How to be a leader when you are injured, ill or broken hearted
Please note: I am not a doctor, and do not try to be. These suggestions are based on my real life experience, and that of my clients- always speak to your doctor or medical professional before making any changes to your life. Mine have been great in helping me with mine.
Leading through the tough times
As a leader, people are looking to you to inspire them, to provide the compelling vision, to equip them with the skills they need, and to remove the barriers in their way to success. And rightly so. So how do you go to get the energy, the drive, to do this? Where do you go to renew yourself as a leader? I’m sure that you have strategies in place.
However, there are 3 particularly challenging situations, which can risk derailing your ability to lead well- or even function- at work and in life. I know that they have been for me. and so, I would like to help you to keep yourself moving forwards, to keep on leading the way, even when you feel broken by life.
Remember:
- A leader finds a way forward.
- And there is always a way.
- Even if you cannot see it at the time.
- Let’s explore this together now.
This blog is written in 3 simple parts
- Being injured, ill or broken hearted and why they are so difficult
- 6 principles that you can apply to look after yourself during these difficult times
- 3 application examples to show how you can apply this information in your life
These are 3 of the most difficult life experiences that you may encounter in your life, which can have a massive impact on your mindset, your relationships, your leadership and you as a human being. They can all affect you negatively in different ways, so let’s begin by looking at how this might be.
For these aspects, I will be using examples from my own anecdotal experience, and that of my clients.
If you are in a leadership position such as CEO, Director, Partner or Manager, you can also use the information that you learn here, to help your employees, staff or their family members, if they are going through these difficulties. A great leader supports others in their times of need, not just themselves when they need it. To take what you find useful here and remember that if it can help you, it can help others too.
When you are injured
This could be a sports injury or something that has happened because of an accident. Common ones include:
- Broken bones
- bad backs
- Sore shoulders
- Carpal tunnel syndrome
- Tight hips and hip flexors
- Sore groins
- Injuries from falls
The main feeling that often arises is frustration. You want to do things and you can’t. And worse, you don’t even know how long it will take to heal. You see other people making progress with their goals, and perhaps you compare yourself to them unfavourably. You may be irritated and grumpy. Or have moments of anger. And you might also get depressed and overwhelmed by your inability to move as you would like to. You may also have a strong feeling of restlessness and a need to be doing something. Or you could swing the other way, and lose all of your motivation to engage in your daily life.
If you are in this situation and would like some help with motivation, click here to read this:
When you are ill
Illness can break your spirit as well as your body. Your energy levels may be very low. You might have to change your eating habits. You might suffer from a lack of sleep. The sheer pain that you are experiencing can cloud your judgement and affect your ability to think clearly. Trips to the doctors, to medical centres, tests, appointments, consultations, waiting for results and constant uncertainty. These can all wear you down, over time. You may put on or lose weight. And you might need help and support from other people, just to get through the week, or even each day.
If you are currently in a lot of pain, and suffering with it, I have written this to help you, based on my own pain journey:
How can you handle the pain in your life
When you are broken hearted
Heartbreak is such a difficult experience to go through. As unlike injured and illnesses, that can occur through accident or circumstance, heartbreak can feel like a rejection of yourself as a person. You may feel unwanted, unloved, isolated and alone. Deeply hurt and angry or totally miserable. Breaking up with your partner and ending a relationship that you are in, especially a long term one, and all that comes with it, is one of the most challenging things that you can go through.
Around half of today’s marriages end in divorce. And so this phenomenon of separating from partners, perhaps very painfully, is a reality for millions of us, that isn’t going away any time soon. Heartbreak can also make us feel like we aren’t enough: attractive enough, rich enough, skilled enough, patient enough. Caring enough etc etc. It can leave us feeling like there may be something wrong with us, that we have to make some kind of change, but we don’t quite know what it is.
If this is you, and you are doubting your worth as a person, I’ve written this to help remind your of how special you are:
How has it been when you have experienced these 3 difficulties? Perhaps you had to deal with more than 1 at a time?
Let’s focus now on helping you to get through these difficult moments, with 6 principles that I have found to be very effective for preparing for these moments, getting you through them, and caring for yourself until you come out the other side.
6 principles that can be applied for all 3 situations to help you
Let’s get practical. Pick whichever of these suggested activities that appeal to you, and try them out, to see if they can help you to be able to still be a leader, whilst not at 💯. I would recommend that you chose something from all 6 of the principles, as their positive net effect for you works best when they work together wholistically.
1 Nourish your mind
- Meditation– try free apps such as headspace or calm. Or set a timer on your phone for 5-10 minutes, sit there and close your eyes. This will give your mind time to just be. To help you to make this a habit, try doing it at meal times, just after breakfast or dinner.
- Training– give your mind gentle challenges. Think about some of the problems that you have in your life. Try and play with ideas and potential solutions. Don’t pressure yourself to solve them. Treat it like meditation. Set a timer for 5-10 minutes and see what you can come up with.
- Revisit the big picture– imagine your life as a long line of time, from your birth to death. And mentally place your age and where you currently are on the timeline. Notice how small the current situation is in the face of these decades. Many of your problems won’t even exist in 1-5 years. This can really help with overwhelm.
- Visualise your life– imagine your life as completely finished and over. Now imagine you are looking back over it. How important is this current difficulty in relation to the fullness of your life? Think through all of the good memories that you have. Do you want to focus on those instead? This exercise can be excellent in shifting your perspective, to remind you that everything is a temporary experience, not a permanent one.
- Use self reflection– self reflection is a beautiful practice to engage in, in order to find lessons learned, benefits and value from our experiences- good and bad. Take your current situation and ask some open ended questions:
- Who– can help me right now?
- What– are my pain levels and moods like today?
- Where– can I get the help that I need?
- Which– activities can I not do right now?
- Why– did this situation occur?
Brain challenges– your brain, although you might not feel like it at this time, is an incredible thing that is capable of so much- but you have to keep challenging it. As you may not be in a great place right now, make sure to retain some control and safety by choosing some of the things that you do to challenge your brain. That way you won’t see them as stressful, but as stimulating things that you are doing to look after your mind, and your ability to think. Here are some great ones to try:
- Crosswords- improve your linguistic and visual spatial thinking
- Su dokus- improve your mathematical reasoning
- Murdles- improve your deductive logic
- Rubix cubes- improve your problems solving and kinaesthetic thinking
And the great thing about these brain challenges, is you can do them with minimal energy, even from your bed or a hospital bed, if you want to.
2 Help your body
Diet– you may be seeking comfort foods, such as chocolate, depending on how bad your situation is. Give yourself grace and kindness to have these foods, as you may want them. Then gradually shift towards eating good foods- lots of fruit and vegetables are the perfect foundation, to give your body the vitamins and minerals that will help you to recover. There is no hard and fast rule with this, just remember, you can nourish your body with the foods that you eat, and it’s your responsibility to do so, for yourself.
Water– every process in your body needs water. And drinking 2 litters of water, is always a brilliant thing to do. If you are not well, you may be dehydrated, which feels terrible. So make drinking water every day an absolute priority.
Protein– eating protein will help your body to recover and build back from illness, or injury. It will also help to maintain your muscle mass while you are not training. It is the building block for looking after your hair, your nails, your skin. Keep your protein intake high, even if you are not currently doing training.
Sleep– sleep is a wonderful, restorative thing. Depending on how hurt or injured you are, you may need a lot of sleep in the beginning. Every process in your body to do with repair and restoration goes to a whole other level when you are asleep. So make getting proper sleep, and enough sleep, a priority when you are not well. It is one of the top things that you can do to recover properly. Be aware though, that as you start to feel better, you don’t use sleeping as much as possible as a crutch, something to do to hide away from the world. It’s a fine balance, you will know when you won’t need as much.
Stress management– this is key when you are going through a physically and mentally stressful time. Make time for relaxation such as hot baths, walks, read a book, meditation, spend time with loved ones and animals- find what works to help you relax. It might even be just one or two things. But make sure to have relaxation time, every day, even just a few minutes. When you are stressed, your body is very tense, you will have chemicals like cortisol flowing around your system, and you may go from feeling on edge to exhausted. This is to be expected. So having relaxation time, as well as the other suggestions in this blog, will combine to help to balance out the stress that you are experiencing, so that it is not overwhelming.
Lie downs– try putting in short lie downs into your day, to help to break them up. These could be just 10-20 minutes. In these times, you may not even be sleeping. Just breathe deeply. You will be giving your system extra moments of rest, which it may well need. So give your body what it needs.
Movement– equally, you may be spending a lot of time sat down or lying down. So plan in movement breaks, get outside if you can. Walking and just moving your body, is brilliant, as we are designed to move and be active. Start small to begin with, and build up in your amounts. Getting outside will also give you the extra social benefit of seeing other people, and depending on where you live, you may get to be see parts of our beautiful natural world too.
3 Understand your pain
Understanding how much pain you are in– physically, mentally and/or emotionally, and then looking to see how it has progressed and changed over time, can be very helpful. So make yourself a weekly chart, and divide it into the 7 days of the week. You chose which particular painful experience you are logging and write it at the top, focusing on one situation at a time. For example, bad back, pain from surgery, or break up emotional pain.
Log your mood– with smiley faces, or colours- a smiley face for happy, straight face for neutral and a sad face for sad.
Log your pain- you can use numbers or colours. For numbers, 0 could be no pain and 10 is agony. And colours could be green- no pain, yellow- some pain, blue- lots of pain.
So, for example, in your weekly chart, it could say:
Monday
Am 
5 pain
Pm 
3 pain
Evening 6 pain
You can also include a section to write notes for each day, such as any changes you have experienced, or things that have helped you.
Of you would like to see this explained in more detail, click here:
How can you handle the pain in your life
4 Receive help from your support network
There are always people who will help you in your life. This is a brilliant truism that I have learned from Professor Steve Peters, author of the book The Chimp Paradox and I think it is so encouraging. You are never fully alone in your life, there are always people- professionals as well as your loved ones and friends- who will support and help you.
Parents– no matter your age, reach out to your parents, if you can. They can be a great source of support.
Family– “We all need to be carried at one point,” my mum says. And it’s true. As a leader, you may not be used to this. But allow your loved ones to support and help you, and carry you, for a time.
Friends– friends can be such a great support, as they know you well. And you may just want to have a laugh and talk about other topics other than you life, and you pain, and friends are a great way to do this. Don’t be embarrassed to share that you are going through a hard time. Good friends will understand this and be there to support you.
Pets– my dog Cotchi has been an incredible source of love and strength for me, when I have been unwell. Pets won’t ask you what is wrong, they will just provide you with love and companionship, when you need it most. And they are great to enjoy a snuggle with!
Online groups– you may belong to online communities and groups. Where appropriate, reach out to them and explain that you are not so well at the moment. The good communities will support and encourage you. This can be a great source of support if you live alone and work from home.
Your home– have a look at your home environment. Some basic things which can help it to be a place of love, relaxation and comfort are:
- Open the windows and keep fresh air coming in every day
- Open the curtains and let natural light in
- Have some headphones handy, so you can have a place to cancel out loud noises
- Keep rooms well lit during the day, and use more mood pools of light in the evening, to help you to wind down
- Keep on top of having clean clothes and bed sheets- you may need some help with this
- Make sure that you have all of the medications that you need on hand and in your house
- Have extra cushions and blankets on hand- to make sitting and lying extra comfortable
- Have good books on hand in several rooms, that you can dip into
- Consider having plants or fresh flowers in your house- so you can always enjoy having something natural to look at
5 Adapt your work
This is a very important aspect to gain control over, when you are a leader who is unwell. As you probably are strongly internally driven, and so are in danger of carrying on at your normal rate or going into overdrive, both of which can lead you to burnout. Or you could become totally overwhelmed at the lack of control you are experiencing, and just want to give up. Neither of these is good. So let’s focus on a Festina Lente approach, which is a Latin phrase, which means make haste slowly. It’s all about still making progress and moving forward, just in a different gear and in a different way.
Online work
Your online work can and should be spilt into essential and non-essential, depending on how well you are. For example, a lot of meetings you can remove, and switch to email or phone correspondence, temporarily. Another important part to get on top of, is expectations that people have of you in replying to emails. So get your PA or VA to respond to emails on your behalf, for particular people. They can send out generic emails to groups, as well as specific emails to individuals. Work closely with this person, they will be an essential source for support and help for you, whilst you are unwell.
If your work involves content creation, consider what can be done whilst you are unwell, and not able to speak to camera. These are activities such as writing, research, editing, studying etc. And when you have good moments or are feeling a bit better, then you can phase in to-camera activities, such as video or audio creation and online video meetings.
In person work
It is very important, at this time, to set the expectations of other people, regarding when they are going to be seeing you. This can vary greatly, depending on if you have an office, hybrid or from home role. But in all cases, other peoples’ time with you in person, is going to temporarily decrease. This could involve a complete break from work, as you have surgery and recover. Or it could be that you take some trusted people aside and explain that you are going through a divorce, and so if you don’t seem yourself whilst with people, that they understand this and help, as best they can.
There is a great truth, which I have learned about people’s ability to adapt to such situations:
- If you tell them what is going of happen, it allows them the thinking time to adapt.
- If you do not, people don’t generally like surprises and unexpected changes to their working conditions.
So explain to them the nature of your reduced in person time with them, and how and why this is so; and ask them to be adaptable and understanding. Good people will rise to this challenge.
Work when you are good
This can be a very useful mantra to help you to adapt to your circumstances, when unwell, injured or broken hearted. When you feel a bit better, do something, do some work. Do something valuable. Just do even a little bit of it. You will be amazed how much you can actually do with 10-15 minutes of focused concentration. It can be easy to think that we must do tasks to completion. But this is not the case. So be kind to yourself and allow yourself to begin something, then leave it for a bit. Know that you will add more to it, or complete it, when you are feeling better. This is how I have made many quality pieces of content, including writing two books: do a bit, take a break, do a bit more.
Focus on value creation
As you will know, as a leader, just doing things, just being busy, is not enough. So use your precious energy and good moments to focus on creating value in the time. Think, what is the most valuable way that you can spend your time and energy, for yourself, and for others? Here are some examples, they can all be done in 5-20 minutes blocks:
Sending emails or talking to your VA, to explain how you are, what needs to be done and adapted
Content creation- writing, recording, making videos
Income generating tasks- depending on the nature of your work
Making plans for your business and its future
Researching and studying- this work can give you a huge competitive advantage
Self-reflection- looking at the key areas of your business for opportunities in sales/marketing, daily operations and finance
Analysis of financial, financial projections, budgeting and cash flow
Scale your days to your energy and your pain
Finally, you can put all of these suggested work practices together, and create routines for your day, depending on how you are feeling and how strong your pain is. Focus on what is really important- for your business and for your health- and put that into your day. Take out everything else that is unnecessary. Then as your energy levels and pain levels allow, do tasks and activities each day that keep you moving forward. And be adaptive and allow them to flow. Some days you will achieve and do more, some less. But the combined total, over a period of weeks and months, will be far superior to doing nothing, or equally, trying and failing to do too much.
6 Feed your vision
Vision is the life force of a leader. I know, first hand, how hard it is to keep the vision of where you and your business are going when you are injured, ill or broken hearted. But you must. It is your responsibility, as a leader. It is the task that has been given to you to do. You cannot expect others to do it for you. So even when you are at your lowest, try these things to keep the fire from going out in your mind.
Revisit your goals and dreams
Take a good look at your big goals and dreams-every day. Create pictures of them, or look at pictures of your big successes in the recent past. Pictures are so powerful, because your mind can absorb them, and create a mental picture of them, through simply looking at them regularly. Don’t think for now of how you are going to achieve these goals and dreams. Just keep looking at your lists and pictures and dreaming big.
Keep creating your environment
Equal to this, make sure that your environment is motivating and inspiring. You can look at motivational quotes or put pictures of inspirational figures on your wall. Tell yourself that you are preparing yourself for future successes that are coming. This is a very exciting way of treating this fallow home, when you may not feel that you are achieving much.
Make plans for your future
Another way to keep your dreams alive and to prepare for your coming future success, is to make plans for your upcoming future. Set yourself daily plans and goals, however small. Then weekly and monthly ones, depending on how capable you are and as your pain and energy levels allow. This can really build a new sense of excitement and vitality into your spirit again, after the drudgery and monotony of injury, illness and heartbreak. Write down things that you are looking forward to doing, even if you don’t feel like it in that moment. At some point in your future, you will do. So start planning for it now.
If you’d like to learn more about how to plan, you can click here:
Application examples- how to put this all together
Now let’s look at how you can combine these 6 principles, to help you in your daily life as a leader dealing with injury, illness or heartbreak.
These are not real people, they are fictional examples, to help you to consider what practical application could like for you in your life.
Mary- a 40 year old with a chronic pain condition and an online business
- Mary has good days and bad days. She keeps her pain diary every day, so she doesn’t get overwhelmed when her pain is severe. This diary has allowed her to track when her pain levels are lowest, and when her moods are best. She structures her days and daily tasks around this. As a result, she is able to successfully run her online business from home, with her ongoing condition.
- She makes time weekly to visit her family, or asks friends to come to her house, if her pain is severe or her moods are low. One friend helps her to look after and care for her home environment. She makes an effort to walk every day and cook for herself. She enjoys doing Si Dokus in the evening, to keep her mind sharp.
Ahmed- a widowed retired 75 year old with a dog
- Ahmed knows that following the death of his wife, he gets very lonely, and this can severely affect his moods. So he belongs to two clubs, which he goes to weekly- bingo and walking football. His friends know that he can be quite grumpy and occasionally tearful, but they are there for him and support him. Ahmed gains great comfort through being with his dog Benjie, and their daily walks give him discipline and order to his day. He plays the piano regularly when he feels sad, and it eases his mood. He also writes a regular blog, to help fellow widowed men with their grief.
Daniel- a 39 year old entrepreneur with a sports injury who lives alone and is recently separated from a long term partner
- Daniel knows that both his injury and the break up with his long term partner were both his fault. After his fractured shoulder, he became dependent on his partner Sarah, and resented her because of this. He would get angry and frustrated, and shout at her. As a result, she left him. After receiving some counselling and support from his doctor, he came to realise this was true. He then created a plan. For his business, he could still work from home, and managed his expectations by knowing he would not be able to work as much for 6-12 months, and so, he budgeted carefully. He then got the help of a physio therapist, who he met through his local medical surgery.
- He used meditation and journaling to improve his self reflection. And through this, he decided that he did not want to date for a while, to allow both his body and mind to heal from his injury and break up. He changed his eating habits to eat more wholesome, nourishing foods. He also made a plan for the business, for the following year, when he would be able to be more active. He also contacted Sarah and apologised for his actions towards her, which helped him with his feelings of shame and guilt.
Final thoughts
I hope that you can now use these words, to sketch out a map, to create a path forwards for yourself. Injuries, illnesses and heartbreaks can stop us, force to adapt and change. They are really difficult. However, if you can coach yourself through it, be a friend to yourself, keep a positive mindset, and try even one of two of these suggestions given here- you will find a way through.
Remember,
Where you are right now is not who you are,
you are just visiting…
Love and best wishes,
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