A great tool to get unstuck from thoughts and emotions which prevent you from flourishing, has been gifted to leaders by Byron Katie.
How so?

As a leader, you often encounter things which in your opinion are not as they should be.
That’s why you resist either yourself:
“I should be/ feel better.”
Or your relationships:
“They should/ should not behave this way.”
Or your circumstances:
“Life is unfair. I deserve more of that. I deserve less of that.”

When we cannot accept what is, we get stuck. It just keeps nagging at us.
We’ve all experienced what Carl Jung has captured in his famous quote:

“What you resist not only persists, but will grow in size.”

Let’s turn that around and see how we can shrink it.
To shrink it, we can take a look at our stuckness with fresh eyes and allow ourselves to just let it be. Paradoxically that empowers us to move on. But before we can move on, we have to truly accept what is.
How?

There are many ways, and I want to share an extract of Byron Katie’s way of “loving what is”.
At the core of her work lies a six step process, captured in a worksheet, which you can find here. I will share one powerful step here:

Find something or someone in your life that is unacceptable to you, that just keeps nagging at you. Go on, pick something big.

Write down how you want it to be – with a “should” statement. Like:
I / They/ It should… .
Then turn this statement around to its opposite:
I/ They/ It should not … .
When you’ve written your reversed statement, write down three examples of how this is true.

This process can help you see the gifts of your current reality:

In what way(s) is it helpful to you?
What can you learn from it?

It is by fully accepting your present experience, that you gain a heart at peace with yourself and the world.

We cannot always change our circumstances. But we can always choose how we respond to them.

Letting go of ‘resisting reality’ is the key to moving forward. And as a leader, we always have to look at the lesson that our circumstances are pointing us to learn and grow to become even more powerful.