In the fast-paced world of leadership, true transformation often requires stepping outside one’s comfort zone. At Orthelian we know that this is not achieved by forcing your way through, or by pushing yourself to your limit. When we push through and use force, we find that life tends to push back, causing physical or emotional damage. It’s a bit like Newton’s Third Law of Motion: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The more we try to force something, the more pushback we get.
Experience has taught us that to get results, instead of acting with force, we need to approach challenges with flow. Using empowered action to gracefully expand our comfort zones from a solid foundation, we enable sustainable achievement and growth.
At Orthelian, we notice that our clients quickly see the benefit when it comes to incremental growth, but does this approach have what it takes to get through a crisis when the stakes are high? Actually, it is in situations with considerable risk, or where there is the possibility to lose or gain a great deal, when the embedded natural resilience in our approach comes into its own enabling leaders to have the resource and skill to step up when it matters most. To be battle-ready though, this healthy approach to risk and growth needs to be cultivated, tested and constructively challenged on a regular basis. Like a muscle, it needs to be worked, so that the strength is there to support us when needed. While we might be familiar with the concept of stress testing our business, how often do we stress-test ourselves or our team in a constructive and intentional way?
Orthelian’s team is always looking for new ways to challenge ourselves and enable us to offer new opportunities for growth to our clients. With that in mind, our founder, Claire Payne, recently challenged herself to qualify as a Firewalk Instructor and Empowerment Breakthrough Coach. This new skill set allows her to facilitate firewalking, glass walking, arrow breaks, metal bar bends, and board breaks for clients as part of our immersive training and coaching experiences. But to get to the point of being able to teach others, she had to put herself to the test and complete these tasks repeatedly herself until she mastered the necessary techniques, managing both the risk and her own neurology on each attempt. You see, Claire isn’t an adrenaline junkie. She is a rather sedate, cuddly woman of a certain age who is far more likely to be found in a coffee shop reading or listening to a podcast than chasing thrills. None of the training was easy for her but, in mastering herself and drawing on our developed systems, she sailed through the challenge, coming out stronger for it and ready to share new skills and insights with others.
The Nature of Risk
When people find out about the range of activities and training that we offer, their reactions range from curiosity to horror. The most common question is, “Are these things dangerous?”
The honest answer is yes, they can be. There’s an inherent risk in walking into an enclosure with wild animals, jumping into a cold flowing stream, dancing on fire coals, walking on broken glass, breaking arrows and bending metal bars with your throat, smashing through a board with your bare hands and reverse parking race horses…to name a few of the things we get up to in our training, at our events and on our retreats. We’d be wary of anyone who claimed otherwise.
But here’s the crucial point: risk is inherent in everything we do in life. From the moment we wake up to when we go to bed, we navigate a landscape of potential risks. As noted in the Harvard Business Review, “In business and life, the opposite of risk is not safety, but stagnation” (Gregersen, 2018).
The Risk-Benefit Analysis
The key lies in conducting a thorough risk-benefit analysis. This process, well-documented in business literature such as “The Upside of Risk” by Adrian Furnham (2021), involves weighing the potential gains against the potential losses.
In the case of empowerment coaching activities like the ones mentioned above, the benefits can be phenomenally impactful and transformative. These experiences offer:
1. A powerful opportunity to gain mastery over your system, getting your neurology working for, rather than against you.
2. An opportunity to challenge limiting beliefs, expanding your comfort zone, making room for growth.
3. A huge boost in confidence and self-efficacy, igniting that fire and passion to spur you on.
4. A tangible experience of working with and through fear in a constructive way that cultivates the ability to make better decisions under pressure.
5. An opportunity to get to know the real you better and uncover strengths and skills you may not even have realised you have or may not have appreciated the value of before.
As with any decision with potential for significant gain, the question that needs to be asked is how much risk are you willing to carry to potentially gain those benefits?
The Neuroscience of Fear and Growth
Understanding the neuroscience behind these experiences is crucial. When faced with a perceived threat, our brains can’t always distinguish between a life-threatening situation and a merely uncomfortable one. This is due to the amygdala, our brain’s fear centre, which responds rapidly to potential threats before our more rational prefrontal cortex can analyse the situation (LeDoux, 2015).
Dr David Rock’s SCARF model provides helpful insight into how our brains process threats and rewards in social situations. The model suggests that our brains react to social threats (like public speaking or confronting a colleague) in the same way they react to physical threats (Rock, 2008). What we need to do is put in place a pause so that our system can tell the difference between the two.
This understanding is key to how our empowerment coaches help our clients approach risk, build resilience and, when needed, create room for growth. By creating controlled, challenging situations, we can effectively ‘rewire’ our brain’s response to perceived threats, giving ourselves that split-second pause in which we are empowered by our fear, not ruled by it.
Building this technique involves:
1. Exposure: Gradually exposing ourselves to fear-inducing situations in a safe environment.
2. Cognitive Reappraisal: Learning to reinterpret threatening stimuli in a more positive and constructive way.
3. Emotional Regulation: Developing strategies to manage our emotional responses effectively in a way that best serves us, without the unhealthy consequences of suppressing them.
Research in neuroplasticity shows that these experiences can create new neural pathways, allowing us to respond more calmly and rationally to future challenges (Doidge, 2007). As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who introduced the concept of ‘flow’, put it: ” The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990).
Moreover, successfully overcoming these controlled challenges triggers the release of neurotransmitters like dopamine and endorphins. This not only creates a sense of achievement but also reinforces the brain’s positive association with facing and overcoming fears in a constructive way (Ratey, 2008).
By understanding and leveraging these neurological processes, empowerment coaching helps leaders develop a more resilient and adaptive mindset. This newfound mental flexibility then transfers to other areas of life, enabling leaders to navigate high-pressure situations with greater ease and confidence.
Pushing Through vs. Breakthrough: A Critical Distinction
When faced with challenges, many high-achievers default to ‘pushing through’. This approach often involves gritting one’s teeth, ignoring bodily signals, and forcing oneself to endure discomfort. While this strategy might yield short-term results, it can lead to burnout, decreased performance, a disconnection from one’s authentic self and, in some cases, unnecessary and irresponsible risks being taken.
Breakthrough, on the other hand, involves a fundamentally different approach. It’s about:
1. Acknowledging and accepting the challenge and the emotions that brings up
2. Pausing to assess the situation objectively
3. Connecting with one’s inner resources and strengths
4. Moving forward with intention and alignment
This principle applies equally to how we approach other challenges in our lives. Instead of forcing ourselves through every obstacle, we can choose challenges that align with our values and goals, and approach them in a way that fosters growth, authenticity, and sustainable success.
The Magic of Empowerment
Empowerment coaching is not about recklessness or chasing an adrenaline high. It is about putting firm foundations in place and then, from that secure platform, stepping into a space of calculated risk-taking and personal growth. A space where you can marvel at the depth and breadth of our own individual capability and learn what it feels like to step into our fully embodied potential. By working through empowerment, leaders create a new future for themselves, one where they’re better equipped to handle stress, make decisions under pressure, inspire their teams and end each day feeling fulfilled and inspired[1] .
For senior executives, established business owners, and high-achieving professionals, our approach offers a path out of the mid-career plateau. It’s an opportunity to reignite passion, rediscover joy, and have a more significant impact in both work and life, making connections and having some fun along the way.
The journey from pushing through to breakthrough isn’t always easy, but it’s immensely rewarding. It’s about learning to work with your natural systems rather than against them, finding flow instead of forcing progress.
If you’re ready to step into a space of growth and empowerment and start experiencing genuine breakthroughs in your personal and professional life, book a call here: https://calendly.com/orthelian/30min?month=2024-10
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*References*:
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row.
Doidge, N. (2007). The Brain That Changes Itself. Penguin Books.
Furnham, A. (2021). The Upside of Risk: Maximize Performance by Managing Threats and Seizing Opportunities. Bloomsbury Business.
Gregersen, H. (2018). Better Brainstorming. Harvard Business Review, 96(2), 64-71.
LeDoux, J. (2015). Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety. Viking.
Ratey, J. J. (2008). Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. Little, Brown and Company.
Rock, D. (2008). SCARF: A brain-based model for collaborating with and influencing others. NeuroLeadership Journal, 1(1), 44-52.
