You’ve been looking in the wrong place
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Ten years mentoring, sponsoring, and coaching women leaders has taught me a few things that don’t show up in typical leadership advice. Over the next ten weeks, I’m sharing the lessons that have shaped how I work with women leaders. This is lesson one: Leadership always begins within. I’ve spent thirty years watching brilliant women search for the right way to lead. The right style. The right book. The right framework, course, or leadership guru who finally has the answer they’ve been missing. Most of them never find it. Not because the answer doesn’t exist (it does!), but because they’re looking for it in the wrong place. You cannot lead others somewhere you haven’t been yourself. Most women I work with are trying to lead a team, a department, an entire function, while still waiting for someone to teach them how to lead their own mind under pressure. They’re hunting for a model to apply to others before they’ve ever applied one to themselves. So they keep collecting more input. More frameworks. More proof that someone else has already mastered the thing they haven’t yet practiced on their own life. Here’s what I ask instead: where have you already learned to lead yourself well? Not where are you disciplined. Not where do you hustle the hardest. Where have you built real trust with your own judgment, your own instincts, your own way of working through hard things? Most women can’t answer that quickly. They’ve spent so long managing how leadership looks from the outside that they’ve never trusted what they already know about themselves. The self-leadership that’s already happening gets dismissed as just how I handle things. The performance that drains them gets mistaken for what leadership is supposed to feel like. But you can only take others as far as you’ve gone yourself. Because the influence you have over anyone else is built entirely on the ground you’ve already covered alone. When you stop searching for the ‘right’ leadership style, and start finding your own instead, something changes. You start leading from solid ground. Leaders go first. Next week: the thing you’ve been calling a weakness that’s actually your edge. Here’s to leading yourself first, Denée PS: What’s the leadership ‘right way’ you’ve been chasing? Hit reply and let me know. Denée Choice, MD, MMM |