Edmonton Leadership Coach | Alone at the Top: Why High Performers Feel Alone
I’m Adam Melnyk, owner of Seeding the Lead and a leadership coach, and today we’re going to talk about loneliness and leadership.
When we look at loneliness, the thing to understand is that loneliness is an emotion. All emotions are deeply personal, and they are telling us something about us and who we are. Specifically, loneliness is telling us generally that our relationships are not fulfilling our needs.
What Is Loneliness?
As you might already think, it’s like, well, if loneliness is deeply personal then what is the answer? The thing to understand about loneliness is loneliness is an emotion; it’s deeply personal to the individual, just like anger, sadness, happiness. The thing about our emotions is they are almost warning signs or gauges—like in our car—to tell us that something is wrong with us or something is right in us, and the question is always, what is this emotion trying to tell us?
Many times I’ll work with a client and they say, “I’m lonely,” and my question is, what good intention does this feeling of lonely have for you? Because it wants something from you, and typically the answer is that your relationships, whatever they may be, are not meeting your needs. The question ultimately becomes, what need is not being met in the relationship?
When I work with my clients, the biggest answer I get is that they feel that the people around them do not truly understand who they are, and they find that incredibly frustrating and isolating. This is something to understand about loneliness: you cannot solve it on your own—it’s physically impossible—because we need another person in the picture to solve this problem with you. We need somebody else that will understand who we are on a much deeper level and fulfill that need so that we can overcome this feeling.
Loneliness is a Common Feeling in Society
While loneliness is pervasive within our society—I see this all over the place—it is particularly devastating toward management, leadership, and new leaders. One of the reasons for this is simply professionalism. When somebody gets promoted into leadership, guess what: they can’t seek a relationship with the people below them because of a power imbalance, and so there’s this distance, or almost like a gap, between the people, the team members, and the leader. But also that leader can’t go to the people above them for the same reasons, creating this almost isolation—this feeling that, who do I talk to about my problems? Who can I ask about what’s going on within my team? Who do I even make comments to about how I’m feeling? And the answer most leaders have is, “I don’t have anybody in my life that I can talk to about this,” which creates that feeling of isolation and ultimately loneliness.
This leads us into point two, which is there’s a huge stigma around leadership and loneliness. For example, you’re a leader, you’re a manager, you’re making the big bucks now—you don’t get to complain about your job, you don’t get to complain about being isolated, you have it all. Many leaders internalize this feeling, and they feel like they can’t reach out or ask for help because they have to be the strong one, because society is telling them, “You have it all.” Which is simply not true.
When Your Friends Don’t Understand
To make matters worse, at home many of their relationships simply don’t understand what they’re going through; they can’t relate. I found this out at one of my jobs where I was working in what’s called Assertive Community Treatment. I was working with very mentally ill clients and saw some very disturbing things. Unfortunately, the people out in my life—like my mom, my dad, my girlfriend at the time—couldn’t relate to many of the things that I was experiencing, creating this sense of isolation. It’s the same thing in leadership: you’re firing people, you’re hiring people, you have unbelievable amounts of stress, and yet your friends can’t understand what you’re going through because they’re not experiencing it, which creates this feeling like, “I’m all alone.”
To compound onto this, you’re often asked to make very important decisions—sometimes even life‑changing decisions—not only for yourself but for your team members, and this can weigh heavily on a leader. Who do they even talk to to consult or even problem‑solve or even to just debrief around such lifechanging life altering decisions? Typically, most leaders feel like they can’t talk to anybody, which again further increases their loneliness.
Ultimately, what I commonly see in leadership is all these problems, all these things that this leader is experiencing, create an imbalance in their life where they tend to struggle balancing their personal relationships and their work relationships, ultimately leading to further isolation, causing them further isolation, causing them to withdraw, causing them to just push people away, which is not healthy in any way, shape, or form.
Long Term Loneliness Can Cause Depression and Anxiety
On the short term, dealing with loneliness is more of just an inconvenience. Long‑term, however, if we are unable to get it under control, it can cause some major problems within your life. For example, long‑term, if you’re just feeling lonely and isolated it’s going to make you depressed, increase anxiety, you’re not going to be able to sleep, you’re not going to get out, you’re going to have trouble getting out of bed, you’re not going to be eating properly, you’re going to be socially isolated, it’s going to create poor decisions for yourself, and ultimately you will make poor decisions. Lastly, you’re just going to be uncreative—you’re in a lack of imagination—which is normal for somebody who’s feeling lonely and isolated, and that’s not what we want.
To keep us from getting to that point, it’s important that you reach out either to somebody that you trust, maybe a mental health professional, maybe even a coach, and start exploring: how can you reconnect with your team? How can you reconnect with the people within your life? For example, many of my clients, when they start feeling lonely and they come to coaching, I help them explore what is this feeling trying to tell them, what does this feeling want from them, so then ultimately we can take the action steps needed to go out and meet people and fulfill the need that is being missed.
There Are Many Things That Can Help Loneliness
But it’s more than just that. The other parts is meditation—meditation or mindfulness is a phenomenal tool at just turning down these emotions so they’re not as intense. For example, if you’re feeling incredibly lonely and you meditate rather regularly, yes, you’ll still feel lonely, but it won’t be as intense as if you didn’t. It’s important that you’re sleeping 7 to 9 hours a night; without sleep, that loneliness is going to spiral out of control and it’s going to dominate your life. We need to be eating food—eating healthy food. We need to be working out because again it helps us manage this emotion.
Hire an Edmonton Leadership Coach to Help
This sounds like a lot, which is again why many people hire an Edmonton leadership coach just to help them navigate from where they are to where they need to be. Ultimately, the three things I always encourage my clients to do when they’re feeling lonely within the workplace are: one, start finding fulfilling relationships outside of the work environment; two, look for possibly a mentor or somebody that they trust that they can talk to about these issues or problems; or three, look for a peer support group—a group that all has the same problems that can support each other.
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