Unsheltered Heart vs. Safeguarded Heart

This week’s guest post is from Amy Balog, a highly experienced and credentialed executive leadership coach. I really appreciate her perspective on authenticity and compassion, so I was delighted when she agreed to share a nugget of wisdom with my audience.

With the extraordinary forces of scale and speed, organizations have become more transient (executive team turn over) and transactional (work becoming increasingly fractionalized and task-oriented.) Leaders can become exhausted, struggle to appreciate their whole selves at work, and place their entire identity and worth in their job performance.

Peace Over Performance

The solution to this vicious cycle is to reverse the belief that performance leads to peace, and to understand that true inner peace is actually the fuel for top performance. That’s peace over performance. Our heart plays a core role concerning our identity and worth. Here’s how our heart behaves differently with the peace self and performance self.

The Unsheltered Heart

If our identity and worth is bound entirely in work performance selves it sets up the condition for an unsheltered heart. Our worth is up for grabs at any moment based on circumstances, opinions, and the sway of challenges we face. The unsheltered heart is exposed to every flavor of judgment – whether sourced internally or externally. Instead of working from a source of peace, we try to protect the heart with a proving energy riddled with shades of imposter syndrome and defensive actions.

The Safeguarded Heart

With our peace self knowing our worth is untouchable, we experience the safeguarded heart.  Missteps, mistakes and failures are recoverable and lead to valuable learning. The safeguarded heart values connection over control. It values what is right over who is right. It allows us to practice full compassion with ourselves and others.

Nurturing a Safeguarded Heart

• Make a conscious decision to believe in your untouchable worth.
• Slow down and celebrate what is good in you and your life!
• Recognize that years of toxic judgment from others or a relentless inner critic are limiting beliefs.
• Remember no matter where you are in achievement, status, job security or station of life, your talent, capacity to learn, and the extraordinary footprint of you is always evolving.

Learn more about Amy and her company, ConnextionPoint.

Join me and Amy for an in-depth conversation about Peace over Performance when she appears on my podcast in December.

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