The journey inward is one that requires courage and vulnerability and certainly in the context of a leadership space, is an essential one. When you make the shift from viewing the world from a separate, ‘you and me as individuals’ perspective and see you and your team or communities as an integrated whole, you realise the absolute necessity of understanding yourself.
You see that by knowing what runs inside you and determines how you show up (or don’t!) in your life, you have the key to seeing why you experience what you do on the outside. “As within, so without” which in simple terms means whatever you are thinking about both consciously and subconsciously will be brought about into your reality.
The courageousness and inevitable feelings of vulnerability are key components of this journey and in fact if they are absent, I invite you to to look at whether what end result you are going for is really all that important to you. An authentic leader learns not to avoid vulnerability and actually learns to actively work on ‘the edge’ in a comfortably uncomfortable place, knowing that’s where ‘the juice’ lies, where evolution occurs rather than stagnation.
A popular talk by Ms Brene Brown at TED.com shows the power found in true vulnerabilty around understanding yourself and is well worth viewing.
Through my experience in choosing this style of leadership, I have found that my authentic style, unique to me, naturally emerges and shines through. The requirement to measure myself against others and compare my way of leading loses relevance. The urgent need to prove that I’m anything other than I am disappears and I turn up making decisions and choices that have clarity and certainty.