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Self vs Service: Wellbeing as a Foundation of Resilient Leadership
- Becca Meadows
- Apr 1
- 8 min read
Wellbeing and leadership - two areas that intuitively seem connected, yet we rarely exploit the synergies as leaders, or are quick to dismiss wellbeing when life gets pressured.
As a registered nutritionist and leadership consultant, I use the Resilient Leaders Elements (RLE™) and the Resilient Leaders Development Programme (RLDP™) to physically show the link between cultivating resilience and self-care. Clients see in the RLDP™ what they know they feel, but have been unable to put into focus.
By self-care I don’t mean a face mask and the odd bubble bath, I mean ruthlessly prioritising the needs of your nervous system so you can continue to be a Resilient Leader.
We practice self-care through recovery, rest, movement, adequate nutrition and sleep, but as the RLDP™ points out, you have to cultivate self-awareness first. You must be able to ‘notice when you go from pressure to stress’ in order to be able to effectively use self-care as a resilience tool.
The majority of my leadership experience is within Defence. ‘You must be resilient then?’ I hear you say. There is some irony that throughout my formative years learning and practising military leadership, of ‘serving to lead’ (this is the ethos of the British Army’s leadership academy), no one spoke about ‘self’, perhaps for fear of confusing it with ‘selfish’.
No one spoke about understanding what moves us from pressure to stress, about the role of recovery in fostering long-term resilience or the importance of taking action to actively move out of stress and back into healthy pressure.
The focus was always on prioritising others. It could lead us to question whether I was ever a resilient military leader at all.
In my area of interest, working closely with female leaders, I feel there is a health and leadership imperative to work to actively remove this stigma that somehow prioritising yourself in any way as a leader is selfish. I will go on to explain why, if anything, prioritising yourself might just be the missing part of the resilience puzzle.
Why is this particularly relevant to women in leadership?
The statistics speak for themselves. Of course there are wider social aspects that play into this picture, but it gives us firm evidence that something needs to change.
It is only with the power of hindsight and an awareness through my RLE™ Accreditation that I can reflect back and consider how such a laser focus on service to others, which in itself is also necessary, can come at such a huge cost to self.
If I were to go back and ask my previous self a question, noting that effective service to others demands a heightened awareness of others (2 facets we see correlate in the RLDP™), I would ask this, ‘You are acutely aware of what moves others from pressure to stress, you help others to rest, reenergise and renew. What stops you helping yourself?
What does it look like from a wellbeing perspective?
Before I was introduced to the RLE™, I would consider the self through a more physical lens. This physical aspect is deeply interwoven with our cognitive abilities, our emotions, behaviours, and beliefs. We have a highly developed nervous system that triggers an incredible physical response when we are stressed, a response that affects every body system at the cellular level. Its only priority; to keep us alive when it senses a threat to life.
The problem is the same chemical signals occur in every single cell in our body whether there is a threat to life; a big hairy lion about to chase us, or we are chronically stressed. The body does not know the difference and enters survival mode in both instances.
The 2 sides of our autonomic nervous system
We have 2 sides to our autonomic nervous system (ANS); the sympathetic ‘fight or flight’ aspect that is triggered when the body perceives a threat to life, and the parasympathetic ‘rest and digest’ aspect that conserves energy and allows us to relax.
For me, resilience isn’t about never being in fight or flight, it’s having the flexibility to move between the two sides of the ANS, so that when we are exposed to inevitable stressors, we have the capacity to deal with it.
The ’allostatic load’ refers to the accumulated fatigue from being stuck in a chronic state of fight or flight’, unable to move from stress back to healthy pressure. This prolonged stress response can dysregulate our nervous system, meaning our capacity to manage pressure is lessened, and the trip wire that moves us from rest and digest to fight or flight is sensitised. In my mind, this equates to reduced resilience or reduced stress tolerance.
In clinical practice I frequently see the physical signs of excessive allostatic load, where when the body is stuck in fight or flight, unable to switch to rest and digest. In prioritising survival, the body down regulates all non-essential bodily processes. We see blood and energy diverted away from the digestive system, the thyroid and the reproductive organs, heart rate and respiratory rate increased, alongside blood sugar dysregulation.
This can present as digestive issues, heartburn, IBS, insomnia, high blood pressure, depression, weight gain, type 2 diabetes, thyroid disorders and menstrual irregularities. This might indeed be what was necessary millennia ago to keep us safe from lions, but it definitely isn’t the state from which we serve others to the best of our ability.
The self has to support service
So, if we are to serve others to the best of our ability, how do we do so without compromising our long-term health or resilience?
This is where I see physical wellbeing as being a fundamental aspect of leadership. Dr Jack Groppel discusses the importance of wellbeing in his book ‘the Corporate Athlete’. He emphasises the benefit of adopting an ‘athlete mindset’ in a corporate setting, in order to sustain peak performance. He argues there are 2 key components of a training programme that develops peak performance, that mirror the 2 sides of the ANS we previously discussed:
The ‘’oscillation’’ – rhythmic movement – between stress (fight or flight) and recovery (rest and digest).
Rituals that promote oscillation. “Repeated regularly, these highly precise, consciously developed routines become automatic over time.”
So like the RLDP™ encourages us to practice the behaviour ‘I rest, I reenergise, I renew’. Dr Groppel goes on to explain that this isn’t a luxury to do after stress, it is an essential part of your training programme for stress. When all the levels are aligned, as per the pyramid diagram, leaders reach their ‘ideal performance state’.
Theory vs Reality
Whilst the theory can all sound great in an abstract way, as a nutritionist and leadership consultant, my role is to support the individual to understand what this means for them in real life and enable that behavioural change. Suggesting individuals ‘prioritise their wellbeing so they can better serve others’ often leads to a blank look, perhaps a vague, compliant nod and a question of, ‘so what do I actually do next?’. Here are some considerations:
Rest Before Stress
An athlete rests before a race, in order to perform at her best during a very stressful event. We expose ourselves in the workplace to multiple ‘races’ a day but instead of resting, recovering and training for stress, we reach for another coffee.
This is the fundamental shift I support leaders to make. Instead of seeing rest as a reward we give ourselves after stress, we must see it as an integral part of our training programme that allows us to respond better to stress. Rest can come before stress.
Supporting that oscillation between stress and pressure so it becomes a ritual is essential and rest does this. When I say ‘rest’ I like to reframe it, before a client has time to respond with a defence like ‘I don’t have time’. Rest doesn’t have to be huge or long. Micro rests are 2-10 min rests that we can take at opportune moments, from a few rounds of 4-7-8 or box breathing, to reciting our strength mantra, to going to get a glass of water or dancing to our favourite song. These are all signals to our nervous system that the lion has gone away, we are safe and can ‘oscillate’ back over to rest and digest. This recovery allows us to re energise, for body processes to work effectively and importantly allows us greater capacity to respond to stress and serve others when needed.
Eat to Support the Nervous System
Food has an incredible power to help support the nervous system. Of a study[1] of 17,4000 participants, those who self-reported the highest levels of resilience had 3 dietary habits in common:
Greater overall diet quality
Greater intakes of seafood, whole grains, fats and fruit
Lower intakes of ultra-processed foods, starchy foods, sugary fatty products and sugar and confectionery.
Omega 3 fatty acids, B vitamins magnesium. zinc and folate all have a role to play in neurotransmitter synthesis, brain function and nerve cell health. Many clinical trials have looked at the power of Omega 3 supplementation to lower anxiety, suggesting there could be a link between this nutrient and overall resilience. Conversely, diets high in freesugar have been shown to heighten anxiety and lower mood, suggesting a negative impact on resilience. When a client is experiencing high levels of uncertainty and is in overwhelm, the simplest way to encourage this is to consider each meal a new opportunity to add something that will nourish your body. Rather than a mindset of restriction or denial, we focus on ‘what can I add?’. This could be some green leafy vegetables, some oily fish, or a handful of nuts and seeds. It doesn’t have to be complicated
Exposure to ‘good stress’
Not all stress is bad. Hormetic stress is a form of low to moderate stress or ‘just right’ stress that confers a beneficial effect on the individual and improved health outcomes. The body learns and adapts from challenge that ultimately increases resilience. As mentioned before, oscillation between stress and rest is key, which means we need exposure to stress to cultivate resilience. Some examples of hormetic stress are exercise, particularly high intensity interval training (HIIT), temperature extremes like saunas or ice baths but also puzzles and crosswords. How could you introduce some additional hormetic stress into your resilience training plan?
Final thoughts
Prioritising others at the cost of yourself may be effective in the short term, but if we are to have sufficient capacity to find a way through future uncertainty or even crisis, perhaps we need to reconsider why the behaviour ‘I rest, reenergise and renew’, is one of the least practiced behaviours in the RLDP™. The statistics show that changing the narrative around the role of self-care and wellbeing might be particularly relevant to women in leadership. I went on to discuss how wellbeing supports a healthy stress response and how practicing the oscillation between fight or flight and rest and digest is an essential aspect of our ‘resilience training plan’ that allows us to support others better and for longer.
My 3 top tips of a radical reframing of rest before stress, of considering how your nutrition can enhance or detract from resilience, but also how exposure to some stress can be beneficial, gives some actionable tips that we can use ourselves to support greater self-awareness, and ultimately more resilient leadership.
[1] McKinsey, (2022) Women in the Workplace. Accessible at: https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/featured%20insights/diversity%20and%20inclusion/women%20in%20the%20workplace%202022/women-in-the-workplace-2022.pdf
[2] Remes O, Brayne C, van der Linde R, Lafortune L. A systematic review of reviews on the prevalence of anxiety disorders in adult populations [Internet]. Vol. 6, Brain and Behavior. 2016 [cited 2016 Dec 2]. p. e00497. Available from: doi.wiley.com
[3] Robert, M., Shankland, R., Bellicha, A., Kesse-Guyot, E., Deschasaux-Tanguy, M., Andreeva, V. A., Srour, B., Hercberg, S., Touvier, M., Leys, C., & Péneau, S. (2022). Associations between Resilience and Food Intake Are Mediated by Emotional Eating in the NutriNet-Santé Study. The Journal of nutrition, 152(8), 1907–1915. https://doi.org/10.1093/jn/nxac124
Meet the author: Becca Meadows
Becca Meadows is a women’s health and leadership consultant who uses a transformational combination of nutrition and lifestyle medicine alongside leadership development to get you performing better. She is passionate about supporting you feel healthier and lead better.
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