overwhelm doesn't lie.
We all experience it, but what if we're also highly compassionate, empathetic and sensitive?
Welcome to Sensitivity is Leadership.
This is a space for highly compassionate and sensitive leaders to lead on our own terms.
I’m delighted you’re here!
Initially, understanding my high sensitivity was a cute hobby.
But then it became a survival method.
When I became a new, but working parent, I needed the information to navigate what was going on with me, and I needed it right away.
Among the working and parenting, and across the many hours and long days compounded with the overall physical, emotional, and spiritual demand required, I was deeply overwhelmed.
But overwhelm is for all of us.
What a message, right?
But it’s true. Any of us can feel and exhibit signs of overwhelm.
We don’t need to know ourselves as highly compassionate or sensitive to experience overwhelm.
I’m not the first new parent—in this case—to feel overwhelm while keeping infants alive.
But I do now know in being highly sensitive, the possibilities for overwhelm are deep, especially when the trait is misunderstood or ignored.
Addressing the misunderstanding starts with us better understanding how we operate in the first place.
Acknowledging overwhelm with high sensitivity
Maybe it sounds like a riddle, but we can really only understand our overwhelm by understanding our high sensitivity in a lived way.
Even though I had a solid, intellectual understanding of high compassion, high sensitivity, and a deep understanding of leadership and change philosophies, I still felt lost.
I still felt completely overwhelmed in my own experience.
To shift this, I had to make the intellectual real.
Dr. Elaine Aron who is credited with the term highly sensitive person explains high sensitivity in the acronym DOES.
DOES stands for:
D: Depth of processing
O: Over-stimulation
E: Emotional responsivity/empathy
S: Sensitive to subtleties
In a future article, I’ll dig into these, but by just reading this overview it helped me to see that—unchecked and misunderstood—high sensitivity is a road to overwhelm.
So as a new, working, and overwhelmed parent with high sensitivity, just reading these words told me that it can feel like every single decision needed to be deeply processed.
This is a way I am wired, and not a defect.
Ah, some grace.
This began to help me to better navigate decisions and their outcomes, including the wave of processing shame that often came after all of the research to make each decision.
Definitions can give us some clear boundaries around what is happening for us.
And awareness creates understanding and competence.
Because my boundary holds high sensitivity within it, I can either pretend that is not the case, or I can wholly acknowledge it.
Coming up against a severe lack of sleep and the overall physical exhaustion as a new parent, it was time to wholly acknowledge this big, true aspect of myself.
What is high sensitivity?
High sensitivity is a trait that, at it’s core, “is all about processing information more deeply.”1 High sensitivity has been most studied by a researcher named Dr. Elaine Aron, but there are many others.2
It’s estimated that 20% to 30% of the population carry this trait—and that’s a whole bunch of us that carry this trait.
What’s cool is that high sensitivity has been tracked across over 100 living species (e.g. humans, horses, dogs, cats, fruit flies—you get the gist). We are cross-species, cross-cultural group.
My sense is that this trait is deeply ancestral and connected to the earth.
And if you feel this way about yourself, then I’m here for you.
What if I’m not—or don’t consider myself to be—highly sensitive?
All good. No pressure to label yourself anything or be something you are not.
I work with incredibly compassionate, creative and kind leaders who do not think of themselves this way, and they still benefit from this perspective.
And given the above numbers, there’s a good chance that even if you do not hold trait, someone you know does, and this work just may help both of you!
What if I think I am highly sensitive, but I’m not sure?
I’ll share more of my story as we go on this ride, but a great place to get started is Dr. Aron’s self-test to see if you may be highly sensitive and/or high sensation seeking.3
Thanks for reading Sensitivity is Leadership!
If you enjoyed this, please forward and share this with a couple of others who you know would appreciate it.
With love,
Sara
Sensitivity is Leadership is space for highly compassionate and sensitive leaders to lead on our own terms.
If you enjoyed this, please forward and share this with a couple of others who you know would appreciate it.
Thank you for reading!
Hi! I’m Sara. I’m an highly sensitive and compassionate leadership coach and guide who helps leaders go from can’t get ahead to leading with ease.
I coach leaders all over the world with a highly sensitive lens, and I couldn’t turn it off if I tried (…I have tried).
If you’d like to connect to explore your own high sensitivity in leadership, please book a complementary, 30-minute call.
Aron, Elaine. But what is the evidence that these actually exist?
Aron, Elaine. Self-Tests. Note: “These tests, the result of empirical research on the trait, give you a good sense of what high sensitivity is, as well.”