How to Improve Your Mental Well-Being & Leadership Skills
Leaders who are optimally healthy have optimal capacity to drive real impact and catalyze lasting, positive change. But leadership itself is a strategic balancing act of competing expectations, responsibilities, and stressors that, if left unchecked, can erode your mental fortitude and well-being. In fact, many of our clients say they’re too overwhelmed to even think about their own mental wellness, letting it take a backseat to their careers—and often unknowingly sabotaging themselves in the process.
Your mental well-being is the backbone of how you lead. It influences your every action and word, including how you think about risk, how you tolerate failure, how you build relationships, how you perceive your own and others’ performance, and how you respond to conflicts and emergencies. If you aren’t taking care of your mental and emotional health, you aren’t leading the way you should be.
A Minefield of Triggers: How Not To Explode
Being a leader is incredibly difficult. Though many people aspire to leadership, the role itself—quite frankly—sucks. All eyes are on you as you walk through a minefield with triggers planted at your feet on a regular basis. And though leaders are often seen as (and push ourselves to be) pillars of resilience, it's important to remember that we’re humans first. Just like any human, leaders have vulnerabilities, difficult-to-handle emotions, and breaking points.
Many triggers that leaders experience are unavoidable, woven into the role, such as:
Being constantly on display, with every move scrutinized and judged by those around you
Having to make fast, and often significant, decisions with very limited information
Interacting with people across generations and cultures who think differently from you and each other
Building relationships that require trust and grace with total strangers
Exerting authority or control over people you actually have little power over
Being asked to put out others’ fires and respond to their “urgent” needs all day long, on top of an already overwhelming and high-priority workload
If you’ve been leading for a while, you know exactly what we’re talking about—and you know just how overwhelming and isolating it can be. All of this is fodder for an unhealthy mental state, which makes it harder to handle triggers appropriately and lead in an effective, impactful way—further worsening your mental state. If you don’t intervene, this can become a vicious cycle that steadily chips away at your overall well-being and capacity for good.
So how do you protect your mental wellness while navigating the demands and triggers of leadership? The answer is emotional endurance.
The Importance of Emotional Endurance
Emotional endurance—your ability to respond to and manage triggers—expands your capacity to absorb the shocks and traumas of leadership with minimal detriment to your short- and long-term wellness. To build this characteristic, you need to gain healthy habits, tools, and skills that help you manage triggers, reduce your mental strain, and support your overall health.
A few ways you can start improving your emotional resilience today include:
Recognize your own strengths. Not only can this ease imposter syndrome and anxiety, it can make you more open to others’ ideas and strengths because you’re less susceptible to jealousy and comparisons.
Practice emotional awareness. Use the Junto Emotions Wheel to identify the specific emotions you’re experiencing when you’re ruffled. It makes it easier to understand the emotion, why you might feel that way, and how you’d like to proceed.
Master your time. Embrace concepts like delegation, prioritization, and strategic thinking to clear your plate of all work that doesn’t move the organization forward and can be done by someone else, staving off over commitment, exhaustion, and burnout.
But perhaps the most impactful habit you can develop takes place inside your mind: interrogating your thought patterns and transforming negative ones so they’re aligned with your strengths, needs, and goals.
Stopping the Spiral
Step 1: Separate Thought and Fact
Differentiating between your thoughts and reality isn’t always as straightforward as it sounds, but it’s absolutely imperative. In fact, nearly half of surveyed It’s the Impact clients said it was one of the most valuable tools they gained from their leadership coaching experience.
If you aren’t in the habit of separating emotion-fueled thoughts from hard facts, you could confuse your perceptions with reality during high-stress or high-emotion moments, feeding negative thought spirals that affect your ability to lead. When this happens, it can complicate your relationships, cloud your decision-making, and baselessly escalate workplace tensions and conflicts.
Facts are external things that most other people would agree are real and true. They’re things that other people witnessed (or could have).
Thoughts, on the other hand, are subjective. Though they can feel like certainties, they’re simply how we interpret and respond to facts.
Here’s an example:
Fact: The new CFO, Jenni, said my team’s performance needs to improve by next quarter.
Thought: Jenni sees me as a poor leader and thinks I don’t bring enough value to the organization.
By understanding that your thoughts and feelings aren’t absolute truths, you’re better equipped to face the complexities of leadership—and your mind.
Step 2: Interrogate Your Thinking
Now that you’ve isolated some of the negative thoughts you’ve been having, it’s time to dissect and understand them.
Before acting on any strong thought, take a beat. Consider what emotions could be fueling the thought—like rage, fear, or disappointment—and ask yourself:
Is this thought true?
Is it helpful?
Have I considered all possible alternatives, and is this the most likely one?
Would I say this to a friend or colleague if they were in my position?
Of course, the answers are almost always no, but the power isn’t in answering—it’s in the asking. Get in the habit of recognizing your triggers, challenging your thoughts, and asking yourself the above questions. Doing this helps create distance between you and the situation so you can break out of the negative thought spiral, gain a more rational perspective, and move toward a productive way of thinking.
It’s important to note that you won’t always be able to just snap out of difficult emotions. Sometimes, letting go of anger or frustration immediately isn’t realistic—and that’s okay. Your feelings are legitimate and deserve space. If an emotion feels overwhelming, consider taking a few moments, or even a day or two, to let it settle before responding. Ironically, emotions often grow stronger when we resist them, so letting yourself feel and understand what’s happening can help diffuse their intensity.
Here’s an example:
You discover you’ve been excluded from a high-level meeting and begin to worry that you’re undervalued or in hot water. Instead of spiraling into panic, you take a step back and evaluate the situation. It’s possible that the meeting is unrelated to your department or that a logistical error caused you to not receive an invite. You aren’t aware of any performance concerns or mistakes that involve you, and just last month, you received praise from the organization’s founder. These rational thoughts help quell your anxiety.
Once you’ve broken free of the negative emotion or thought spiral, you can decide on a more constructive path forward.
Step 3: Transform Your Brain
Once you start identifying and challenging your thought patterns, you can begin working to change them.
To do so, you have to regularly reflect on your thought patterns and how they affect how you feel, act, and lead. This can help you identify the patterns that harm your overall health or otherwise hold you back, as well as develop detailed action plans to transform them.
For instance, did a heavy disappointment—like being passed up for a promotion or your proposed strategy for boosting retention being rejected—cause you to withdraw from your team, resulting in increased friction? What response or leadership action would you like to embrace instead? What thoughts or emotions might facilitate that response?
By consciously shifting your thinking to be more positive, productive, and in line with your leadership goals, you’re taking control of your brain and empowering your thinking.
Here’s an example:
You feel a little sidelined after a new team structure shifts a few key responsibilities off your plate. Though you initially fretted over the reasoning and felt frustrated at the loss of control, you evaluated the situation’s facts, your thoughts and emotions, and your leadership goals. Now, you’ve embraced this change as an opportunity to focus on higher-priority tasks and accelerate the organization’s advancement.
Here’s why it’s worth the effort: Beyond being a risk factor for mental illnesses like depression and mood disorders, repetitive negative thinking has been linked to cognitive decline and dementia, causing observable physical changes in the brain. Changing your thinking could do more than improve your overall mental well-being and leadership legacy; it just might help your long-term physical health.
ACTIVITY: Putting It In Action
The activity below is designed to help you process and decide how to respond to intense, negative thoughts and feelings. Think of an overwhelming workplace trigger or situation you’re currently facing, then follow these steps:
Separate thought from fact. Make a list of the absolute facts (as defined above) of the situation and a separate list of your negative thought(s) or thought spiral(s) about the situation.
Name your emotions. Use the Junto Emotions Wheel to identify three feelings you’re experiencing related to thought(s) identified above.
Challenge the thought(s) or thought spiral(s). Ask yourself the questions listed in “Step 2: Interrogate Your Thinking,” and consider whether you’re ready to let go of the negative emotions and thoughts. If not, give yourself time to be ready before continuing.
Reflect on your actions. List what you have (or have not) done as a result of the thought(s) and emotions you’ve identified here, then describe what leadership action(s) you’d like to take instead.
Reframe your thinking to support your desired response. Lean into perspectives and emotions that empower you to take the actions you need to take with confidence and authenticity.
Complete the above activity each time you face a particularly difficult situation or trigger—and at least once a week outside of that, even when things feel stable. The power of this exercise lies in making a habit of it, allowing you to be intentional about your thoughts and actions rather than letting your brain run on autopilot. With time, you’ll be surprised at how your mind begins to let go of thoughts that don’t serve you.
By transforming negative thoughts into positive patterns and actions, you build your emotional endurance, support your well-being, and equip yourself to lead from a place of stability, calm, and confidence—no matter what’s going on around you.
Take Charge of Your Thoughts
Healthy habit-building and reflection are powerful tools for mental clarity and endurance, but they’re not the complete answer to wellness in leadership. At It’s the Impact, we believe that true wellness can only happen when your work aligns with your strengths and supports your leadership legacy. Given how much of life is spent working, it’s essential that the impact you’re making reflects who you are and what matters to you. By grounding yourself in this, you’re better positioned to create the change you want to see.
Want more guidance on transforming your thoughts to enhance your leadership and well-being? Download the exclusive Empowered Thinking workbook from It’s the Impact or schedule a complimentary discovery call today.