Mental health has increasingly become a more popular topic and a more accessible resource for individuals, especially children, adolescents, and emerging adults. But in terms of being a leader, handling depression, anxiety, PTSD, OCD, and more can lead to burnout. How does it affect leadership?
In Bloom Project (inbloomproject.com) is an organization that provides improvement of wellbeing and productivity to individuals to produce positive results in the environments they exist in. According to In Bloom Project, this is “why mental health awareness is important for leadership.” According to them:
- Leaders need good mental health to show empathy.
- Leaders need good mental health to be perceptive.
- Leaders need good mental health to keep showing up.
I agree with In Bloom Project; leaders need to show empathy, be perceptive, and keep showing up, especially if they are fighting for a more significant cause than them. However, what sparked my interest in mental health and leadership was my time spent teaching youth leadership at the Franklin County Juvenile Detention Center and the Circleville Department of Youth Services. Teaching and interacting with incarcerated youth made me realize how important mental health is, especially for adolescents and emerging adults. It was pretty ironic that I taught them leadership tools and principles, but the youth showed very little, or no, empathy at all. They weren’t really perceptive to the situations and could not adapt to different environments. Rarely were they able to show up for one opportunity for them to change their life trajectory because, in reality, they still had time to recover from their mistakes, consequences of their decisions?
At any given moment, if I were to ask each youth I interacted with, “are you a leader?” With all of the confidence in the world, they would answer with a “yes!” I would then ask them, “tell me what make you a leader?” The typical answers I would get are “because I take care of me,” or “because I get money,” or “because I handle my business.” I always found these standard answers interesting because in the case of leading your own life. Those are the exact things we have to do to get to each level we want to get to. We have to find a way to make money to survive; whatever we determine our business is, we have to conduct it, and at the end of the day, we have ourselves and have to face ourselves in the mirror each day.
One thing about youth, they are wise beyond their years without even realizing it, but I always would rebuttal, leading with a communal perspective. In most cases, even though we handle our business, there’s someone or a group of people who helped us and even taught us how to conduct business somewhere along the line. Someone provided us the opportunity to make money. Someone taught us how to take care of ourselves. In whatever environment we exist in, how we take care and handle ourselves influences someone else’s way of taking care of themselves.
In general, if we are all leaders in some kind of way, then why aren’t we discussing leadership and mental health together. Whether it’s a mother or father or couple leading and raising their family. A director, manager, team lead leading their workers to efficiency and success. A teacher educating their classroom of students. to the question “how does it affect leadership?” How does mental health affect leadership? Referencing In Bloom Project’s second point, leaders need good mental health to be perceptive. We aren’t perceptive at all, even if we are still operating in a burnt-out state. Being keen is the most essential principle in being a leader. No matter the place or reason, we must always show up because our influence and ability to adapt are what drive the environment’s energy. Whether it’s to empower another to find their voice or stand for another whose voice has been suppressed, the ability to adapt and act accordingly is essential.
Having the tools to fight or have a better handle on mental illnesses makes being a leader easier. It decreases the heavy load that already exists in the lens of leadership. Before one can save the world, one first must take care of our own home. We always find a home when we take a look in the mirror.
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