Like many of you reading this, I set out on my career journey with the aspirations of leading people. I love managing people. I love connecting with people and truthfully, I actually enjoy working hard and working in a corporate environment.
At some point in my journey, I realized that I was missing some tools in my toolkit as the levels of responsibility I had were increasing. I found myself burnt out, full of self critical thoughts and internalizing the many emotions of my team. I was working over time to ensure nothing would go wrong and no one around me, including myself would fail. All the while, trying to crack the code on how to meet the expectations of everyone around me.
I have been to countless trainings, including some with the best management development courses out there. My hard work, my ability to manage my time and deliver results got me far. My interpersonal skills, my common sense, all of those things were playing into my success, but I knew that I was only operating within a very small portion of my capacity, yet I was still exhausted.
I had many people telling me who I should be and what that should look like, but through all that noise, I lacked a definition of who I wanted to be and what leading in integrity would look like for me.
I knew I felt terrible most of the time, but thought the only solution was to change my circumstances, find a different job or work in a different culture or with different people. I spent a lot of energy trying to predict the future and anticipate everything that could possibly happen. I was like a surfer who, instead of learning to ride the waves, spent all their time trying to control them instead.
What I learned is that taking the steps to finding your voice as a leader provides the tools you need to adapt to any situation. If you can find your voice, you will surprise yourself with how much capacity you have and the ability to create anything you desire in your life and in your work. At the same time, you’ll have greater peace of mind and stronger relationships with those around you.
I believe becoming this leader and finding your voice can be achieved through the three A’s: Anchoring, Awareness, and Agility.
Anchoring – In order to take control of your leadership, you need to anchor yourself to what you believe in and why you get up everyday to do the work you are doing. You can do this by defining things like your vision, values and expectations so you always have that anchor to rely on when things get tough.
Awareness – You filter all life’s circumstances through our brain and give them meaning by assigning thoughts and feelings to them. Sometimes, you remember your vision and values, choose your thoughts intentionally, that process is straightforward. But you have a human brain and sometimes, you might feel things you don’t want to like stress, overwhelm, anger and frustration or you behave in ways that feel uncontrollable. So you need something in your toolbox to help you understand why this is happening.
Agility – This is mental fitness. Athletes train their bodies to move quickly and easily through set regimens for conditioning and recovery. They don’t show up to perform without preparation and expect their muscles to simply adapt. Leaders must do the same with their minds in order to rise to unexpected challenges, make decisions under pressure and bounce back quickly.
This is the first blog in a four part series introducing these three A’s. Over the course of the next three blogs, I will dive into each of these areas with more context around why it is important and how you can use it to find your voice as a leader.