You need thick skin but a soft heart
How do you build the thick skin needed to protect yourself as a leader but maintain the lightness that makes the journey enjoyable and joyful?
This is one of those #SelfAuthoring posts that will make more sense to those who have chosen a life of leadership. Those who have given themselves over to sacrifice, to stick their head above the parapet and serve a cause greater than themselves. Firstly, you shouldn't feel bad if you are exploring this question, it is a bit of a quandary many haven't resolved.
Why you need thick skin
Let's face it, when you put your hand up to say 'I want to lead, I want to help others in some sort of way', you're often putting your hand up to do good. What you soon realise is that thick skin is necessary for leadership.
When I first put my hand up to lead at 13 years old, it was to lead the school council. I generally just wanted the school to be better. However, I soon discovered that being visible comes with criticism, betrayal, and many other things I didn't know I was volunteering for. Pick whatever political leader you want, whether on the left or right of the political spectrum, they will be criticised.
The very act of saying something, believing or commuting to an idea means you will find people who believe and are committed to the opposite thing. There's a well-known saying that. decisions divide’ and I’ve found that to be true. When you make a decision, you inadvertently divide people into groups of those who agree with you and those who don't. I struggled with this when I was growing up. I had a strong people-pleasing tendency which meant I struggled with accepting that my decisions would lead to some people disagreeing with me.
People pleaser
This meant my early years were full of me trying to make decisions that everyone would agree with and so, I was a pretty poor leader. I've written about my journey with people pleasing in an earlier issue of #SelfAuthoring. However, now much older and later on the journey, I realise that the decisions I make will lead to criticism. I've made peace with making many decisions that people don't like, however, sometimes it’s not even the decisions you make that invite criticism. Just being visible is enough for some people.
I remember the first time I was on BBC Breakfast being interviewed about my take on Dame Louise Casey's integration plan for the Government. I shared my perspective on National TV and for my young career, this was my highlight. I was so excited to be asked, after the session, I logged on to Twitter to see people's take and was shocked by the first few remarks. People were saying they loved it, and I made a great point here and there.
However, after reading that, I got to the other comments, people commented on my race, how I sounded and the fact that I looked odd. Very quickly, a blissful beautiful moment became something very different. I realised in that moment. I needed a thick skin. I needed to be able to hear the criticism, but not take it personally. The more visible you are, the more opinions people have and you must be able to deal with it. The majority of the opinions will be baseless but you have to take it.
Dealing with Betrayal
Another thing you deal with in leadership is betrayal. I could write a whole other chapter about this. There are times in your leadership journey when you will meet people who you're committed to and maybe you pour into them, or maybe you spend hours looking after and caring for them. Irrespective of how much you care for them, often, after they are ok, nursed back to health, they walk away. This could leave you feeling betrayed and left alone. This is something I've had to come to terms with in leadership and sometimes it can be disorientating. This is to say that you can spend years and even decades pouring into somebody and they simply disappear when they don't need you anymore.
If you don't build a thick skin, every time someone leaves, it can leave you questioning yourself. What did I do? What did I say wrong? What's wrong with me? You have to learn quickly that this is a necessary path of leadership.
Why do you need a soft heart?
Well, I could riff for many hours. Getting straight to the point. it's really hard to lead people with a heart that has been calloused by betrayal and years of bitterness. A soft heart allows you to maintain the childlike optimism necessary to tackle really big issues. It’s what sustains you to carry on leading during a hard and often lonely leadership journey. If you grow bitter and jaded, very quickly you'll fall out of love with what you're doing. A soft heart allows you to emphasise with people and put yourself in their shoes. Put it this way, to attempt to understand what people are going through, you have to have a soft heart. It's a superpower for a leader.
It makes you the empathetic, caring and relatable person who serves through sacrifice and is willing to get down when people are down, to mourn with people who are mourning. All of this requires a soft heart. It's hard to connect to people when you are hard and have a cold heart. Without a soft heart, you cannot lead effectively. In my opinion, a soft heart is a non-negotiable for somebody who wants to be an effective leader.
How do you balance both
Now you've probably noticed the dilemma here. You need some thick skin but you also need a soft heart. Sometimes in pursuit of building this thick skin. We end up building many layers around our hearts.
The problem is that when people go about trying to build thick skin they often callous their heart in the process. They fortify themselves and in so doing lock up their heart in the process. I’ve been down this road before. I’ve made the same mistake. To protect myself from high criticism which came from being visible so young, I would use apathy and indifference as a defence. I found safety in stoicism and prided myself on feeling nothing. I had indeed built thick skin but what I lost was the ability to truly empathise. To truly understand people, to feel what they felt and to put myself in their shoes. This is what happens from optimising for thick skin.
It’s an ongoing commitment
Part of the answer is realising that you don't actually build thick skin or a soft heart but instead, they are ongoing commitments. In other words, you are building tougher skin and you are also softening your heart. You never finish this ongoing process.
Every time I think I've built my skin to the right toughness, someone says something, a quip or a little comment that breaks through my fortified walls. And there I go again, a random Twitter comment or Instagram message is bothering me. It reminds me I still have work to do to build up my sense of identity. My identity mustn’t be tied to what people think. It's even more important to ensure my sense of self is not connected to commentary on my gifts and talents. That would make it all too fickle.
The same thing happens when it comes to my heart. Once I get to a place where I think I have a soft heart, some issues, some ask, some requirements make me realise that my heart is maybe not as soft as I think it is. When these things happen, it helps me realise that I need to do more work to dig deeper to ask myself the hard questions of why I'm doing this in the first place. I need to work more intentionally to empathise with people.
These things happen and help me realise that it is an ongoing journey and i’m not the finished article.
Interrogating my foundation
Another thing that helps in trying to strike this delicate balance is interrogating where my identity is found. As a Christian, my principal identity marker is that I belong to God and that I'm part of God's family. This acceptance of me has nothing to do with what I do or what I don't do. It's a positional security I can rest on and it’s the bedrock of my life and identity.
It means when everything else isn't going well, I can always rely on the fact that I'm accepted and adopted by God. It frees me to live my best life which isn't connected to how well I'm rated by other people. I can hold Jesus up as my example where I try to live the kind of life he lived. He desperately cared about people's infirmities and their struggles. He was intimately wedded to what people were going through. In so doing, I don't have to obsess over getting the right balance. Instead, I can try to be like Jesus and everything. will be okay
No one gets it right
The last and ironic way is to realise that no one has the perfect balance between a soft heart and tough skin. There is no way to have the perfect balance. I sometimes oscillate between both extremes of a very soft heart and very tough skin. My goal as I mature in leadership is to ensure the variance or the range of my oscillation isn't too wide. I shouldn't go from having unbelievably thick skin to the other extreme of being a wet blanket anyone can walk over. Instead, I can move back and forth, but the range can be a bit less than that extreme
Armed with the knowledge that I can't get it right, I try my best. I try to do the best I can, to put my best foot forward, to serve through sacrifice and to stand next to people and walk with them through some of the toughest moments of their lives
I try not to score myself on how emotionless or emotional I am. Instead, I aim at the good and reassure myself that that's the best thing I can do.
Have a great week,
M.T. Omoniyi
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