Along the way, leaders struggle.
And some see their journey as an endless list of struggles. What they look for is for these struggles to end, assuming that that is when they’ve arrived.
But this moment never arrives.
However, this doesn’t mean that the journey is dull, without success, or only struggle. It’s a question of perspective.
One of the steps on the journey will be a sense of achievement. A moment that can be experienced as a victory or as the ability to get a glimpse of a wonderful future. At the same time, it follows hard work and many battles fought.
Such a moment can be experienced as an emotional roller coaster that has to be handled.
While working hard and fighting battles, people often act without taking into account how they’ll feel about it later. They’ve invested energy without caring how exhausted they might find themselves to be, they’ve focused on succeeding rather than on relationships, and they’ve made compromises they wouldn’t make without a sense of urgency pushing them.
Moving out of that period and looking back at their success, people prefer to forget how they got there. What they did well becomes their success, what they don’t like about themselves becomes someone else’s problem or fault.
Self-awareness is a struggle.
They blindside themselves, thus widening the open door for their fears and anxieties to overcome them. The mere fact of splitting between good and bad, of wanting to only keep an eye on the parts of themselves they like makes them more vulnerable to the parts of themselves they dislike. By avoiding becoming aware of them, they can’t see when and how they are subject to them.
Either way, the task they find themselves in, is regulating their emotions. That is struggling with their emotions.
By leaning into their emotions, they enter the space of self-awareness and have to deal with whatever they learn about themselves. It leads to other emotions, often including the desire to run away from them. By resisting their emotions they find themselves seeking to step into emotions they would prefer. It’s a period in which they have to confront the world as it is with the one they would want to experience.
One path may lead to getting used to searching for ways to feel satisfaction. The other path may lead to a growing sense of calm and awareness.
It’s a choice. One that may transform the struggle.
