Whether you’re a senior leader or just striving to perform at your best, the use of mantras is strongly recommended. Using mantras aligns closely to essential leadership qualities like emotional regulation, resilience, and self-regard. Our step-by-step guide we use with our coaching clients is being published here shortly. Meanwhile here we uncover exactly what mantras do for us, as we distill this into 6 key insights. Backed by significant psychological evidence, it’s clear that integrating mantras into your personal and professional toolkit is a great way to support your growth and success.
1. Emotional Regulation and Resilience in High-Stress Environments
Senior leaders often face high-stakes decisions that can provoke stress or anxiety. Regular use of mantras can foster greater emotional regulation by providing a reliable tool for stress management and enhancing mental resilience. Self-affirmation techniques such as mantras can improve problem-solving under stress, giving leaders a way to maintain clarity and emotional stability even in challenging situations. Telling ourselves, for instance, that we are great at noticing important things or are open to new perspectives (Reality Testing) can help expand our insights and take us beyond our current thinking. These can reinforce the value of resilience in leadership by helping leaders remain objective, calm and focused.
2. Self-Compassion and Long-Term Motivation
Leaders often carry a strong drive for achievement (Self-Actualisation). This is key to driving ideas and action forward. However it can lead to self-critical tendencies, if goals are unmet. If this drive is stronger than a leader’s Self-Regard then their ambition may be writing cheques that their confidence simply can’t cash. This is why self-compassion is so important and strengthened by self-affirming practices like mantras—can mitigate harsh self-judgment, promote emotional balance, and sustain motivation. By repeating compassionate mantras, leaders can cultivate a mindset of self-kindness, making it easier to navigate setbacks with a balanced perspective, avoiding burnout, and maintaining long-term motivation.
3. Self-Regard and Confidence in Leadership Presence
Most would acknowledge that effective leadership is often linked to a confident presence. Mantras that reinforce self-worth and capability enhance a leader’s self-regard, contributing to a positive and confident public image. Self-affirmation theory suggests that repeated positive self-affirmations bolster self-integrity, making leaders more confident and less prone to second-guessing. This can be especially valuable during high-pressure presentations, negotiations, or when rallying teams, as a confident demeanour often encourages trust and commitment from others.
4. Increased Self-Awareness and Overall Emotional Intelligence
Mantras that align with someone’s personal values are more likely to help create empowering goals that people stay committed to. Uncovering our core values is therefore an important exercise. Incredibly very few people ever uncover theirs. Examples might be: ‘I am highly creative’ or ‘I hugely value my need to explore’. Creating such aligned mantras allows leaders to cultivate a heightened sense of self-awareness, an essential quality in emotionally intelligent leadership. By regularly reflecting on such mantras, leaders become more attuned to their thought patterns and emotional states and subsequently notice what serves them. This increased self-awareness improves decision-making and interpersonal interactions, helping leaders better understand and relate to their teams, a key factor in employee engagement and retention.
5. Encouraging Positive Organisational Culture
Leaders who regularly practice self-affirming techniques like mantras can affect their organisation and culture in two ways:
– They model the importance of personal development and emotional well-being, creating a ripple effect throughout their organisations which promotes the use of mantras as an acceptable or even recommended practice. By sharing the benefits of mantra practice with their teams or incorporating it into training, leaders can contribute to a culture that values personal growth and emotional resilience. According to broaden-and-build theory, the positivity generated by such practices can enhance workplace morale and collaboration, making the organisation more adaptable and cohesive.
– In addition, beyond modelling the use of mantras being infused into a culture, the very act of a leader being more aware of and using precise, positive expressive language that consciously aligns to the values and culture that they choose, encourages an ideal positive culture through-out the organisation and the repetition of culturally enriching mantras.
6. Practical Application: Building a Habit of Daily Mantra Practice
For leaders, incorporating a mantra into routines, especially during transition times (e.g., before meetings or at the start of the day), can transform it into a powerful mental tool. Using a mantra like “I am calm and capable” before engaging with teams can help a leader set a composed and reassuring tone, positively impacting their interactions and overall leadership presence. By consistently practicing these steps, leaders can not only encourage a ‘can-do’ success culture but also create an emotionally supportive, resilient work environment, benefiting personal growth, wellbeing and organisational culture.
references:
Self-affirmation techniques – Creswell et al. (2013), Self-compassion – Neff (2003) and Leary & Tate (2010) Self-affirmation theory (Sherman & Cohen, 2006) Fredrickson’s (2001) broaden-and-build theory
