Every morning, before my feet touch the floor, I lie still, breathe, and take inventory from my toes to the top of my head. It’s not just about the physical, but the mental, emotional, and even spiritual condition.
It takes a just a few minutes, and I have found it to be one of the most consequential leadership decisions I make all day, because the version of me that walks out the door in the morning, is the version my clients, my team, and my family get.
After coaching more than 400 executives, I’ve come to believe that your state of being is a leadership tool every professional should use, yet most leaders never check it.
Sure, we have a routine to check in on our calendar, emails, text message, calls, the laundry list of to do’s, and of course our metrics. We rarely check the instrument doing all of the leading.
This post walks through the three daily check-ins I use, what the research says about why they work, and how to build your own version on even your busiest days.
NO EXCUSES ALLOWED. Every one of us has 3 minutes. If you are gasping for air from that, then you and I need to have a deeper discussion regarding boundaries, delegation, and prioritization.
Your State of Being Travels Further Than You Think
I was fired after a long corporate career and called a “difficult boss.” I know what that label really means, and I know how much of it comes down to the state you carry into a room.
The research backs this up. In a well-known 2005 study in the Journal of Applied Psychology, Thomas Sy, Stéphane Côté, and Richard Saavedra found that a leader’s mood spread to individual team members and shaped the emotional tone of the group collectively. It also has profound affects on how well the group coordinated and how much effort people put in.
Both positive and negatives moods, attitudes, however you want to call it… traveled with the person, whether they intended it to or not.
Now layer in Gallup’s long-running finding that managers account for at least 70 percent of the variance in employee engagement across business units. Put those two findings side by side and a clear picture emerges. The person with the most influence over how a team experiences work is also the person whose mood spreads the fastest.
Think about it. If your own boss shows up agitated, frustrated, energetic, or motivated… you respond to that in kind.
Someone smiles at you, in most cases, you’re going to smile back. If someone snarls at you, you most likely, will snarl back.
That makes checking your state of being a performance practice. I will take it one step further and say it should be in everyone’s job description.
On my podcast, Dr. Cynthia Bentzen-Mercer, a social psychologist and author of Now, Near, Next, told me, “Our body tells on us first.”
I absolutely love this declaration, because I have learned over the last fifteen years that it is so true.
Cynthia’s research on drift shows how easily driven people override those signals. My addition to that: if you don’t listen to your body, your team will hear it anyway In your tone, your emails and even In how much patience you have left at 4 PM.
Here are my drift prevention practices you may want to try, and then listen to the newest Shedding the Corporate Bitch episode where Cynthia lays out her powerful techniques she uses for herself and her own clients.
- Check-In One: The Morning Scan
Before I get out of bed, I stay still, breathe, and scan from my toes to my head across four levels: physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Anything that feels off, anything that would send me into the world carrying angst, I focus on shifting to a more positive state before my day begins.
The scan works best when each level gets one simple question. Physically: where am I holding tension? Mentally: what is already racing? Emotionally: what am I still carrying from yesterday? Spiritually: who do I choose to be today?
One more perspective from years of coaching: naming comes before shifting. “I notice I’m anxious about the 10 AM board prep” is information you can work with.
It’s also important to recognize that shifting your state is different from suppressing it. You being intentional about shifting your state of being isn’t about pretending the concern, fear, uncertainty, anxiety, stress away. It is giving you time to choose how you want to show up for yourself and others around you.
Clients will tell me that their intent is never to create a stressful or uncomfortable experience for their team. However, at times they are without recognizing it. And then there are some who don’t acknowledge it.
Be the one who wants to be self-aware and intentional.
2. Check-In Two: The Hourly Pause
Every hour, I take three minutes to stop, step away from my work, and simply breathe. Sometimes that means stepping outside with my dog, Coco. Sometimes it’s grabbing a glass of water or just sitting back in my seat.
Two bodies of research support this. A 2022 meta-analysis in PLOS ONE pooled 22 study samples covering more than 2,300 participants and found that micro-breaks of ten minutes or less boosted vigor and reduced fatigue. Think of your three minutes as protecting your energy and your state of being. After a truly draining stretch of deep work, give yourself time to reset.
Microsoft’s Human Factors Lab added a vivid picture of what happens without pauses. Researchers fitted participants with EEG caps and compared four back-to-back half-hour video meetings against the same meetings separated by short breaks. Without breaks, brain activity associated with stress kept climbing from meeting to meeting, and the jump from one call straight into the next produced sharp stress spikes. With breaks, stress levels held steady across all four meetings.
To make it stick, anchor it to something you already do.
- Take the pause at every meeting transition
- Set a quiet hourly chime
- Set a timer to do 30 minutes of work on a task with a 5 minute break before going at it again
- Change your calendar defaults to 25- and 50-minute meetings so the space is built in.
The last one is my favorite go to and I adhere to it no matter what or with whom a meeting or appointment is with.
3. Check-In Three: The Nightly Reconciliation
Before I go to sleep, I want to be clear headed. So, I reconcile my day, the way a finance team reconciles the books at month-end. Everything that came up, the good and the bad, gets looked at and then put away so I can be fully present for rest and sleep.
There’s a practical lesson in the research here. In a 2018 Baylor University sleep-lab study led by Michael Scullin, young adults who spent five minutes writing a specific to-do list at bedtime fell asleep about nine minutes faster than those who wrote about tasks they had already completed. The more specific the list, the faster they fell asleep. The study was small and used healthy young adults, but the principle is useful: putting something away works best when you get it out of your head and onto paper. Basically, you’re no longer worrying about what has to get done. You have the plan and you can close your eyes feeling good about what will get done , then, but not now when sleep is critical.
How to Start Without Adding One More Thing to Your Plate
Start by choosing one check-in to do, not three. For most executives, the morning scan delivers the biggest return because it sets the tone for everything after it.
Track it for two weeks with a single word each morning that describes your state of being. We’re looking for patterns and you’ll see them faster if you take 1 minute to name how you feel in one word.
If you want to amp up your ability to see this through, and even model powerful self-care, tell your team what you’re doing. When a leader says, “I’m taking three minutes to reset before our next meeting,” it gives everyone else permission to do the same, and that changes the emotional tone of the whole group.
Lastly. We aren’t looking for perfection, meaning that you do it every single day. Imperfect perfection will reveal a lot to you, and when you see the benefits you gain from it, you will be intentional about using that time to do it time and time again.
The Bigger Picture: Catching Drift Early
In our conversation, Dr. Cynthia described drift as the slow slide off course that driven people rarely notice until they slam into something. Her daily seven-minute practice helps people catch it early. These three check-ins are my version of the same discipline, spread across the morning, the workday, and the night.
Find the one(s) that work for you. Also, be sure to listen to my conversation with Cynthia to hear all about her practices and assessments she uses to identify drift with individuals, teams, and organizations. HERE
Your Next Move
Want to see where your leadership is off balance? Take the free Leadership Gap Diagnostic → https://balloffirecoaching.com/opt-in [button]
Go deeper with my full conversation with Dr. Cynthia Bentzen-Mercer on Shedding the Corporate Bitch → [PASTE EPISODE LINK]
Ready to work on how you show up, with a coach in your corner? Book a discovery call → https://coachmebernadette.com/discoverycall [button]
Sources
Sy, T., Côté, S., & Saavedra, R. (2005). The contagious leader: Impact of the leader’s mood on the mood of group members, group affective tone, and group processes. Journal of Applied Psychology, 90(2), 295–305. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.90.2.295
Beck, R., & Harter, J. Managers Account for 70% of Variance in Employee Engagement. Gallup Business Journal. https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/182792/managers-account-variance-employee-engagement.aspx
Microsoft WorkLab. Research Proves Your Brain Needs Breaks. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/brain-research
