Overview: Leadership coaching can help leaders identify signs of spiritual exhaustion. An effective leadership coach can help them devise ways to protect their spiritual integrity. To defeat spiritual impasses, leaders can adopt abundance-focused mentalities, practice forgiveness, and find higher purposes to motivate their leadership efforts.
Leadership is not easy under the best circumstances, and it can be soul-sapping when things go wrong. Leaders are people like everyone else. They’re not immune to bitterness, resentment, or toxic situations. When managers lose their cools, departmental or organizational leaders are the ones who gets the earfuls.
Acting as a lightning rod for negativity can take an emotional and spiritual toll on anyone, yet leaders can’t fall victim to losing their spirit. Spiritless leaders are ineffective.
Leadership Coaching Can Help
Due to their positions, leaders can’t escape negativity. They can, however, learn to deal with it. Leadership coaching can help leaders devise ways to cope with negative, soul-sapping aspects of leadership.
The Signs of Spiritual Impasse
The first step of the healing process is to recognize signs of spiritual exhaustion. Executive coaching can help leaders take analytic looks at the spiritual aspects of their leadership through fresh perspectives. Here’s what spiritually wounded leaders may discover:
- Sarcasm. Sarcasm is a socially acceptable coping mechanism that allows spiritually ailing people to keep functioning. In the context of leadership, sarcasm is a symptom of bitterness.
- Bitterness. Bitterness is a sign a leader fails to process and move on from hurtful situations. Unrelenting hostility towards someone is a telltale sign of bitterness.
- The inability to forgive. We may feel that by not forgiving someone, we punish them for a past affront. In reality, we punish ourselves by condemning our souls to bitterness.
- Apathy. Leaders who take emotional and spiritual damage may choose to cope with rough situations by giving up. Apathy is a dangerous leadership attitude as it’s contagious and can engulf entire organizations.
- Negativity. People who meet failure may often resign themselves to never being able to succeed. A negative person only sees obstacles in every enterprise and reasons to give up. Like apathy, negativity can be contagious, especially when it comes from leadership ranks.
How Executive Coaching Helps
Leaders who find themselves in spiritual impasses often feel helpless and out of options for resolving problems. Outside help is welcome under such circumstances even if the suffering party is reluctant to accept it.
For leadership spirit to prevail, leaders must take intentional steps, and executive coaches can help them identify what measures to adopt.
Adopting an Abundance-Focused Mentality
Intelligent leaders don’t hoard power, prestige, responsibilities, information, or resources. They understand there’s plenty of everything to go around.
Good leaders focus on others. They help others even when spiritually drained as they understand how the world works. They know their success hinges on how they serve others, and whatever they give will return to them tenfold.
Finding Higher Purposes
Leaders who understand their leadership is not about them find it easier to navigate challenges, spiritual and otherwise. Having a higher purpose redefines spiritual leadership, giving leaders enjoyment and fulfillment where purposeless would only find frustration and negativity.
Serving a higher purpose can fend off the effects of spiritually drained leadership.
Practicing Forgiveness
Forgiveness is like disinfection for leaders’ spiritual wounds. Forgiving others grants leaders reprieve from bitterness. Executive coaching encourages leaders to let go of grudges and acknowledge their emotions and the spiritual damage they cause.
Focusing on Positivity
Outstanding leaders surround themselves with positive people. Problem solvers never see hurdles as reasons to give up. They see them as challenges they must solve. This attitude can rub off on peers, creating a pervasive “can do” environment throughout an organization. Engaged and empowered employees and peers are often truthtellers. Honest people and interactions keep leaders accountable and grounded in reality.
Leaders often fail to see and admit that they lead in less-than-ideal spiritual states. The role of a leadership coach is to shine a light on a problem from a fresh, outside angle.