THE 3 HUMAN FEARS THAT DRIVE LEADERSHIP OVERWHELM

If you’re human, you’ll be running patterns and strategies – however resourceful or unresourceful – to address one or more of The 3 Human Fears in your life and work:

– The fear of not being good enough
– The fear of not being loved
– The fear of not belonging or fitting in

It doesn’t matter what you’re fearing, the root of that fear will fall into one (or more) of these three categories.

Identifying Unresourceful Strategies

While some of the strategies may be resourceful and effective, you might be surprised to learn that the most common strategies used by leaders are in fact unresourceful and contribute to leadership overwhelm.

These unresourceful strategies include:

not saying no
overcommitting
overly conservative approaches
martyring our own needs in a false sense of service to others
approval seeking and people pleasing
being dependent on direction from others
over delivering
withholding our true thinking
and generally ‘playing it safe’ (which, by the way, is usually the LEAST safe thing we can do).

Unresourceful Strategies and Leadership Overwhelm

A leader that is deploying these types of strategies is likely struggling under the weight of their perceived responsibilities and outputs (overwhelm lives here) and unable to achieve a #lit leadership state.

Now, let’s consider what it is like to follow a leader who runs those fear-based strategies. A leader who is rarely acting from inspiration, only from proving themselves worthy? Their team may be feeling one or more of the following: