Putting On Your Oxygen Mask: The Benefits of a Cognitive Budget for Leaders in the Higher Education Sector

In both our higher education coaching and consulting practice, we help our clients by reminding them of the  airline safety instruction that has become a widely used leadership adage, “Put on your oxygen mask before helping others.”

A strength and challenge of working in higher education is that people care. They care a lot. They care about the students, about their institutions, about their peers. They strive for excellence in every aspect of their work, and they care when they don’t achieve it. All this caring, well, it takes a toll.

In this short article we share the importance of managing your physical and mental wellbeing for leadership, what a cognitive budget is, and how managing your mental energy and cultivating reflection can make you more effective as a leader. We also provide some helpful coaching questions that support the creation of a cognitive budget.

Managing Emotions Matters

Sometimes as leaders, we try so hard that we don’t even realize in the moment we’ve strayed a long way from our best selves and the ideal leader we hope to be. Maybe it is a series of nights with interrupted sleep, or simply being depleted after tackling one challenging situation at work after another, that leads to snapping at someone instead of responding gently, or sending an angry email.

Putting on your oxygen mask is a holistic endeavor. It means caring for yourself, your energy, and your body to be that best self when others need you. It requires us to be in parts of our brains that are suited to dealing with complexity, making good decisions, and managing our impulsive or reactive behaviors. 

In very simple neuroscience terms, it is about making decisions in our brain’s frontal lobe, which is responsible for complex tasks, rather than our temporal lobe, designed to deal with dangerous situations that require a fight or flight response.

But you may find that caring for yourself isn’t enough. Our work today is complex and demanding – on us and on those with whom we work. You may also need to work on directing your mental focus so that you manage your mental energy.

What is a Cognitive Budget?

In a recent article published in Sloan Management Review, Jordan Birnbaum presents the idea of developing a “cognitive budget” as a way to direct our thinking and our energy in helpful ways.

A cognitive budget is a way to proactively manage the fact that on any given day, there is a limit to how much thinking we can do and how much mental energy is available to us.

Research suggests that 90% to 95% of our decisions are made unconsciously. We have a limited budget for hard, slow, intentional, and logical thinking. Making sure to focus this energy on things that matter can be a transformative practice.

A cognitive budget helps us to maximize reflective thinking. Reflective thinking is how we get the best of our minds, from genius to compassion, empathy, and joy.

You create a cognitive budget by identifying subjects for reflection that will yield the results you are looking for in your professional and personal lives. It isn’t a budget in the strict sense of the word but a framework that can help us be more intentional with our mental energy.

Becoming more aware of how we are using our thinking can also help us to create “offramps,” or shift our focus, when our mind engages in the unconscious process of rumination – replaying events repeatedly without gaining insights or progressing.

Birnbaum explains that while ruminations differ greatly from person to person, they can come from similar sources, for example being excluded from meetings or decisions, missing out on promotions or assignments, combatting bullying or dealing with unfairness.

If a rumination is an exaggerated belief, you can train your mind not to dwell on it.  If you have a real decision, you can focus on that. If shifting focus from ruminations is challenging for you, you might want to work with a therapist specializing in cognitive and behavioral therapy.

The Power of Reflection for Leaders

Leadership is a behavioral practice. It is learned through planning, then doing and then reflecting. As Patrick Lencioni has argued, leadership is about how one behaves daily—through actions like fostering teamwork, maintaining trust, and creating clarity, all of which require both behavioral discipline, knowledge and wisdom.

You can do the reflective work to build your cognitive budget on your own, and it is also great work to do with a leadership coach. Examples of questions that may help you identify areas for reflection include:

What do I care most about? And can I increase the time I spend on this?

How would I most like to learn and grow? What skills or abilities would I like to develop?

How might my work benefit from more innovation? What value might I create?

What are my team members' core strengths? What opportunities could I give them to use
these?

If you find that you are continually focused on an issue or thought, ask yourself,

Do I have this? Or does this have me?

Are my judgments based on feelings rather than facts? Then, based on your answers,
ask yourself:

Is this worthy of my focus?

These types of questions are core to how we engage with our clients through our  Coaching Services. Organizational leaders who wish to understand leadership perspective in the context of a unit or department, or school may also wish to engage us for an Organizational Assessment or Culture survey.

Contact us to learn more!