Latest / Real STRength with Sarah Draper / The Real Strength Framework | #12
Transcript
- Sarah Draper: It's about understanding the three dimensions of leadership strength and how they work together to amplify each other. Your state's contagious. Real strength is three-dimensional. Walking doesn't just calm your body, it changes how your brain works. I create the conditions for my brain to do the thinking. Welcome to the Future Walk Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Drapert. Each week on the podcast, I explore tools to help you lead your best now and into the future, and I talk with top leaders to see how they stay focused when life gets cluttered. It's time to stop reacting to your life and start leading it. Welcome to Future Walk. Welcome to the Future Walk Podcast. I'm Sarah Draper and I'm so glad you're here. This is part two of a two-part series on leadership and well-being. If you haven't listened to part one yet, please go back and listen. In that episode, we talked about why you can't wellness program your way out of organizational dysfunction. And I walked you through a cultural contradiction audit, which is a tool to identify where what you're saying Is not what's actually happening in your organization. Today I'm going to show you what to do with that information. I'll introduce you to the Real Strength Framework, which is a three-dimensional approach to building strength as a leader in your body, your mind, and your relationships. Now, this is not about adding more to your already full plate. It's about understanding the three dimensions of leadership strength and how they work together to amplify each other. So by the end of this episode, you'll understand what real strength is, why all three dimensions matter, how the future walk builds strength in all three simultaneously, and how to assess your own strength using a strength check. So let's get started. So, last episode, you identified some cultural contradictions in your organization. So this is when you've seen where your stated values And actual behaviors don't align. So now what? Right? This is where most leaders get stuck. You see a problem, but you don't know how to fix it, or it just feels too big or too complicated, especially when you're depleted. That's where the real strength framework comes in. I developed this because most wellness approaches, both individual and organizational, are one-dimensional. They focus on physical fitness or mental health or team connection. All these matter, but rarely do these programs and frameworks work on all three together. Real strength is integrated and holistic, and it starts with you as a leader. It has three dimensions. I call it capital S T R strength, state, trait, relate. Your state's your body and your physiology. It's how you show up and regulate. It's your energy, your stress response, your physical health, your sleep, your nervous system. When your state's strong, you show up with the right level of energy for whatever is ahead of you. Maybe you need to be energized, which is great. Maybe you need to be calm. You're able to regulate and bring that. You're focused. You're present. But when your state's depleted, You're reactive or you're irritable or you're running on fumes. You're just in survival mode. Your state's contagious. So as a leader, when you're regulated, your team feels safe. But when you're dysregulated, they feel a threat. So your state matters because it helps you perform your best and it sets the energy for your entire team. Okay, traits are your mind and your mindsets. This is who you're becoming. It's how you think and process information. Things like resilience, focus, empathy, and patience. These aren't fixed. They can be developed over time through repetition and reflection and bravery. Traits are your cognitive flexibility, your growth mindset, your ability to handle complexity and your decision making under pressure. When your traits are strong, you're curious, you're adaptable, open to new information. But when they're not, you're rigid, defensive, and stuck in your thinking. As a leader, your traits impact your decision quality. When you're rigid and defensive, your decisions suffer. But when you're flexible and curious, they improve. So your traits matter because they determine how you navigate complexity and uncertainty and relate. This is your connection to others and the world around you. It's how you lead. It's where you get your inspiration. It's where you find your why and your purpose. It's those relationships, communication, your ability to create psychological safety, your sense of purpose. It takes all of your internal performance and brings it externally to others as well as drawing from others when you need it. And when you relate as strong, You're present, you're connected, you're purposeful. But when it's not, you're disconnected and uninspired or going through the motions. Your relate creates your organizational culture. And it matters also because it determines the quality of your relationships. Most well-noticed programs will focus on state, the physical health, the stress management, the sleep, and those are all so important. They're foundational and they're key alone in and of themselves. But they're not enough. If your state is strong but your traits are rigid and defensive, you'll make poor decisions. If your state and traits are strong but your relates weak, you'll create a disconnected and defensive culture. Real strength is three dimensional and you need all three dimensions working together. Here's what makes the future walk so powerful. It builds strength in all three dimensions simultaneously. Let me show you how. When you walk outside, especially in nature, your body begins to regulate itself. Research shows that even five to ten minutes of nature exposure can begin to regulate your sympathetic nervous system or the branch of the nervous system that is your fight or flight side. Helping you shift into that calm, focused side. At 20 to 30 minutes, you get the greatest rate of cortisol reduction, an average drop of 21%. Your heart rate slows, your blood pressure drops, your nervous system shifts from a threat response into rest and restoration. And this is not just about feeling better in the moment. This is about building your capacity to regulate under pressure. And when you practice this regularly, so say you take strategic feature walks as part of your leadership routine, you're training your nervous system to recover faster, to regulate more effectively, and show up calmer in high stress situations. That is state strength. But walking doesn't just calm your body, it changes how your brain works. Stanford Research found that walking increases your creative output by approximately 60%. It improves your ability to generate novel or new solutions to complex problems. But it's not just about creativity, it also enhances your cognitive flexibility, your ability to shift perspectives, to see multiple options, and adapt your thinking. When you're stuck at your desk staring at the same problem, you've all been there before, right? You're just looking at the same thing where your thinking becomes narrow and rigid. But you get up. You walk, your brain opens up. You see possibilities you couldn't see before. This is why some of the best strategic insights have come during walks. This was for me as well as many of our historical thinkers, and I've covered that in a previous episode too. Not because of thinking harder, but thinking differently, changing the conditions for your brain to be able to do its work best. And when you practice this regularly, when you use the strategic feature walks to work through complex problems, you train your brain to think more flexibly, more creatively, and strategically. So that's the traits part of strength. And walking changes how you connect to others and with your purpose. Research shows that walk and talk coaching in nature. produces nearly twice as many positive changes in mental health, job satisfaction, and self-esteem compared to traditional coaching. Why? Because walking side by side creates psychological safety. You're not sitting across from someone creating a performance or power dynamic. You're literally moving together in the same direction. And the side-by-side positioning reduces defensiveness and increases openness. People share things on walks they wouldn't share in an office. And when you walk alone, you can reconnect with your purpose. You step out of the noise and remember why you're doing your work in the first place. When you practice this regularly, whether you use a strategic future walk to connect with someone on your team or reconnect solo with your purpose, you're building the relational and purposeful foundations of your leadership. So that's the relate strength. And what makes this so powerful is during a future walk, you're not building these dimensions separately, you're building them together. When you take that strategic future walk, you're simultaneously regulating your nervous system, which is the state side, enhancing your cognitive flexibility and creativity, which is the traits, and connecting with your purpose or your team. And that's to relate. There's one practice with these three dimensions, and that's real strength. That's why the future walk isn't just a walk, it's a leadership practice that can become an indispensable part of your leadership routine. Okay, we're gonna move into the strength check shortly, but I want to pause for a moment. If this framework's resonating with you, would you share this episode with another leader? Maybe someone who's struggling with burnout or trying to build a healthier culture. Just send them a link and let them know that you thought of them. It could be exactly what they need to hear right now. All right, let's talk about how to assess your strength. And we give you a simple way to regularly do this, to assess your strength as a leader. I call it the strength check. It's three questions, one for each dimension that you can ask yourself. One is the state question. How am I showing up physically and emotionally? You could be energized or depleted, calm or reactive, sleeping well or running on fumes. Think about what your body needs right now. So thinking through these different things, you might notice maybe you are irritable and reactive. Maybe you're exhausted but you can't sleep. Maybe you're getting sick more often, or you're relying on caffeine or other stimulants to get through the day. And then what to do about this comes from once you identify on the physical side what's going on. Maybe you realize you need to prioritize your sleep or take micro breaks during the day, move your body regularly, or practice some type of nervous system regulation like breathing. Then you ask a traits question. So this is a states question on the body side. Traits check is how am I thinking and processing? Could look at this as: am I flexible or rigid? Curious or defensive? Open to new information or stuck in my patterns? Maybe what's one assumption I'm making that might not be true? When your traits are depleted or weak, you're gonna notice potentially you're stuck in black and white thinking, or you're defensive when you're challenged about something, or you're repeating the same solutions. Where you're avoiding complexity instead of engaging in it. So, what you can do about that is something like take a strategic future walk regularly to work through complex problems. Or ask yourself that blind spot question we've previously talked about, which is, what am I not seeing? Or seek out perspectives of those who challenge your thinking, or begin a practice like mindfulness meditation. And finally, the relate check question is. How am I connecting and leading? You can ask yourself deeper questions. Am I present or distracted? Am I creating psychological safety or fear? Am I connected to my purpose or just going through the motions? When was the last time I had a meaningful conversation with someone on my team? If your relate is struggling, you're going to notice that your team is disengaged or defensive. Maybe you're going through the motions without meaning. Or you're violating some of your boundaries and values to get things done, or you're avoiding difficult conversations. So what you can do about that is schedule some walk-and-talk meetings with your team, reconnect with your purpose and your boundaries through visioning future walks. Have honest conversations about what's working and what's not. So I recommend doing a strength check once a week. So you ask yourself those three questions. Those three big questions are: how am I showing up physically and emotionally? How am I thinking and processing? And how am I connecting and leading? When you ask yourself those questions, this is before the walk, identify which dimension needs the most attention right now. Then go on a strategic future walk, 20 to 30 minutes. To identify one, just one action you can do in the upcoming week to strengthen that dimension. Come back from your walk and write down your insights. You don't have to fix everything at once. Just identify one area and one action to take. In this way, you will begin to build a more integrated strength for yourself, which helps you lead and perform better in all aspects of your life. So, as an example from me, I had a time in my life when I was all about state and relate. I did nothing in traits. I thought it was unnecessary and that these things were fixed anyhow. And it wasn't until I deliberately started some trait practices, which for me were mindfulness, meditation, and gratitude that I began to change. Now, why I did those, it was out of necessity because I had kind of hit my bottom and and I was struggling in the things I used to do really well and really easily, my states and my relates, it wasn't calling this at the time, but those areas of physical and the relationships and connections when my leadership was struggling. So I guess was trying anything to see what would help. And mindfulness, meditation, and gratitude trait practices started to change me. I didn't really realize it right away. It's it's it's slow and tedious at times, but I did begin to notice that I was more creative and insightful when I was out in nature moving myself, like on my own, propelling myself. And this wasn't in the intense running workouts I'd once done on the physical side, but just walking gently in nature and sometimes easy bike riding. Those insights only surfaced. I now know those insights I started to get when I was moving myself in nature only surfaced because I had to learned to tune into myself through that trait work I'd been doing. Right. I had learned a process of tuning into myself from that trait work that I was all of a sudden seeing this impact on it when I was out moving myself in nature. So I began to use this as a tool to help me get more creative or see problems differently. I would seed an idea or an issue or a problem or a conversation I needed to have before I went out for one of those easy walks or easy cycles. I would just think about okay, what's one thing I want to see where my mind goes on this? And I did it. And I found that within 15 to 20 minutes, My brain would start to shift in this place where new ideas and connections came together. And this absolutely matches what I now under understand is happening in the brain during these different phases it goes through as you're moving yourself in nature. So new ideas would come through. So I began to use this as an indispensable tool for me to get creative or look at something differently. And I regularly still plan these longer bouts outside to work through a problem differently, to think about a conversation, to practice something, because I know my brain will get into that place where ideas flow more freely. I don't judge them. And I just let that creative process unfold. I create the conditions for my brain to do the thinking. So to summarize, I would do that physical state work that was moving in nature. To let my mind wander in a productive way, that's the trait work, to help create new solutions or see a bigger picture or work through something that was a leadership leadership situation. That's the relate work. That is the future walk. It's a tool that's at the intersection of state, trait, and relate. It's like a 3D Venn diagram where the intersections of each of these three dimensions, they Amplify versus isolate one another. Okay, so to recap from today, we've talked about the real strength framework, a three-dimensional approach to building strength as a leader. The three dimensions of this state, which is your body and your physiology, traits, your mind and your mindsets, and relate your connection to others and the world around you. The future walk. We talked about. How that builds strength in all three dimensions simultaneously, and then a strength check, a practical tool to assess and build strength in all dimensions, one thing at a time, not trying to tackle everything at once, but a regular strength check identified one thing for the upcoming week to focus on. So the previous episode we talked about how you can't wellness program your way out of organizational dysfunction. And we identify the cultural contradictions that hurt your culture. Lena covered how to do a future walk in conjunction with a cultural contradictions audit. To do that, you identify one contradiction within your influence. Remember, you're not trying to fix everything at once. You have to be realistic about what you can actually change. And once you identify that one thing that is within your influence, then you go on a future walk with the question of. What's one specific thing I can do as a leader to close that gap? Close that gap between what we say in the organization and what actually happens. That was last episode. And today in part two, we talked about how to build the strength you need to fix those contradictions you identified. You've got to build your strength. You can't eliminate cultural contradictions. You can't lead well. If you're depleted, rigid, and disconnected. But when you build real strength, when you strengthen your state, your traits, and your relate, you create and develop that capacity to lead differently. So again, this week, do a strength check to identify state. How am I showing up physically? Traits, how am I thinking and processing and relate? How am I connecting and leading? And then do a future walk to identify one thing you can do in the upcoming week to strengthen whichever dimension needs the most attention right now. Okay. If you're finding this podcast valuable, please subscribe and follow so you don't miss any future episodes and leave a comment. I'd love to hear which dimension of real strength resonates with you, what you've discovered in your strength check, what you think of your future walk. If you've started to take them, anything you'd even like me to cover on a future podcast episode. You can also find out more about me through LeadingWellstrategies.com. The Real Strength Framework addresses what most performance and wellness programs miss, which is the importance of working in all three dimensions. So this week, do your strength check, then step outside, leave your phone behind. Take 20 to 30 minutes to identify one thing you can do in the upcoming week and see what becomes clear. Thanks for joining me on the Future Walk Podcast. I'm Sarah Draper. Until next time, enjoy your walk.