Is it lonely at the top?

This post is written by Paul Boston, business advisor, leadership development at Ontario Public Service

• **The problem: **The feeling of isolation and loneliness is real for leaders.
• Why it matters: These feelings can impair a leader's ability to lead people and teams.
• The solution: Learning and applying effective leadership performance skills from the world of sports can help.

Over my career as an ultra-endurance athlete I have experienced many parallels between the world of sport and leadership, often bringing these insights into my professional life when developing leaders. There is a notion in our culture that “it’s lonely at the top”. Fact or fiction? Well, it depends: for many leaders, it can be very lonely, and yet other leaders don’t feel lonely at all.

From the world of ultra racing to everyday leadership, I’d like to share some skills leaders can use to feel less lonely at the top.

Where is your support group?

People will sometimes say endurance sports are a single person’s sport, however there is always a whole team behind these athletes, like any leader in an organisation. It could be someone running their first marathon, or someone going to run their first 100km ultra marathon. From the outside it looks like one individual, but there is a team of trainers, coaches, nutritionists, massage therapists, and the list goes on.

"No matter how experienced you are as a leader, you always have a skilled team around you that wants to succeed."

As a leader, it’s important to find your support groups. This could be people you have worked with before, it could be peers you might not have talked to in years. The important thing is to build a group around you who can be trusted advisors, sounding boards, or just someone with an open ear who asks good questions.

Just like an endurance athlete who has a coach, this is where you might consider investing in an executive coach to help you navigate a new role as a leader, or just help you move through the challenges and unpredictable times which most leaders have found themselves in over the last 18 months.

Reframing in the moment

As an ultra endurance athlete, lots of things have happened to me on the racecourse. I once ran an ultra trail race that took me 18 hours to complete and it felt like I went through a year’s worth of ups and downs during that race. The thing I learned early in my endurance athlete career is the skill to reframe things in the moment, and it’s something I often share with leaders who might be feeling lonely.

This is not to say that if everything is not going to plan, or going sideways, you need to look at the positive each and every time, but rather that you need to look at the situation from different angles: the good, the bad and the ugly. Then start to reframe things based on what you have observed and make productive and directive decisions based on that by putting these three things into practice:

• look at things from the perspective of what you can control,
• what you have influence over, and
• what is completely out of your control.

Then decide to move forward in a positive direction!

Reframing is not always about turning “lemons into lemonade” - I think that’s how the saying goes - but rather looking at things with an agile perspective.

As leaders you know nothing ever goes the way you might envision, and most things take way more time than we usually think, but once you start to develop the skill of reframing, it will soon become second nature, and you will do it automatically without even thinking twice about what you are doing.

A mentor of mine once said to me: “It doesn’t matter if the glass is half full or empty. If you like what’s in it, keep filling it up. If you don’t like what’s in the glass, dump it out and start over again”.

Question self doubt

One of the reasons leaders “feel” lonely at the top is self-doubt. It could be a large challenge they must deal with in a quick period, or it could be they are thrown into a new leadership role with no warning. Self doubt starts to creep up and then what I often see is the withdrawal and closing in on themselves that starts to create those feelings of loneliness.

This happens often within the world of sport, and as an ultra endurance athlete I learned the skill of challenging my own thinking when I feel self doubt approaching. I coach leaders by having them challenge their thoughts to a point where they are almost arguing with themselves about the fear and self doubt. What this ends up doing is transforming the self doubt energy into something more positive and productive.

Questioning and challenging one’s own doubts starts to fire off different areas of the brain, taking an individual to a place where their perspective and energy shifts into something more positive and productive. You are in fact moving away from monologuing self chatter into dialoguing.

The power of your team

Back in the early 2000s, I started to see some larger performance in my race results. I was finishing on the podium and moving from racing regionally, provincially, nationally, and then onto the world stage. This process was a journey, but I remember when reaching the world stage of racing, I started to experience challenges that a rookie would experience. I thought (or so my ego told me) I am a nationally ranked athlete; I can get through this. I failed to reach out for help and guidance from my teammates, and yes, the close circle of people who helped get me to that point.

Once I chose to discuss and share the performance and training issues I was facing, the skills and talents of all the people around me kicked into action, and that alone made me feel better, and my training and performance almost started to improve immediately.

No matter how experienced you are as a leader, you always have a skilled team around you that wants to succeed. Reaching out to them, authentically, asking them for insights or help with what you are dealing with will start to showcase their best talents and skills to help you succeed as a leader and alleviate the sense of having to do it on your own.

I was fortunate to start learning some of these performance skills as a young endurance athlete and have only scratched the surface here of what sport teaches us as leaders, about human behaviour, and performance.

If you are “feeling” lonely or isolated, try using one of these skills, and over time you will start to feel less lonely at the top! - Paul Boston

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