5. Thriving: With Consistent Emotional Intelligence and Goals Alignment
How to thrive as a leader. 🎁 Join the 30 Days WonderLead Thriving Challenge & Course for Free Today!
What You'll Learn:
💡 The difference between surviving and thriving in leadership.
💡 Four key areas for thriving as a leader.
💡 Practical tools for maintaining Emotional Intelligence and goal alignment.
💡 About our free 30-day thriving challenge to boost your leadership skills.
Tasks for the Week:
☑️ Assess whether you or your team are in survival or thriving mode.
☑️ Prioritize your values and ensure basic and psychological needs are met.
☑️ Commit and practice daily the tools that will help you thrive.
☑️ Join the 30 Days WonderLead Thriving Challenge & Course.
From Surviving to Thriving
After 7 years working at AWS, I thought I had mastered Amazon’s culture. But when I returned from maternity leave, I realized that I had temporarily forgotten some of my high-performance habits and skills. This made me feel less confident and like an impostor. Later, I was assigned to lead a crucial launch for my organization at reInvent - AWS's most important annual event where teams present their biggest updates - while adjusting to my life with my new baby. Sleep deprivation, stress, and lack of free time were pushing me towards survival mode.
Being in survival mode made me get stuck in the day to day high priority tasks with tunnel vision. It wasn’t only me. The team also got so focused on the delivery that we skipped retrospectives and worked more hours. We were doing an amazing job, but at what cost? At the moment I defended the team needs, it was when I started to thrive and feel myself back.
When I learned about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, everything became clearer. Understanding the needs required for thriving, combined with a system to support it, allows my team and me to completely succeed today.
"We can't be in survival mode. We have to be in growth mode." ― Jeff Bezos
Happy new 2025!💫 This is a good time for yearly reviews and reassess your goals.
Together with your self-management tools and knowing yourself through self-awareness and self-assessments, you will be able to choose better actions that will help you thrive.
What is Surviving vs Thriving?
Surviving is doing what is necessary to exist, while thriving is reaching for continual growth and success. We all exist on a spectrum somewhere between surviving and thriving. And we all constantly shift between the two states depending on our situation. What’s critical is that we can identify where we and others are on that spectrum and then move towards thriving!
It’s not enough knowing our values and be self-aware. Before being able to thrive, we need to know the priority of our values and satisfy our basic and psychological needs. And if our environment doesn’t support us, we can apply self-management tools to stay in thriving mode.
Tell me about your experience in Surviving and Thriving modes.
What impact did it have? How did you self-manage yourself? Write it now in a comment! 💬
Why is it Important to Thrive as a Leader?
When leaders thrive, it benefits the leader, the team, and the entire organization. It creates an environment where everyone can excel!
Thriving leaders inspire and motivate, are resilient and good decision-makers, foster innovation, enhance the work culture, accelerate their personal growth, improve their work-life balance and retention in their team, increase organization success, and build a legacy that lasts and has a positive impact.
How can I Thrive as a Leader?
To thrive as a leader, commit to improving the following 4 areas. They align with the Emotional Intelligence 4 Pillars that I introduced in Your Journey to Become a WonderLead post.
Self Awareness: Knowing ourselves allows to make the best decisions and act on them.
Self Management: Drive your actions towards your goals with motivation. Manage challenging situations and your emotional triggers through Self-Management. It allows to build resilience and use adversity to grow.
Build Trust with Social-Awareness: Empathize and support the well-being and needs of those around. It allows to deepen engagement. It helps your team manage change, prevents burnout, and inspires growth.
Master Collaboration Social Skill: Through relationship management, create a psychologically safe environment that fosters inclusion and innovation. It allow to resolve conflicts, influence, and develop the best in others.
Let’s break down an example:
Situation and Task:
My team has just encountered a major technical issue that threatens to potentially delay for 6 months a reInvent launch.Possible Survival Mode Actions:
1) Panic and work longer hours, 2) Blame team members or other departments, and/or 3) Cut corners to meet the deadline at any cost.Recommended Thriving Mode Actions: 1) Self-Awareness: Recognize your stress and anxiety about the setback. 2) Own Your Actions: Take a step back and assess the situation objectively. 3) Build Trust with Social-Awareness: Communicate transparently with your team and stakeholders. Empathize with team members who might be feeling pressured. 4) Master Collaboration: Bring the team together to brainstorm solutions. Delegate tasks based on individual strengths. Negotiate a realistic timeline or solution with stakeholders.
Result: Immediate problem addressed but also strengthen team cohesion, build trust with stakeholders, and creates a team process for handling future challenges.
The actions were generated by my 🎁 AI Thriving tool. You can get access when joining to the WonderLead Thriving Challenge by filling this Substack survey.
What Tools can I use to Thrive?
To be an intentional leader and thrive, I try to apply the following consistently:
Cultivate Self-Awareness by understanding your emotions, meditating, and rethinking what you will do before doing it.
Focus and Take Action with the WonderLead Framework to thrive daily by:
Planning to avoid losing your North Star. Align your actions with your prioritized values and goals. Choose 1 goal at a time in a dedicated timeframe.
Taking Care of Yourself by walking and mindfully breathing to reduce stress and increase optimism.
Practicing Gratitude to boost your resilience and happiness.
Journaling to reframe things that you are labeling as bad. Identify what actions for turning the bad into a good thing to celebrate someday in the future.
Regularly Reviewing to reaffirm your values and check if you/your team are surviving or thriving (quiz). Get some additional perspective by asking others how they see your values manifested in your actions. And ask yourself, what could you have done differently to stay aligned with your values?
Practice Thriving Consistently. To ensure your success, I created the 30 Days WonderLead Thriving Challenge & Course! Together we’ll practice daily the 4 areas that are required for thriving. Participants will get an AI app that will help them assess survival mode and will receive guidance for shifting to thriving. Top achievers will get 6 months of the future WonderLead paid subscription and access to productivity tools. Join me for the first cohort for free here! 🎁
Remember that it is expected that we move to survival mode when there are life-inevitable issues. I also thought I had already learned the reInvent rushing lesson, but I made the mistake of stopping my own system because of lack of time and moved to survival mode. There are still days when I feel overwhelmed or unsure. But with each roadblock, we can grow, recover faster, and spend more time thriving with ongoing awareness, acknowledgement and practice.
"Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again." ― Nelson Mandela
30 Days WonderLead Thriving Challenge
To help you put these tools into practice, I'm excited to announce the launch of the 30 Days WonderLead Thriving Challenge & Course! This free program is designed to help you focus on thriving through daily reminders, mini-posts, and support.
You just need to subscribe here and adjust your schedule for 20 daily minutes! It will be free in exchange for your feedback during and at the end of the program. Participants will get an AI app that will help them assess survival mode and will receive guidance for shifting to thriving. Top achievers will get 6 months of the future WonderLead paid subscription and access to productivity tools.
Whether you're returning from vacation or leave, aiming for a promotion or goal, dealing with survival mode or impostor syndrome, or simply you are curious to learn with like-minded individuals, this challenge is for you! You will be more prepared to handle stressful situations and life’s inevitable issues. 🎁 Join for Free! (See details).
🙋🏻♀️ Hey senior leader! If you would like to help in the Challenge, subscribe as a Mentor now!
You will be assigned to one of the groups to mentor others.
And if you have a related newsletter, you can contribute with some of the weekly mini-posts! Just promote the WonderLead Thriving Challenge in your newsletter and reach out to me to collaborate. The more we join and contribute, the better the experience! 🥳
My Recommendations
Thriving Books
Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence — Daniel Goleman.
A Theory of Human Motivation — Abraham H. Maslow.
Thriving Tools
Thriving Related Substacks
How to make meaningful progress this year without burning out - Selda Seyfi
How I'm advancing my career without neglecting my life. "New year's resolutions" done right. - Fran Soto
Thank you 🧚🏻♀️ for your commitment to personal and professional growth.
I'm excited to thrive together with you! Click 💖, Chat or Share so more people join.
This post opinions are my own, and may not reflect the opinions of the company I work for.
I can swear I'm in survival mode. LOL 😂
Saving This Pat❤❤