Strengthening Your Identity
SUMMARY
Personal leadership is about who you are. It's the foundation for everything you learn and do as a leader. Therefore, it’s the most important part of your leadership journey to work on.
A lot of people want to go straight to the area of people leadership and learn about the things that will enable their team to work well. However, despite its importance, you first need to work on the foundation, which are the things about you.
This week, I want to continue our conversation on the 9 crucial shifts that every leader needs to make by helping you to strengthen your identity.
TRANSCRIPT
Do you sometimes feel conflicted about who you are? Are there things you believe about yourself that might not be true, and are they holding you back from being who you need to be?
Well, stick with me because in this week's episode I want to help you look at yourself in a different light.
Hi, this is Grant Herbert, Emotional Intelligence Master Coach Trainer and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today I want to continue our conversation on the 9 crucial shifts that every leader needs to make by helping you to strengthen your identity.
Last week, we started a conversation about the 9 crucial shifts every leader needs to make in this VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) world we are working in now. We talked about the fact that these shifts happen in the 3 areas of personal, professional, and people leadership.
What I want to do today is start to go on a journey for each of those 9 shifts starting in the area of Personal Leadership.
Personal leadership is about who you are. It's the foundation for everything you learn and do as a leader. Therefore, it’s the most important part of your leadership journey to work on.
A lot of people want to go straight to the area of people leadership and learn about the things that will enable their team to work well. However, despite its importance, you first need to work on the foundation, which are the things about you.
The first shift that you want to make is around the area of IDENTITY. As I said last week, this shift is about going from being conflicted to being congruent.
Being conflicted means that you keep thinking about the past, having some false beliefs about yourself, being confused about your behaviour, and often not feeling worthy of the opportunities given to you. When you are in this state, you subconsciously sabotage what you are doing, preventing you from living up to your full potential.
This shift is about going to being congruent so that you feel at one with all of that.
Being congruent means being humble and teachable yet, at the same time, being confident that you have everything within you and around you to be who you need to be to get the results that you want to have.
Identity is an area that most people I work with, including myself, are still working on developing.
Feeling authentic and aligned is really important for you to step into a position of power in your personal leadership.
The first thing I've realised and want to help you with is where that conflict comes from. There are several things that you need to work on in this area, and the first thing is to make sure that you look at any limiting or false beliefs you've formed about yourself.
You see, it is not what happens to you that defines you; it’s what you make that mean.
Situations in your past (whether it was something that happened during your childhood or just recently) may have affected how you view or respond to things.
Experiences that you’ve had with people — the things they have said and done to you — may have allowed you to form beliefs about yourself.
Those beliefs are powerful in guiding your internal dialogue, thoughts and behaviour as you go through your life.
So, the first thing to do is to look at why you formed that belief and then to challenge it with data from the logical processes in your brain to go: “Well, hang on a minute. I've got evidence that that's not the case, that I can, and I am this…."
The second area that I do a lot of work in is what I call the Performance Trap.
We all perform every day. In fact, I am performing right now. There is nothing wrong with performance. However, it becomes unhealthy when you perform to get approval and external validation from other people.
It’s like: “If people say good things about me or they like what I'm doing, they're actually validating that I'm worthy and good enough."
Remember those 3 universal fears that we've talked about before:
The fear of not belonging.
The fear of not being enough.
The fear of not being loved.
A lot of times, when you are seeking to avoid those fears in your life, what happens is you tend to focus on them, and your behaviour becomes counterintuitive, which actually empowers those fears to come upon you.
When you are in the performance trap and you are looking for external validation, you sometimes make decisions that are outside your true priorities and are not aligned with your values.
So, you become incongruent and feel like a fraud.
However, the problem with this is that you don’t always get the approval you want. I guarantee that sometime in your life you have done something and at least one person felt it was not good enough.
Although getting external validation from others may make you feel great, seeking it to feel worthy is dangerous. The problem with looking for external validation to feel worthy is that if you don’t get that approval, your identity will be eroded, and you will feel less than others.
Now, here's the thing: Your performance is what you do. Your identity is who you believe you are. How you operate comes out of who you believe you are and who you believe you're not. So, these things will dictate your behaviour.
That's why you need to work on your identity first. You need to build your Personal Power so instead of performing to get approval, you get to a position of self-approval where you can look in the mirror and physically and metaphorically like what you see.
You know that you are on a journey of imperfection, and you’re still learning, but you are okay with who you are becoming. So, the opinion of other people does not dictate your perception of yourself.
Identity is the foundation of everything that you do. Therefore, it's vitally important to work on that first.
In the leadership programs that I run, I make sure that we work in that area first because it is not going to be of value to learn all these other skills without having that foundation built.
For example, if you were to learn communication skills (something you need as a leader), you're not going to implement those strategies that you’ve learnt effectively because of the beliefs that you have about yourself — the inabilities that you might feel are still there or whatever.
For many years, identity was a big issue for me. That is why I am very passionate about helping you to rebuild yours. The beauty of the human being is that we can reprogram what goes in our minds.
Through neuroplasticity you can rebuild neural pathways. You can get rid of that unhealthy conditioning and form new beliefs about yourself that will empower you instead of holding you back.
Well, that's it from me for another week. Join me again next week as we continue this conversation around these 9 crucial shifts that every leader needs to make by looking at the second shift, which is in your Intelligence. In this shift, I will teach you how to go from singular intelligence (using your skills and cognitive intelligence alone) to multiple intelligence (emotional, social and creative intelligence).
I’ll see you then.
