Career
The 7 Traits of Emotionally Fit Leaders
Healthy leaders pursue these 7 traits, allowing for employees to do the same.
Posted February 19, 2021 Reviewed by Hara Estroff Marano
In 2011, I started to focus my clinical time on working with people in tech. I entered a world of high functioning, high achieving, smart and capable people. Most weren’t suffering from any extreme mental health disorders, yet they were struggling. Despite lack of clinical diagnoses, they needed more support to do their work well and live fulfilling lives.
This made me think about how reactive mental health care is—the way most people wait until things are really falling apart to get any support and how quick-fix the current mental health landscape is. I wanted to begin shifting that narrative. Could mental health be a more proactive practice? Could people start thinking about going to a therapist or working on their mental health the way we think about going to a gym? I began using the term emotional fitness and decided to do some research about what emotional fitness looks like in real life.
By the end of the year, I’d interviewed more than 200 entrepreneurs and psychologists, coded the results, and identified the seven traits of emotional fitness.
Introducing the 7 traits
The seven traits of emotional fitness serve as the foundation of a healthy emotional life. And cultivating these traits is even more essential for leaders today than it was nearly a decade ago, when I began my research.
Emotional fitness is important for bolstering the mental health of individual leaders, and for avoiding the ultimate catastrophes that befall entrepreneurs who push themselves too far with too little support. Emotionally fit leaders create emotionally healthy space for employees, who will foster emotionally fit companies, which will be resilient, impactful, and successful in bringing emotionally fit products to the world.
In our next post, we’ll dive deeper into how to “work out” and foster each of these traits, but before we get to the work, it’s important to understand what each trait is and how it appears in life.
1. Self-awareness is about understanding the triggers and biases that shape the way you relate to the world. It’s the pursuit of discovering all you don’t know you don’t know.
When self-awareness is strong, leaders find it easier to be vulnerable, patient, and resilient. Tolerating frustration and managing emotions comes more naturally because self-aware leaders understand the difference between what they think and feel and objective external truth.
It’s really hard to change things before you can see them. When self-awareness is weak, maladaptive patterns are often repeated, people act on biases without realizing it, and personal growth stagnates.
2. Empathy is the ability to put yourself in another person’s shoes. This goes beyond understanding that they have a different perspective; it’s about actually allowing yourself to feel what they are feeling in order to understand them.
When empathy is strong, leaders recognize that the way they feel about things might not align with what others feel, consider how their decisions will affect others. They can hold space when people on their team are struggling and take the time to uncover what others are going through.
When empathy is weak, leaders can come off as uncaring and dismissive. A classic example is a founder who says, “we support working moms,” only to show a lack of compassion when a working mom shows up tired or stretched thin.
3. Willingness to play indicates an embrace of spontaneity and creativity. Play is about removing constraints, exploring what is possible, and saying “yes and” to other people’s ideas.
When play is strong, a leader is open to trying on new concepts and perspectives and can meet the creativity of a team with openness. By expanding on other’s ideas, a team will get somewhere that no individual could have gotten to alone.
When play is weak, leaders often come off as rigid, regimented, and closed-minded.
Particularly in times of crisis, willingness to play is essential to diverting energy away from the intense anxiety that comes with periods of prolonged uncertainty and creating a pressure-release valve for the heaviness of day-to-day reality.
4. Curiosity is about prioritizing your desire to learn and grow over your desire to avoid criticism.
When curiosity is strong, leaders are able to understand and tolerate the difference between what they want to be true and what is true. They ask questions and leave themselves open to the answers — even when they are difficult. They ask questions like "Tell me more about that?" or "What could I do differently next time?"
When curiosity is weak, leaders often come across as unapproachable, defensive, and averse to feedback.
5. Mindfulness is about being able to sit with discomfort without escaping, avoiding, or watering it down.
When mindfulness is strong, leaders are able to host tough conversations. Mindful leaders are seen as transparent, even when sharing uncomfortable information or complicated feedback. They sit with problems and think things through, even if it takes time.
When mindfulness is weak, leaders can be seen as rushing past the discomfort or trying to escape or avoid difficult moments. Perhaps they cancel meetings where bad news will be shared, interrupt moments of silence, avoid giving feedback, or try to fix things immediately.
6. Resilience is about having the capacity to learn from failures and mistakes without shutting down, escaping, or avoiding the consequences.
When resilience is strong, leaders can bounce back quickly after setbacks and failures. They can be seen as flexible and quick to adapt.
Conversely, when resilience is weak, leaders often display a strong desire to avoid criticism or failure. This is common with risk-averse leaders who dodge situations that may shake their confidence, even if it would allow them to learn.
7. Effective communication is about putting words to needs and expectations.
Leaders who communicate effectively are proactive. They talk about their vision, goals, and desires clearly and on an ongoing basis. Often these leaders are able to both maintain boundaries and show flexibility. One way this trait shows up in leadership literature is in Kim Scott’s book Radical Candor.
When communication is ineffective, teams often report changing definitions of success, cultures driven by post-facto critique rather than guidance, and a lack of clear and helpful feedback.
So what do you do with it?
It can be tough to know where to start when it comes to the seven traits, but the beauty is that they all relate and feed into each other. Work in any trait will naturally improve the others, so you can start anywhere. That said, the trait I like to start with is self-awareness. It comes at the top of the list for a reason: It’s hard to change what you cannot see.
If you’re keen to do a self-assessment before you dive into our next post, read back through the self-awareness section above and ask yourself three questions: Where do I show strengths in this arena? Where do I show weaknesses? And what is one thing I can practice this week to begin building strength?
