What does your past say about you? More importantly, what do you tell others about where you have been and what you are about?
Women’s journeys are often filled with lessons learned and strengths built, yet we rarely boast about them.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION
Katie: Welcome to the Skirt Strategies November installment.
Carol: And here we are today and we have a fabulous topic for you today. “Your Leadership Story.”
Katie: More fabulous than any other one.
Carol: Absolutely.
Katie: Actually, then keep getting better.
Carol: They pile on.
Katie: I’m not kidding. They really do.
Carol: Yeah.
Katie: Alright. Tell us about this month.
Carol: So your leadership story is about how you view yourself as a leader. And it starts when you’re a child and it moves all the way up until today. And I’m going to really hand this over to Katie. She does a fabulous workshop on writing your leadership story.
And so I’d like for her to talk a little bit about that and then we’ll talk a little bit about some of the bios that we just wrote.
Katie: Okay. I want our leaders to think about what they would say to others if they were to identify their leadership story. Most of us, say a bio. “I did this and I did this and I did this.”
However, if you think about your past – assuming that those of you that are watching have more than a few years of your career and even if it’s just your career, you also have your childhood. All of that has built up to who you are right now. All of that contributes to our belief systems that control or I wouldn’t say maybe always control, but at least influence your day to day decisions and how you see the world.
My mentor – Coach Dr. David Krueger says, “Our story is not so much what happens to us – as what we make of what happens to us.” And we like working with women at Skirt Strategies to help them take a look at what they’re doing to affect that in a more positive way.
Carol: Absolutely.
Katie: You know, your childhood… there’s something called childhood tapes, have you heard of that term? Childhood tapes over and over again, things that you are told. And they become belief systems – whether they’re true or not. Often, it’s something that your parents have instilled in you good or bad.
So its beliefs like… or childhood tapes that go on and on like, “You can’t do that because you’re a girl. You’ll never be good at blah, blah, blah. You should never try it.” I heard one person say, “Oh I’m really bad at managing conflict.”
Well, listen to that. You don’t always have to be that bad at managing conflicts, you can get better. When you tell yourself those stories, those trends over and over again, you’ll start believing them yourself and you end thinking beyond it.
Carol: Right.
Katie: Learn helplessness, we call it.
So that’s a part of the story. We work with women to help create an initial theme, what they wanted to be. But really, what we did in the recent workshop…
Carol: We had a great experience recently and it was with Big Fish Marketing, Robin Roffer. She took us through just a fascinating write your own story and we were basically writing our bios. But we had to really delve deep and believe things about ourselves and say things about ourselves that were barely braggadocios.
Katie: Yes. And she encouraged that.
Carol: She really did. And when it came out, you’re like – “Well, of course that’s what I’ve done and of course that’s how it looks to other people. But you know, I didn’t want to brag about what I did about ourselves.” And we don’t sell ourselves well because of that.
Katie: I love the way she had themes. She had themes around – kind of a pattern that you had taken in. And you’ll know what I mean when I explain them.
Like were you a David and Goliath theme where you were really David and you had to face up to Goliath and you overcame incredible odds to be where you are or you came from nothing or you worked your way through law school for 10 years and paid for it and worked three jobs to get it done.
All of us have had those journeys through our past that I think when they’re on our past, we kind of put them in the past and we’re like, “Okay. Glad that’s over.” But we ought to leverage them.
Carol: Right. And we really should. And just as an example, I’ll give you my story which we came up with. This is just the first sentence of it, but at 21, I owned my first restaurant. By the time I was 30, I had three successful restaurants and 150 employees.
So you know, I knew that about myself, but I wasn’t willing to brag about it. And it really does sound fairly impressive. And I really did it.
As I was moving through with it, it was just what I did. Now that I look back on it, it’s fairly impressive.
Katie: A friend of mine says, “Live long enough and you’ll learn everything.”
Carol: That’s true. And for those of you who are younger and you think, “Oh! Well, I don’t have anything.” You really do.
So don’t get down on yourself. And you have accomplishments. Be proud of your accomplishments. Don’t be afraid to tell people who you are and what you do. And write your leadership story in a way that you are a true leader.
Katie: So those of you that are monthly subscribers to our membership, we’ll have specific tasks this month.
We’re going to send you off on pieces of writing that story and checking into your enabling beliefs and maybe some of your limiting beliefs. And we might ask you to spend a little time introspectively with that and we’ll have another couple of challenges for you.
If you’re not a monthly member you can become one at any point in time. Please subscribe. And you can always subscribe to our free newsletter where you will get our videos without having to ask. We’ll send you the videos.
Carol: Yes.
Katie: Isn’t that nice? They don’t have to ask. We just send them.
Carol: That’s right. They’ll come right to your email whether you want them or not.
Katie: Oh! It’s a great month. And its Thanksgiving month. That kind of fits well – Thanksgiving.
Carol: Oh, yeah!
Katie: We did that on purpose.
Carol: Yeah.
Katie: That’s all for now! We’ll see you.
Carol: Thank you. Bye!
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