Who are you?
While the video started off as a short video of me looking for a new pair of glasses... it is a sort of silly metaphor for finding one’s 'identity' and hopefully one that empowers you to explore the idea of guiding how you develop your individual identity across contexts.
The work I do with Leaders (at all levels) helps them to explore how each context they find themselves in requires a different leadership style, a different element of ‘who’ they are to most appropriately address what they need to do.
[That point is important!]
What I’ve found is that when you see what is required by the situation, you can start to ask yourself, ‘how would my best self address this requirement’. Your best self is already within you, all that you have to do is remember that you can experiment with how you bring this identity forward. And this is one of the essential micro-skills of leadership - that being, ‘authoring your self-narrative’.
Your exploration of your narrative enables you to really explore and play with your leadership identity, and find ways in which to make it an effective tool for achieving your goals.
Your leadership is underpinned by ‘who’ you believe yourself to be. Who you believe yourself to be is created by the story you tell yourself about ‘who you are’, and how you came to be this way.
While there are facts within your narrative… there is much poetic licence taken in that ‘heroes journey’ as well. Every stage of leadership development is accompanied by some loss of old identity. Some component of our old story that no longer suits the direction that we want to take our personal insightful path.
The trick is to understand that your identity can be influenced by the words you use to describe yourself to yourself.
If you, and the workforce of today, are to be able to effectively learn, adapt, and use your identity to thrive at work and in life, a leadership ‘hack’ is to look at how we can use the micro-skills of leadership to influence this. These skills empower individuals who want to take agency in their lives – creating more productive work environments and more successful organisational cultures.
Remember, you can be authentically ‘you’ in a variety of contexts, AND you can successfully be the author of your own self-narrative. You choose how to write the chapters that remain in your story, and which way to go on your personal insightful path.
