Alice is the 38-year-old CEO of a New York-based consulting startup that was growing rapidly when we began working with her in early 2020. Then the pandemic struck. Alice was compelled to quickly pivot the company from providing most of its services face-to-face to creating a comparable level of personalized attention for clients online.
To Lead Better Under Stress, Understand Your Three Selves
A year into a global pandemic which upended how we work and live, the complexity and intensity of the challenges many people are facing exceeds their emotional resilience. And the understanding what’s happening in your body, mind, and emotions is at least as important to sustainable performance as the skills you bring to the work you do. The authors began to look more deeply at how we react to different levels of stress in our lives. They present here a roadmap for better stress management grounded in the premise that human beings don’t operate from a single stable self. Rather, we unconsciously move between three primary selves — the child self, the defender, and the adult self — which vie for attention and control, depending on the demands we’re facing.