Leaders, Pay Attention at Your Mental Capacity

Leaders are energy suppliers. I don’t mean selling electricity, rather a supplier of mental energy for the team that they are leading. This aspect is something that a lot of people forget, especially when promoting someone to leadership position.

Mental energy is important as it gives a leader the ability to coach and mentor their teams. It gives them the ability to be resilient to different kinds of pressure and the ability to listen and take information from individual team members. As an example: have you ever felt that you have difficulties listening to someone? And I mean not just hearing but really listen and understand that person. If you do have some difficulties then perhaps your mental capacity is a bit low.

Your team members look up to you as a guide. Whenever there is any problems, chances are that you’ll be the one that they approach (and that’s good). If your team members are afraid of you then it’s a different issue altogether. A leader must be ready to listen when these situations arise because there are always information gems if you just listen properly.

Remember the safety instructions on the airplane that always says help yourself before helping others. This rings true to this article. If you haven’t got the mental capacity to coach then there’s no point.

How to Identify Low Mental Capacity

• If you feel that you are easily affected by emotional situation then you might be a bit low on your tank.
• Unable to stay objective on decision making.
• Unable to maintain concentration during conversations.
• Feeling physically tired even though you have enough sleep.
• Easily irritated by blockers.
• And many other symptoms of stress.

What to do When Your Mental Capacity is Low

One of the most important traits for a leader is being able to pick themselves up when they fall. So here are a couple pointers of what can help recharge mental capacities.

• Defer crucial conversations when possible. If your mental capacity is already low, you won’t do any good. In fact it may even have negative effect for you and your team members.
• Take some time off. This is probably the easiest way to recharge, the caveat is that you don’t do any work during the time off.
• Meditate. This helps reset your mind temporarily and will give you chance to think better.
• Prioritise your work. Only do things that matters to your mission. This will reduce your workload and you’ll be able to achieve what really matters.
• Sleep early.
• Be immerse in your hobby. As an example: one of my hobbies is photography, going out taking pictures really helps me recharge.

I think in our busy always connected digital world, its super important to think of mental capacity especially for leaders. This is both for the leaders themselves and for the people that they are leading.

Hopefully this post helps you and your team. As usual feel free to leave comments for more suggestions and questions.