Welcome to episode #212 of the Own Your Best Life Podcast. One of the common misconceptions that I see both professionally and personally is that people don’t think they’re leadership material if they’re not loud, aggressive, direct and extraverted. Leadership, however, isn’t a personality trait that you innately have or don’t have – it’s a skill that you develop – and it pays dividends for years to come when you develop these skills. Today’s podcast is going to help you understand the difference between the personality and skill of leadership and help you lead even more authentically. 

If you feel a bit uncertain about leading, there can be a number of reasons why. There could be past experiences where other people told you to be more like someone else, which led you to question if you’re a good fit for the organization or for a leadership role. People have good intentions when they make suggestions to copy someone else, but it often backfires because people begin to believe that who they are just doesn’t work. They begin to want to take a step back from leadership roles or think about not taking anymore on as they lose confidence in themselves or the organization.

Another reason for feeling uncertain about leading is that you might have had some failures in the past. You tried taking on a bigger role or more scope and that challenge felt so overwhelming that you don’t want to do it again. You might have received feedback about your leadership style so you now think that leadership isn’t for you. Whether it’s how the leadership role affected your personal life, mental health or even how you were viewed by other people, it’s normal to feel like you’re not ready to take on the role of a leader again.

Yet, the reason that working on your leadership skills keeps coming up is that you know that leadership in some shape or form is part of your next step in your career. Leadership of yourself to create different boundaries or ways of working so that you have more balance in your life. Or, leadership of others to manage and influence more people or to feel more confident in your industry.

Given that this is such an important next step in your career and life, I want to offer you a paradigm shift to see leadership as a skill that can be developed, not a personality trait. Is it really true that leadership is a personality style that you’re born with and destined to have? Would the world be better off if everyone that led was exactly the same? Research has shown that diverse teams have better results. The truth about leadership is that it’s easy to just be like other people, but it’s not the most effective nor is it the most sustainable. 

If the world never questioned leadership styles and the value of different types of leadership, we wouldn’t have the diversity that we are now seeing more of today leading and working across a number of fields and industries. We’re trying to break the stereotypes, not reinforce them. While it is uncomfortable not to be exactly like the leaders you’ve seen in the past, evolution and progress come when we can integrate different styles and ways of working and leading. This allows us to go beyond stereotypes, pull out what truly does create extraordinary leadership so that we can focus on developing those skills. 

For example, you don’t have to be loud and aggressive, but you do have to communicate your ideas and be able to share them even when it may be uncomfortable. The difference between these behaviors are learned skills. Someone that may speak loudly and often may not say the most coherent or appropriate things in the moment. They may initially seem like the best fit because they speak up, but the quality of what they say diminishes the value of their voice. Likewise, someone may have the best ideas but if they don’t share them at the appropriate moments, it’s hard for others to benefit from their leadership.

How do we develop our leadership skills?

I work with my clients on congruent leadership strategies. It’s a process of understanding and aligning who you are internally – your natural inborn tendencies – and what the external world needs from you. It’s having the purpose, process and tools in place for managing yourself and other people. Instead of feeling like you’re doing a copy and paste form of leadership where you imitate who has gone before you, you are developing a truly unique leadership style and brand that you can call your own.

This may feel more difficult at first because you’re charting your own course, but it develops your own critical thinking skills to answer the hard questions like, “is this the only way this can be done?” or “does it have to be my way?” It allows you to bring more people into your world while not diminishing your own value. Often, the trouble that comes with leadership is that leaders are so worried about how they look that they don’t want to be wrong. They’ll fight to appear right so that they don’t lose face or that their team doesn’t lose face, but in the process instead of looking like a hero they appear stubborn or hard to work with. 

Instead of swinging on a pendulum of being a pushover to being a tyrant, you’ll find yourself more in the middle with congruent leadership strategies. Knowing that there’s a time to advocate and a time to be a team player. You’ll work through these moments of decision-making where you have to make a call on how to respond and instead of reacting with the same responses you’ve had in the past – you’ll question if this is the best way to handle this situation.

The reason congruent leadership strategies work is because it takes into account not just what the outside world needs, but how you naturally prefer to behave. Your personality does matter when it comes to leadership, but not in the way you believe. It matters because self-awareness helps you navigate how to bridge the gap between what you need, your growth edge and what others need from you. 

There are studied and researched skills of leadership that have been correlated to extraordinary leadership. They are simple to understand but people often don’t know what they are or what skills to focus on, so we help you identify exactly what to focus on first. Coaching gives you the ability to see what exactly you need to focus on, supports you in real life attempts and helps you make the course corrections so that you aren’t derailed in your career when things inevitably don’t work according to the plan.

Just like an athlete trains and recovers from setbacks, my clients are also in the field working on these leadership skills and training them in real time. They manage teams, companies and families. Without support, they may not keep going or decide that leadership isn’t for them and that would be such a tragedy. Their innate wisdom and brilliance becomes bottled up and never shared because they don’t trust themselves or others as much anymore. Instead of working through a simple skill and addressing one or two points of change, they start hiding and overworking instead. Retreating from relationships. Going back to the world of doing more by themselves to compensate for not being able to lead as effectively as they desire.

Leadership truly is a “no way out but through” type of skill. You will benefit from having leadership skills and suffer from the lack of leadership skills. Whether it’s overworking, hiding or having others suffer because you knew how to avoid a problem but didn’t have the influence to make it happen – the consequences of not working on leadership skills are real. Fortunately, it’s simple to do this thing called leadership and have it benefit you and others for the rest of your life. As you get better and have more reps in the field working through these skills, your confidence grows and your ability to handle setbacks grows as well. Your capacity increases and whether or not you take on more is up to you, not limited by your leadership skills. 

Now this is when you get to decide. You have the option of overworking and hiding, holding onto the innate belief that leadership is a personality trait not a skill – or you have the option to believe that leadership is a skill that can be developed. Which one do you want to choose?

Do you want to downplay your ability to lead because you don’t believe that you are born leaders or do you want to do what’s most helpful now, and lead yourself and others in the most simple and sustainable way?

If you want to choose the latter, to create more sustainable ways of living and working, I want to offer that this is the path from going from overworked achiever to spiritual achiever. 

If you’d like to become a spiritual achiever, I invite you to watch the free training on how to Stand Out and Lead, using spiritual, high-performance strategies: STAND OUT AND LEAD.

You can apply to join my Spiritual Achiever® program, where you’re going to create your next chapter with spiritual and high-performance strategies to achieve time and financial freedom using my proven method. It’s risk-free. You either start seeing results within your first month or I give you your money back. Schedule your call here at www.mayempson.com/contact.  We’ll see you inside.

Want to know more about what happens when you join?

1. When you join Spiritual Achiever® Coaching you’ll be supported for a full year: Career Revelation Academy: A 5-step career change process (if you have a job you want to stay in, I’ll show you how to love it even more) that can launch you into your next career chapter in 30 days.
2. 2x/month group training and coaching on Spirituality, Achievement, Earth Energy and Harmony. You’ll know how to design your days for breakthroughs, create a personal brand and community, lead yourself and others through change, become more physically and mentally fit, reduce stress and reinvent what’s possible in this next chapter of your life.
3. Discover your Leadership Strengths and Branding Workshop: Increase your awareness of what makes YOU different from others and how to become even better at your genius zone.
4. Your Best Year workshop: Create your one year plan and design this next year, no matter what time of the year it is.
5. Your Next 5 Years one-day virtual retreat: Vision what’s possible 5 years from now and break out of your old routines so you can step into new habits, behaviors and routines.
6. Tickets to all in-person Spiritual Achiever retreats (discounted rates): Highly immersive and intimate gatherings where we spend time in nature, experience energy work, eat and move well – all while making big decisions and committing to what’s next for us.
7. Monthly 1:1 Coaching Sessions: To help you break through obstacles, define your individual path, and to work on both strategy and mindset.

The next step?

Schedule a consultation to get clarity on how coaching can help you on your journey.

Once you’re accepted into the program, you’ll receive a calendar invite for a 2-hour deep dive 1:1 session to map out your personal goals and your own year-long journey.

You’ll have immediate access to the Spiritual Achiever process and philosophy – how to achieve your biggest goals and reinvent your life.

You’ll have immediate access to 5 modules of Career Revelation Academy – to love your career even more and launch that next chapter of your career in 30 days.

You’ll have the calendar invites for the upcoming group calls and retreats.

If this speaks to you, I can’t wait to talk to you live: Schedule a consultation.

Reach out at www.mayempson.com/contact for more information on my Spiritual Achiever coaching program. You’ll figure out what’s next and actually go and do it. 

That’s it for this week. Have an amazing one and I’ll talk to you next time.