Great leadership includes more of who you are
This article addresses one of the core tenets of Rebellious Leadership for women. Over three months, my flagship program brings a group of women together to step into this paradigm so they can feel more freedom and regain agency over their own experience.
Rebellious Leader core tenet: A Rebellious Leader sees her multitudes as a strength and invites all of her to determine how to be in the world.
Stepping into this paradigm is a multi-step process. It involves:
Seeing your multitudes
Integrating your multitudes
Learning to leverage all of you in your leadership
1. Seeing your multitudes
In my initial coaches training 10 years ago, the instructors asked us to imagine a piano with 88 keys. The full span of all those keys represented the diversity of parts available within each client. Most people, without conscious thought or practice, use a small set of those 88 available keys in their life and leadership. We mistake the familiarity of certain parts of ourselves for all there is within us.
The world we live in continually places us in boxes and definitions about who we are. And we do the same to ourselves. This is a normal way to break down the complexity of people and differences. The problem arises when we don’t examine those labels. Some of the labels you live with today were placed upon you long ago. They feel like your identity, because you’ve created a life that reinforces those labels. The truth of who you are as an individual is much wider. It’s full of far more keys, many of which are hungry to be seen and discovered.
2. Integrating your multitudes
Every person pushes away parts of themselves — some of their 88 keys. We do this for a few reasons. You may have received explicit or implicit messaging throughout your life that those parts of you were inappropriate or shameful. If you ask yourself who you have to be to receive love or security, the parts left out of your response are those you’ve pushed away.
For example, a part of women we focus on in my programs is the part of you that has needs or desires. Many women are taught our value comes from serving others. We’ll be safe if and when the people around us are satisfied. Thus we bring forward and amplify the parts of ourselves that make that possible - curiosity, compassion, empathy. And we do it very well. By doing so, we slowly bury the parts of ourselves that have needs or desires that deviate from those of the people around us.
We also push things away because it feels like we’re forced to retire parts of ourselves to survive or achieve success today. Today’s world values a specific part of your humanity and you’re trained to develop and use those parts of yourself simply to navigate the world.
For example, many women I connect with in my work have set aside their femininity to navigate male-dominated spaces. Many work environments favor logic and reason over intuition, and cognitive intelligence over emotional intelligence. They reward competition over collaboration and long-term planning over the emergence of ideas. As a result, women bury the subtle, valuable ways we understand and navigate the world.
Integrating multitudes means seeing the value in each of your parts and inviting the exiled parts back into the wholeness of who you are.
3. Learning to leverage all of you in your leadership
Unintegrated parts are at the heart of reactive leadership. When parts of you are suppressed they’ll explode into the scene of your leadership. Integrated parts are available to respond to your invitation to come forward and support you in what you’re wanting to create.
For example, a large part of me I often suppressed in my corporate leadership was courageous authenticity. I turned away from this part because I wanted to fit in. But, like all good exiled parts, it’d show up uninvited, desperate to be included in my leadership. The result was a truth-telling in many situations that created a large unintended impact that consistently derailed my effectiveness to enroll people in my vision.
Now that I’ve named and integrated that part into my leadership, I can creatively use it to shift stagnant energy in people and situations, which is one of the impacts I most want to create with my leadership.
Call for reflection:
What part of you are you pushing away from how you lead?
Shine On,
Alicia
(Image by Mikhail Nilov via Pexels)