What kind of strong are you?
The leaders I coach all want to be strong. But what type of strong do we want to be? Therapist Aundi Kolber says there are actually three types of strength. If we’re going to avoid burnout, we need to understand all three.
In “Strong Like Water,” Kolber tells her own story of growing up in a deeply dysfunctional household, where she felt like she needed to be “strong” at a young age in order to survive. So she drove herself relentlessly at school and especially in her passion for basketball.
Being the “strong one” brought her awards and recognition as a leader you could rely on to get things done. In the high school yearbook, she was the one you would pick to succeed, to make it. And she felt good about all these things.
Until she reached her early twenties, that is, when she crumbled under the pressure.
The problem, she writes, wasn’t that she was weak. She was just laser-focused and hell-bent on being the wrong kind of strong.
Many of us—me included—can relate to her story. For as long as we can remember, we’ve been “the strong one,” “the capable one,” “the tough one.” We’ve been praised for our capacity to survive. We like it, too.
But deep down, we also know that the strength we pride ourselves on comes from shaming ourselves, forcing ourselves, and beating ourselves up. It’s not sustainable strength. It lifts us high, only for us to crash back down.
Kolber calls this type of strength “situational strength.” Situational strength is the strength we need to survive something threatening or challenging in a particular situation, like being chased by a bear. It's supposed to be a temporary strategy. But many of us spend our lives there.
When we live in situational strength, Kolber writes, we are living in a constant state of arousal. Constantly feeling unsafe, we see everything as a do-or-die, life-or-death struggle. In contemporary society, where threats seem to be everywhere, feeling this way is easy.
When we’re in this place too long, our constant sense of urgency blinds us to goodness. We assume if we stop to smell the roses, we’ll get hit by a car. “Your body quickly and unconsciously decides that it cannot spare any energy to focus on goodness,” Kolber says, “because diverting attention from the bad could endanger your survival.”
So we become rigid physically, emotionally, and cognitively, assuming that this is what strength is. While Kolber believes we can and should value our capacity for survival, we also need to recognize what our hypervigilance, excessive attention to detail, toxic tenacity, hyper-responsibility, or people-pleasing is doing to us.
We’re telling ourselves we’re “killing it,” but we’re really just killing ourselves.
Kolber believes that we need a different sort of strength, what she calls integrated strength. We’ll talk more about that tomorrow.
Want to find a different sort of strength? Book your free Discovery Session here.
