What if your leadership is the first of it’s kind?
What messages inform how you defined leadership?
Think back to school...Were they pictures in textbooks showing the same looking people over and over again?
Or was it a performance review saying you should be less (or more) of something?
Or was it from movies or the news showing the same type of personalities in charge?
And perhaps it’s all of the above and 100 other places?
In the course of our lifetime, we receive 1000s of explicit and implicit messages about what leadership is.
And when we don’t fit that image, we start to consciously and unconsciously assimilate so that we DO fit that image so that we can be “traditionally” successful as a leader.
That continues because it is what we know.
From the outside, it looks like we have all the answers, are confident and honestly, we often make it look easy.
Yet on the inside, we battle inner thoughts of self-doubt, the proverbial who am I to do ...?, what if they figure out I’m not as great as they think?, comparing ourselves, shoulding on ourselves, and constantly feeling like something is missing.
We question if we are a leader (OR how good of a leader we are) because we don’t fit the definition explicitly and implicitly taught to us.
Basically on the outside everything looks handled but on the inside it feels like mental gymnastics to fit in the leadership space.
What if the inner conflict you feel is because you are trying to fit into a definition of leadership that wasn’t designed to work for you?
In fact, what if your version of leadership is the first of its kind?
What if the question isn’t ‘Am I leader?’ but rather ‘Who AM I as a leader?’
You get to redefine leadership. Your world and the broader world will be better for it.
And you illuminating your version of leadership allows the people you lead to find theirs.
That's one of the ways we create work cultures that actually work for people.
