In many ways, parenting is just another kind of leadership. (Or is it the other way round?)
Both come with shelves of books full of tips and techniques. And if you’ve ever tried to use them, in either role, you’ll know that success is far from guaranteed.
Jack Pransky, in Parenting from the Heart, puts his finger on why:
Being effective and successful as a parent has more to do with a parent’s state of mind than whether the parent knows parenting techniques. When parents are upset or in low moods they tend to forget any parenting technique they know… and even if they used it, it would not necessarily come out right, because a bad feeling seeps through and negates its usefulness. Children react more to the feeling.
Read that again with “leader” in place of “parent,” and “your team” in place of “children.” It holds exactly.
The feeling overrides the technique
If you’re in a lousy mood, you’ll struggle to remember the clever technique. And even if you do remember it, it won’t work well, because the state you’re in leaks out around it. People respond to the feeling more than the words. A perfectly correct piece of feedback delivered from frustration lands as frustration.
In a good state, the opposite happens. The warmth carries the message, and more often than not you didn’t need the technique in the first place.
This is the difference between your natural and normal states. In natural you’re calm, present and secure, and the people around you settle and respond. In normal you’re tight and reactive, and no amount of technique covers it.
You influence your state, not theirs
There’s a limit here, and it’s freeing rather than discouraging. You can’t control other people’s states. They’re in their own mind, having their own day. What you can do is tend to your own, which does far more than any technique, partly because states are contagious. A secure presence is the most reliable thing there is for helping someone else come down off the ceiling.
So how you show up is the real lever. Not the script. The state.
It shows up everywhere
Once you see this, you notice it everywhere people are reading you. It’s there in difficult conversations, where how something lands depends on the state you’re both in. It’s there in interviews, where they’re really assessing what you’ll be like to work with, not how polished your answers are. And it’s there every day with your team, who take their cue from your weather more than your words.
So before you reach for another leadership tip, try a quieter question: how am I showing up? Arrive calm, present and secure, and you’ll need far fewer tips. And if you can’t get there, it’s often wiser to wait until you can than to lead from a state that quietly undoes everything you say.
