We often talk about how we help leaders find an open space from which they can really be heard.  In this post, we thought we’d try explore seven key warning signs that you may need more open space in your life.

We often talk about how we help leaders find an open space from which they can really be heard.  In this post, we thought we’d try explore seven key warning signs that you may need more open space in your life.

If you recognise any of the things below, it might be that you too would benefit from taking a proverbial step away from the day-to-day and to work on finding some fresh oxygen for yourself. Let us know if you want to discuss how.

1. We lose track of what we really think and feel, so burdened are we by the need to meet others’ expectations – to fit in and be legitimate. It’s like the approval-seeking we may recognise in our interactions with an influential parent; in effect, we stay infantilised, searching for a pat on the back when really we should be building our own independent futures.

2. We’re tired, demoralised, disengaged – like the room of our lives is fugging up and needs some ventilation; the hard bit is that we can feel trapped by the ongoing intensity of live projects as well as our life’s responsibilities, making other ‘ways of being’ hard to see.

3. We realise that we make no time for planning or reflection – we’re jumping from one thing to the next in a heavily diarised schedule; as Stephen Covey told us, planning and reflection is the important but non-urgent sphere of activity that can really move us forward, preventing future fires but also maximising learning and helping us see things clearly so we can put our best foot forward.

4. We find it hard to get our voice heard. In our social and in our work groups, meetings are stressful – we know we want to say something but can’t seem to cut through; instead, opportunities to speak pass us by or are seized by others, and we leave the conversation knowing we failed once again to have an impact.

5. A team finds it hard to be themselves, to share vulnerabilities, ask potentially naive questions, make suggestions; instead, the carbon dioxide levels increase at a team level as the oxygen is overwhelmed and ultimately the team’s productivity is strangled by dysfunction.

6. We struggle to differentiate ourselves from those around us – at an individual, team or organisational level; in effect, we are failing to find a space that is our own and don’t know what to do in response to the feedback that we need to increase our impact and presence (without wasting people’s time and indulging in the politicking we see in others).

7. Fundamentally, we find we are losing a sense of direction – there is no open space into which we are moving, instead we are coasting (at best), perhaps even stagnating.