Excerpts: June 9, 2006
Learn from Your Past
- Your childhood is a leadership legacy. Reflect on it and use it to build your leadership.
- Be honest with yourself as you think back to your earliest memories.
- Be as curious about exploring your memories as you are about making new discoveries
- Connect your memories to your leadership goals and values.
- As you draw on your memories, focus on the positive lessons that can help you reach your goals.
- Be proactive about finding mentors. Don’t make excuses that stop you from pursuing opportunities.
- Recognize that you can’t know everything. Look for a mentor who can help in your weaker areas or with a new challenge.
- Remember that mentoring is a reciprocal experience. Look for ways to use your growing leadership skills to help your mentor.
- As you learn, grow, and change, as you become more secure and powerful in your ability to lead, look for opportunities to be a mentor to others.
- Your mentor may be older or younger than you; you may have more than one mentor at a time and will likely have more than one mentor over the course of your career.
- To talk about leadership, women need to use language authentic to their experiences.
- Mother-leaders are great at multitasking, a key skill for any leader.
- Mothering is a testing ground for the leadership required to foster strong interpersonal relationships and collaboration.
- You can not avoid your share of personal challenges, difficulties and disasters. It is how you handle them that will determine how your leadership develops.
- Understand that you cannot change or control others; you can only change and control yourself.
- Strive for self-mastery – the ability to help and heal yourself by your own actions.
- Search for optimism and affirmation in even the darkest experiences.
- Use the strength that develops from your sorrow to act. Be a leader in command of yourself, sustained and driven by the power of your experience.
Find Your Leadership Passion
- Finding your leadership passion will depend on clarifying your values. Values motivate great leadership, underpin the actions that you take to build your leadership, and lead to lasting and transforming change.
- Take the phrase “I can’t” out of your vocabulary. Nobody succeeds by expecting to fail.
- Take the word “should” out of your vocabulary. Act on your authentic wants and needs, not on those imposed by others.
- Leaders act within their environment. Every act of leadership based on your mission builds your capacity for making change on a larger and more transforming scale.
Your Leadership Your Way
- Women often lead differently than men. Follow your authentic instincts for leadership.
- Your leadership will be most effective if you stick to the mission of your organization.
- Like all good leaders, you must “challenge the process” by questioning the status quo, looking for ways to be innovative, and exercising creativity. In this way, you can help your organization succeed.
- Stick to your principles and inspire others by acting on them. Demonstrate that you can be trusted and you will get the trust of those around you.
Give Voice to Your Leadership
- Learn to be an effective personal communicator by getting honest feedback and honestly assessing your communications skills. Then use practice to improve.
- Show your sincerity and passion as you communicate in both words and images. If you don’t have the conviction to support your idea no one else will either.
- Don’t hide your light behind anything or anyone.
Face Criticism with Courage
- Build your firsthand knowledge around the issues and ideas where you want to take leadership.
- Reach out to people. Listen and learn about their concerns.
- Be a leader that knows the way before you show the way.
- Understand that leadership comes with criticism. Expect it and be ready for it.
- Handle criticism with less emotion and more intelligence. Be open to constructive ideas. Be strong in the face on unjust attacks.
- Distinguish between criticism that you value and can use versus criticism that is best to ignore.
Keep Your Focus
- Remain true to your leadership passion even when you face drastically changed circumstances. You can adjust your vision to fit the times.
- Embrace change. See it as an opportunity not a setback. Be the person who steps up to the new challenge and brings others along.
- Use every avenue, every method, and every opportunity to advance your vision.
- Build loyalty and a legacy to carry on transforming change by encouraging leadership in other people.
Contacts, Networks and Connections
- Look for opportunities to network wherever you can. Take the initiative in meeting new people and looking for ways that you can help each other.
- Be broad and inclusive in building your network. Sometimes the most helpful contact is the least obvious.
- Understand that networks and alliances are built over time. Be intentional about developing the right networks and alliances for your goals – and be patient.
- Be a “connector” linking people in your networks to each other.
- Leaders are risk takers who seek out and accept new challenges.
- Focus on your abilities, your talents, your strengths.
- Accept that there are problems you can’t control and focus on what you can do.
- Lead by example.
- Understand that thinking and talking must lead to action – from yourself and others whom you inspire to act.
- Learn from everyone by inviting others to teach you.
- Be curious. Curiosity nurtures the souls and spirits of people.
- Learn and listen. Leaders who are the best learners are the best listeners.
- Empower others by honoring their ideas with your serious attention and interest.
