8. How To Trust Yourself as a New Leader
Are you on high alert, constantly monitoring your environment for threats, bracing yourself for worst-case scenarios? If so, you likely have a hyper-vigilant nervous system. In today’s episode, we’re exploring what this means for you as a new leader, and how you can start deconditioning yourself from this hyper-vigilance and begin trusting yourself as a leader.
Having a trusting relationship with yourself and others is vital for leadership. There are multiple reasons why you might have a hyper-vigilant nervous system, but whatever the case is for you, I’m sharing how to recognize when your nervous system is on high alert, and how to regulate your emotions so it doesn’t negatively impact your ability to effectively lead.
Tune in this week to discover why hyper-vigilance may have served you earlier in your life but why it isn’t serving you as a leader. Plus, how to start deconstructing this habit of hyper-vigilance so you can develop real trust in yourself and the people you’re leading.
Until January 30th, you can book a one-time 90-minute deep dive with me to uncover what makes you unique as a leader, and give you a personalized roadmap tailored to your strengths and needs, so you can fully focus on your leadership goals. Click here for all the details!
What You’ll Learn From This Episode:
Why I chose the word trust as my area of focus for 2023.
What it looks like when you have a hyper-vigilant nervous system as a leader.
Some of the reasons you may have developed a hyper-vigilant nervous system and why it may have served you in the past.
Why hyper-vigilance is such a difficult habit to train your brain out of.
How to start deconditioning your hyper-vigilant nervous system and develop deep trust in yourself and others.
Listen to the Full Episode:
Featured on the Show:
Book a one-time 90-minute deep dive with me to uncover what makes you unique as a leader.
To thank you for being a listener and supporter of The Confident Female Leader, I am sharing a free guided meditation with you! Download your meditation here.
Full Episode Transcript:
Do you constantly monitor your environment for threats, and brace yourself for worst-case scenarios, finding yourself on high alert? If so, you likely have a hyper-vigilant nervous system. Today, we explore what this means for you as a new leader, and what you can do to start to decondition yourself from that hyper-vigilance and start to develop a more trusting relationship with yourself and others.
Welcome to The Confident Female Leader podcast. A space for ambitious women stepping into leadership, who are ready to take control of their circumstances and own their magic. If you're ready to start shedding your self-doubt, come into your new identity as a leader, and stop consistently undervaluing yourself so you can feel more confident in your role, this show’s for you.
I'm Annie Framand; Psychologist, Certified Feminist Coach and Master Trainer. And I'm on a mission to help women just like you stop overworking, overthinking, and overpleasing, so you can start creating success on your terms. Ready to create your dream life? Let's go.
Hola, amigas. How are you? I had the most amazing holiday. I took a week off, where the only work I did was working on my tan. And the most important question I asked was; pool or beach? I took the time to catch up with friends. I read a couple of books. I tried out some new cafes, and I played with my kitten. On New Year's Eve, I watched the fireworks from the rooftop, with my love and my neighbors. And, it was the best vacation ever.
Now, as my mind always does when it's rested, I got so many new ideas for the podcast, and also for how to work with my clients. So, stay tuned for all of that in the weeks to come.
All right, let's dive in. This week, I want to share with you a personal practice that I use. Every new year, as part of my ritual for setting intentions, I choose one word as a focal point for the year. In 2021, I chose the word “joy” because I knew that it would be a challenging year, for me personally and also globally with everything going on. So, I wanted to focus on finding joy within that.
It was the year that I started my coaching practice. The year that my mom passed. I also sold my childhood home, and in December I left for Mexico. So, it was a year full of pain, not gonna lie, but also a year full of joy, endings and beginnings. I put up the word “joy” as the wallpaper on my phone, as a reminder that things would eventually get better when I was struggling. And, it worked.
In 2022, I chose the word “love”. It's the year my lover and I found each other. The year I adopted a kitten. The year I found my soul family. Basically, in 2022 I literally saw the word love and heart-shaped things everywhere I looked; in stores, on murals, and paintings. I even came across heart-shaped bushes, if you can believe it.
That's the thing when we choose a point of focus, the confirmation bias starts to work in our favor, and we start seeing evidence of it everywhere. And this year, I chose the word “trust”, because I have a hyper-vigilant nervous system. And, so do most of my clients. So, I thought I'd talk about this concept today, as well as what to do so that you can start to decondition yourself from that hyper-vigilance, and start to develop a more trusting relationship with yourself and others.
If you're hyper-vigilant, you constantly monitor your environment for threats and you brace yourself for worst-case scenarios. Your nervous system is always on high alert. Your fight-flight-or-freeze responses get triggered really easily. When you're hyper-vigilant, you have an overactive amygdala, which is the part of your brain that's responsible for identifying threats.
It's basically like a meerkat, always on the lookout for danger and ready to head for the hills when it senses it. Which is really exhausting, and also it prevents you from living in the present moment because you're 10, or even sometimes, 20 steps ahead.
Now, if you have a hyper-vigilant nervous system, you likely come from an unstable family or environment. For example, one or both parents were addicts or abusive, or they used the silent treatment, or they had difficulty regulating their own emotions, for example. That said, not everyone with an unstable environment will develop hyper-vigilance because we all cope differently.
Hypervigilance is just the way that some of us found to cope. With constant anxiety, the constant high alert, and monitoring for other people's reactions made sense to us as children, right? Is dad in a bad mood? What can I do to make mom happy? Or, some of us, like me, had an anxious parent, so we picked up the vibe that that was just the way to be.
Now, how does hyper-vigilance show up for women promoted in leadership jobs? You have a chronic fear of being demoted, fired, or otherwise losing your job, even though you've consistently demonstrated above-average performance. Or, you're constantly thinking your boss or colleague or your employee is upset with you. Or, maybe you're overthinking a performance conversation before it happens.
For example, you're anticipating the 10 ways it could go down, or the 5 emotional reactions that the employee could have. Or, maybe you're on the lookout for making, often, small mistakes, like words you use in an email. Or, you tend to be controlling of other people's behaviors, which can lead to micromanaging. It could be any one of these things, other options, as well, or a combination of these, or even all.
Now, hyper-vigilance is thinking, “What if something goes wrong?” On repeat; it's like a broken record. When you're hyper-vigilant, it's hard for you and others around you to relax, because you're often nervous about something going wrong. It's like taking the same road to work, because that's what your brain is just used to doing.
So first, you need to notice it. And second, you need to teach it to take another route. Now, this is a process that you can use when you notice yourself being hyper-vigilant. Although this process might work right away, it's not a quick fix. It's a habit that you're going to want to implement, so that your inner meerkat eventually calms down. For some, it takes weeks or months. And for others, like me, it's a work in progress still. It's still a struggle for me, but it does get better every day.
Let's say, for example, that your boss wants to meet with you, but she didn't tell you why. Your brain might start to wonder what she wants to talk to you about. Now, if you're hyper-vigilant, you might start to review what happened in the last day, last week or month. You might start to think about all the mistakes you made. About what others might have said about you. You might think she's gotten some negative feedback. Has finally figured out that you're not cut out to be a leader, and wants to put you on a performance plan. Or worse, demote you or fire you.
So first, when you notice your brain spiraling into worst-case scenarios like this, you're gonna want to acknowledge the anxiety; allowing it to be there. I like to practice saying, “Anxiety is here,” for example. You're going to want to name the emotion, and that tends to lessen the impact of it.
Then, you want to locate the emotion in your body. So, for me, anxiety shows up in my throat. For you, it might show up somewhere else. If, like me, it shows up in your throat, you might say, for example, “My throat is tight.” And then, you're going to want to breathe into the area in your body where the emotion is located; in your throat, in this case.
Because emotions are sensations in our body, it helps when we feel into our body. Now, if you need help with this, I have a five-minute meditation that you can do anytime. And, you'll have info in the show notes on how to download it.
Now, when you find yourself trying to go down the rabbit holes in solving the problem, or 20 potential problems in the moment, once you've calmed yourself down by acknowledging the emotion, you're going to want to send a signal to the overactive meerkat part of your brain that there is no danger. Okay?
So, your brain is going to go on high alert. Often, in my case, it happened in the middle of the night, not gonna lie. And that's the case for a lot of my clients, as well. You start thinking about the worst-case scenarios, and what are you going to do if you get fired, right? What you want to do, especially, is not solve for that problem, okay? You don't want to start to think about the potential solutions to maybe getting fired.
What you want to do, is helping the meerkat relax from its outlook post, by practicing telling it, “Of course, I'm scared. That's just what I've always done to cope. I'm just being hyper-vigilant; nothing has gone wrong. And, I don't need to do that anymore. If anything happens, I'll figure it out; I always do.”
You can use your own sentence, your own mantra, that works for you. That's one that I've taught my clients, and one that's worked for me, as well. I even had some of my clients visualizing themselves petting the meerkat and being friends with it. Okay, so then, once the meerkat is relaxed, you're going to be able to access your rational brain, and then assess if there's truly a danger or not.
You'll be able to discern the best course of action only then, when you are not in your emotional brain. You'll be able to trust yourself to figure out what to do, whatever it is. So, in this case, maybe it turns out that your boss wanted to talk to you about a new company initiative that few people know about. Which is why she didn't tell you about the topic for the conversation. Right?
So again, what you want to do, is you want to avoid trying to solve the problem when your brain’s freaking out about it. Okay? That's kind of the worst thing to do, because you're not in a position to think rationally about the issue. You want to calm the meerkat, first. You want to acknowledge that the emotion is there. And then eventually, once you're rested and calm, you want to start thinking about solutions, if you even need to.
Yesterday, I was at the beach with my love, who was swimming in the ocean like he was a fish. Meanwhile, I was being thrashed around by the waves and doing my best not to swallow all the water that was thrown my way. And I realized it's a very similar feeling for women who become leaders, especially for those of us who are hyper-vigilant.
So, it goes something like this: Congratulations, you've leveled up and now you've literally been thrown into an open ocean by yourself. You've been thrown in the deep end. And now, it's time to figure out how to swim. You're barely treading water, trying not to drown, spending a lot of energy flailing your arms and freaking out. Thinking, “Did a fish just touch my leg? What's happening? Maybe, there's a shark down there. Was that seaweed?”
I don't know, you're super worried about all the threats in the water. And, you don't have the technique to swim in open water. You think you should just instinctively have figured all of this out already. I mean, after all, you're a smart, successful woman who has been thrown into the deep end. And now, you feel like you're in open water alone.
Meanwhile, you see this experienced ocean swimmer next to you. And he's been doing this for 20 years. He's swimming in the ocean, enjoying the exercise and the view, and you're beating yourself up for not being an elite swimmer on your first day on the job.
Now, I help my clients become a confident ocean swimmer, faster and with less drama. I help you go from feeling like you're drowning in the ocean of everything you need to do, and learn to swim confidently. We work on mindset; how to go from worrying about all the threats in the water, to enjoying your swim. And, skillset the ocean swimming technique. It's like having your own personal open ocean water trainer.
In the upcoming podcast, we're going to be taking a deeper dive into some of the topics that new leaders struggle with the most. Things like delegation, performance, conversations, influence, and communication.
I'd love to hear from you, on what your word is for 2023. Also, let me know what you're loving about the podcast and what you want me to talk about next. Have a great week, everyone.
Now that you've dreamt up your goals for the year, if you'd like some support to make them come true, or if you'd like some help to apply any of the skills that you're learning on the podcast, I have a special offer to help you kickstart your year and create some traction towards your goals.
Now, normally the only way to work with me is in my three-month coaching container, but until January 30th of this year, you can also have a one-time 90-minute deep dive with me. Now, at the end of the 90 minutes, you'll have uncovered what makes you unique as a leader, and you'll have a personalized roadmap tailored to your strengths, so that you can focus on the goals that you want to achieve.
Book your free consult on my website at annieframand.com/getstarted to learn more and see if we're a good fit.
Thanks for listening to The Confident Female Leader podcast. Ready to dismantle the patriarchy with me? Come say “Hi” at annieframand.com to learn more about how you can take this work deeper and apply what you're learning.
Welcome to The Confident Female Leader podcast. A space for ambitious women stepping into leadership, who are ready to take control of their circumstances and own their magic. If you're ready to start shedding your self-doubt, come into your new identity as a leader, and stop consistently undervaluing yourself so you can feel more confident in your role, this show’s for you.
I'm Annie Framand; Psychologist, Certified Feminist Coach and Master Trainer. And I'm on a mission to help women just like you stop overworking, overthinking, and overpleasing, so you can start creating success on your terms. Ready to create your dream life? Let's go.
Hola, amigas. How are you? I had the most amazing holiday. I took a week off, where the only work I did was working on my tan. And the most important question I asked was; pool or beach? I took the time to catch up with friends. I read a couple of books. I tried out some new cafes, and I played with my kitten. On New Year's Eve, I watched the fireworks from the rooftop, with my love and my neighbors. And, it was the best vacation ever.
Now, as my mind always does when it's rested, I got so many new ideas for the podcast, and also for how to work with my clients. So, stay tuned for all of that in the weeks to come.
All right, let's dive in. This week, I want to share with you a personal practice that I use. Every new year, as part of my ritual for setting intentions, I choose one word as a focal point for the year. In 2021, I chose the word “joy” because I knew that it would be a challenging year, for me personally and also globally with everything going on. So, I wanted to focus on finding joy within that.
It was the year that I started my coaching practice. The year that my mom passed. I also sold my childhood home, and in December I left for Mexico. So, it was a year full of pain, not gonna lie, but also a year full of joy, endings and beginnings. I put up the word “joy” as the wallpaper on my phone, as a reminder that things would eventually get better when I was struggling. And, it worked.
In 2022, I chose the word “love”. It's the year my lover and I found each other. The year I adopted a kitten. The year I found my soul family. Basically, in 2022 I literally saw the word love and heart-shaped things everywhere I looked; in stores, on murals, and paintings. I even came across heart-shaped bushes, if you can believe it.
That's the thing when we choose a point of focus, the confirmation bias starts to work in our favor, and we start seeing evidence of it everywhere. And this year, I chose the word “trust”, because I have a hyper-vigilant nervous system. And, so do most of my clients. So, I thought I'd talk about this concept today, as well as what to do so that you can start to decondition yourself from that hyper-vigilance, and start to develop a more trusting relationship with yourself and others.
If you're hyper-vigilant, you constantly monitor your environment for threats and you brace yourself for worst-case scenarios. Your nervous system is always on high alert. Your fight-flight-or-freeze responses get triggered really easily. When you're hyper-vigilant, you have an overactive amygdala, which is the part of your brain that's responsible for identifying threats.
It's basically like a meerkat, always on the lookout for danger and ready to head for the hills when it senses it. Which is really exhausting, and also it prevents you from living in the present moment because you're 10, or even sometimes, 20 steps ahead.
Now, if you have a hyper-vigilant nervous system, you likely come from an unstable family or environment. For example, one or both parents were addicts or abusive, or they used the silent treatment, or they had difficulty regulating their own emotions, for example. That said, not everyone with an unstable environment will develop hyper-vigilance because we all cope differently.
Hypervigilance is just the way that some of us found to cope. With constant anxiety, the constant high alert, and monitoring for other people's reactions made sense to us as children, right? Is dad in a bad mood? What can I do to make mom happy? Or, some of us, like me, had an anxious parent, so we picked up the vibe that that was just the way to be.
Now, how does hyper-vigilance show up for women promoted in leadership jobs? You have a chronic fear of being demoted, fired, or otherwise losing your job, even though you've consistently demonstrated above-average performance. Or, you're constantly thinking your boss or colleague or your employee is upset with you. Or, maybe you're overthinking a performance conversation before it happens.
For example, you're anticipating the 10 ways it could go down, or the 5 emotional reactions that the employee could have. Or, maybe you're on the lookout for making, often, small mistakes, like words you use in an email. Or, you tend to be controlling of other people's behaviors, which can lead to micromanaging. It could be any one of these things, other options, as well, or a combination of these, or even all.
Now, hyper-vigilance is thinking, “What if something goes wrong?” On repeat; it's like a broken record. When you're hyper-vigilant, it's hard for you and others around you to relax, because you're often nervous about something going wrong. It's like taking the same road to work, because that's what your brain is just used to doing.
So first, you need to notice it. And second, you need to teach it to take another route. Now, this is a process that you can use when you notice yourself being hyper-vigilant. Although this process might work right away, it's not a quick fix. It's a habit that you're going to want to implement, so that your inner meerkat eventually calms down. For some, it takes weeks or months. And for others, like me, it's a work in progress still. It's still a struggle for me, but it does get better every day.
Let's say, for example, that your boss wants to meet with you, but she didn't tell you why. Your brain might start to wonder what she wants to talk to you about. Now, if you're hyper-vigilant, you might start to review what happened in the last day, last week or month. You might start to think about all the mistakes you made. About what others might have said about you. You might think she's gotten some negative feedback. Has finally figured out that you're not cut out to be a leader, and wants to put you on a performance plan. Or worse, demote you or fire you.
So first, when you notice your brain spiraling into worst-case scenarios like this, you're gonna want to acknowledge the anxiety; allowing it to be there. I like to practice saying, “Anxiety is here,” for example. You're going to want to name the emotion, and that tends to lessen the impact of it.
Then, you want to locate the emotion in your body. So, for me, anxiety shows up in my throat. For you, it might show up somewhere else. If, like me, it shows up in your throat, you might say, for example, “My throat is tight.” And then, you're going to want to breathe into the area in your body where the emotion is located; in your throat, in this case.
Because emotions are sensations in our body, it helps when we feel into our body. Now, if you need help with this, I have a five-minute meditation that you can do anytime. And, you'll have info in the show notes on how to download it.
Now, when you find yourself trying to go down the rabbit holes in solving the problem, or 20 potential problems in the moment, once you've calmed yourself down by acknowledging the emotion, you're going to want to send a signal to the overactive meerkat part of your brain that there is no danger. Okay?
So, your brain is going to go on high alert. Often, in my case, it happened in the middle of the night, not gonna lie. And that's the case for a lot of my clients, as well. You start thinking about the worst-case scenarios, and what are you going to do if you get fired, right? What you want to do, especially, is not solve for that problem, okay? You don't want to start to think about the potential solutions to maybe getting fired.
What you want to do, is helping the meerkat relax from its outlook post, by practicing telling it, “Of course, I'm scared. That's just what I've always done to cope. I'm just being hyper-vigilant; nothing has gone wrong. And, I don't need to do that anymore. If anything happens, I'll figure it out; I always do.”
You can use your own sentence, your own mantra, that works for you. That's one that I've taught my clients, and one that's worked for me, as well. I even had some of my clients visualizing themselves petting the meerkat and being friends with it. Okay, so then, once the meerkat is relaxed, you're going to be able to access your rational brain, and then assess if there's truly a danger or not.
You'll be able to discern the best course of action only then, when you are not in your emotional brain. You'll be able to trust yourself to figure out what to do, whatever it is. So, in this case, maybe it turns out that your boss wanted to talk to you about a new company initiative that few people know about. Which is why she didn't tell you about the topic for the conversation. Right?
So again, what you want to do, is you want to avoid trying to solve the problem when your brain’s freaking out about it. Okay? That's kind of the worst thing to do, because you're not in a position to think rationally about the issue. You want to calm the meerkat, first. You want to acknowledge that the emotion is there. And then eventually, once you're rested and calm, you want to start thinking about solutions, if you even need to.
Yesterday, I was at the beach with my love, who was swimming in the ocean like he was a fish. Meanwhile, I was being thrashed around by the waves and doing my best not to swallow all the water that was thrown my way. And I realized it's a very similar feeling for women who become leaders, especially for those of us who are hyper-vigilant.
So, it goes something like this: Congratulations, you've leveled up and now you've literally been thrown into an open ocean by yourself. You've been thrown in the deep end. And now, it's time to figure out how to swim. You're barely treading water, trying not to drown, spending a lot of energy flailing your arms and freaking out. Thinking, “Did a fish just touch my leg? What's happening? Maybe, there's a shark down there. Was that seaweed?”
I don't know, you're super worried about all the threats in the water. And, you don't have the technique to swim in open water. You think you should just instinctively have figured all of this out already. I mean, after all, you're a smart, successful woman who has been thrown into the deep end. And now, you feel like you're in open water alone.
Meanwhile, you see this experienced ocean swimmer next to you. And he's been doing this for 20 years. He's swimming in the ocean, enjoying the exercise and the view, and you're beating yourself up for not being an elite swimmer on your first day on the job.
Now, I help my clients become a confident ocean swimmer, faster and with less drama. I help you go from feeling like you're drowning in the ocean of everything you need to do, and learn to swim confidently. We work on mindset; how to go from worrying about all the threats in the water, to enjoying your swim. And, skillset the ocean swimming technique. It's like having your own personal open ocean water trainer.
In the upcoming podcast, we're going to be taking a deeper dive into some of the topics that new leaders struggle with the most. Things like delegation, performance, conversations, influence, and communication.
I'd love to hear from you, on what your word is for 2023. Also, let me know what you're loving about the podcast and what you want me to talk about next. Have a great week, everyone.
Now that you've dreamt up your goals for the year, if you'd like some support to make them come true, or if you'd like some help to apply any of the skills that you're learning on the podcast, I have a special offer to help you kickstart your year and create some traction towards your goals.
Now, normally the only way to work with me is in my three-month coaching container, but until January 30th of this year, you can also have a one-time 90-minute deep dive with me. Now, at the end of the 90 minutes, you'll have uncovered what makes you unique as a leader, and you'll have a personalized roadmap tailored to your strengths, so that you can focus on the goals that you want to achieve.
Book your free consult on my website at annieframand.com/getstarted to learn more and see if we're a good fit.
Thanks for listening to The Confident Female Leader podcast. Ready to dismantle the patriarchy with me? Come say “Hi” at annieframand.com to learn more about how you can take this work deeper and apply what you're learning.
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