About four weeks ago, my back pain returned for real.  With an incredibly busy work schedule, I did everything I could to push through it.  It got worse. Then two weeks ago I spent 36 hours unable to get out of bed because of excruciating back spasms that were triggered by the slightest movement.  It had gotten so bad that I needed my wife’s help to simply turn over in bed.  

Laying there in bed, largely immobile, I did something I should have done many years ago.  I listened to Dr. John Sarno’s bestselling book, Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection. 

When I asked someone on our team how they were doing last week, she said, “January has been a long year.”  It resonated. 

I’ve been struggling recently.  Dealing with threats both real and imagined to people I care about.  I feel myself bracing and moving into a defensive crouch.

For many of us, things feel under attack.  Some of the leaders we support are not just in an urgent / reactive mode, but carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders.  And in that state, the temptation may be to gloss over our own feelings and focus on what we need to do - and who we need to be - for the people we lead or care about.  

But we ARE one of the people that we need to care about.  

As leaders, we’re often conditioned to believe the fallacy that we are in control.  “I’m the leader, so all these things that are happening are because of me.” “I can control how other people feel and what they do.”  These are blatant distortions of reality that leaders are frequently invited to embrace.  We’re told that great leaders take responsibility for everything and everyone … they decide what’s going to happen and then make it happen.  Essentially, we’re told - though never in so many words - that great leaders play god.  And for most of my career, I was all too ready to hear it.  That’s often what my ego wanted to believe anyways.  But abundant research shows that the most effective leaders don’t operate that way.