For the last couple of months, I’ve been playing with content ideas and thoroughly enjoying myself.
I also knew there was something else I should’ve been doing that I kept putting off because the thought of it made me feel uncomfortable, yet I knew to progress this is a step I had to take.
By focusing on content creation, I had a perfectly valid reason for not doing the thing. Right?
Wrong!
Fate stepped in where I came across a video asking why people don’t just do the thing. The message was:
"Rather than beat yourself up for avoiding something, lean into why you're avoiding it.
So I did. I talked it out and the conclusion… anything that doesn’t feel authentically me makes me run in the opposite direction.
Until this point, I had been taking advice - only when I applied the advice, I sounded like the person giving it. At times, I even sounded like it had come directly from an AI. None of it sounded like me.
So I started working out what sounding like me really is. Where does it come from. What words would I use? What would I never say? What makes my voice mine? Then boom! I stepped into the most productive afternoon I’d had in months, doing the exact thing I had convinced myself I could never do.
Why am I sharing this?
Right now, I'm sitting in a WiFi free area with only the sounds of the trees you see in the photo around me and I realised the same thing happened at the beginning of my leadership journey. I didn’t know who I was as a leader or what my voice sounded like, so I copied other people. I copied what I thought leadership was supposed to look like and I hated every moment - with a passion.
Then, one day I found myself and stopped sounding like everyone else. I became me, one hundred per cent of the time.
That was when everything changed.
The progress I made was unbelievable, not because I had suddenly learned how to lead, but because I had finally stopped performing someone else’s version of leadership.
I genuinely thought I had learned this lesson.
Turns out, regardless of where we are in our lives we can still be clueless when learning something new.
We borrow language, follow advice and try on other people’s ways of doing things. That part can feel uncomfortable.
It doesn’t mean we are doing it wrong. It means we are still finding the version that belongs to us.
Until next time, Aileen
Exceptional Leaders: Episode 3 is now available on Spotify.
This month's exceptional leader Aura Dorneaunu, who is well known for her leadership and innovation; shares with us how to always remain authentically you.
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