.
So we are constantly being hammered by amateurs.
They may choose the wrong words, the wrong timing and the wrong tone. They may bundle useful observations together with exaggeration, emotion or personal criticism.
Our natural response is to reject the whole thing.
That can be a mistake.
Instead, parse it.
What part might be accurate?
What can I learn?
What should I change?
Then discard the rest and ignore the invective.
Emotional fitness means becoming capable of extracting value even when the package it arrives in isn't particularly attractive.
Do now: The next time you receive uncomfortable feedback, separate its content from its delivery and look deliberately for the useful 5% hiding inside.
How can leaders actually implement what they learn?
Leadership development only creates value when learning changes behaviour, so leaders need to concentrate on a small number of high-impact actions rather than trying to implement everything.
If only this were as easy as it sounds.
We are creatures of habit and we all love change.
The problem is we love change in other people.
We want the organisation to change, the boss to change, the clients to change and the team to change.
Meanwhile, we would prefer to stay exactly as we are.
I have accumulated thousands of pages of notes over the years. But how much of everything I have learned have I actually implemented in my work and life?
That is the uncomfortable question.
The answer isn't trying to do everything.
Use the Pareto Principle. Better still, use the Pareto Principle of the Pareto Principle.
Find the 4% of actions that could generate 64% of the results you are after.
Do now: Stop trying to implement every good idea. Identify the tiny number of actions capable of producing disproportionate improvement and start there.
Emotional Fitness Has To Become Daily Behaviour
The seven emotional fitness factors provide us with a useful framework, but frameworks don't change anything by themselves.
We do.
Across Parts One and Two, we have looked at seven areas:
Learn your emotional triggers and biases.
Understand the emotions of others.
Find comfort in discomfort.
Foster a safe space of connection.
Bounce forward from failure and setbacks.
Express needs, feelings and feedback.
Implement what you have learned into your daily life.
The temptation is to read a list like this, nod wisely and then return immediately to doing everything exactly as we were doing it before.
That is the trap.
We don't need to transform all seven areas tomorrow morning.
Start smaller.
Keep the list handy and look at it every day. Choose one area and consciously practise it.
Maybe today you use a cushion before reacting to someone who pushes your Hot Button.
Tomorrow you deliberately listen more carefully to someone else.
The next day you ask for help instead of trying to solve everything yourself.
Or perhaps you finally take one useful idea from the thousands of pages of notes you have accumulated and actually implement it.
If you have more bandwidth, identify the 20% of actions capable of producing 80% of the results you need.
But start somewhere.
Emotional fitness, like physical fitness, doesn't come from knowing what exercises exist.
It comes from doing the exercises.
Author Bio
Dr. Greg Story, Ph.D. in Japanese Decision-Making, is President of Dale Carnegie Tokyo Training and Adjunct Professor at Griffith University. He is a two-time winner of the Dale Carnegie "One Carnegie Award" (2018, 2021) and recipient of the Griffith University Business School Outstanding Alumnus Award (2012). As a Dale Carnegie Master Trainer, Greg is certified to deliver globally across leadership, communication, sales and presentation programmes, including Leadership Training for Results.
He has written several books, including three best-sellers — Japan Business Mastery, Japan Sales Mastery, and Japan Presentations Mastery — along with Japan Leadership Mastery and How to Stop Wasting Money on Training. His works have been translated into Japanese, including Za Eigyō (ザ営業), Purezen no Tatsujin (プレゼンの達人), Torēningu de Okane o Muda ni Suru no wa Yamemashō (トレーニングでお金を無駄にするのはやめましょう), and Gendaiban "Hito o Ugokasu" Rīdā (現代版「人を動かす」リーダー).
Greg also publishes daily business insights on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, and hosts six weekly podcasts. On YouTube, he produces The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show, Japan Business Mastery, and Japan's Top Business Interviews, which are widely followed by executives seeking success strategies in Japan.
