Leading with Authenticity

Happy Monday, everybody. My name is Jean Mitchells. I'm excited to be here on professional development day. I'm here in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and it is a beautiful sunny day. It's going to get in the seventies and I just love the blue sky, the windows open, being able to feel that fresh air, being able to hear the wind, the birds. I'm a huge fan of all the birds. So I'm popping in here on this Monday, excited to talk about leading with authenticity. I'm gonna hang for just a hot second just to see if anybody else pops in.

I don't know if you had a chance to listen to Luke this morning for Monday motivation, but I highly encourage you to jump out there. He has a really great message for this morning and I really, really appreciated it. Good morning, Colleen. How are you this beautiful Monday? My name is Jean Nichols. I'm excited to be here. Hello, Jocelyn. Happy Monday. Excited to see everyone jumping in. Good morning, Luke. Ah, Luke. I listened to your message this morning and he definitely brought some inspiration to my soul.

A couple tears to my eyes, but I am not even going to spill the beans on what you shared. I'm just inviting everybody to go out and listen to your message this morning on replay. Because it was lovely this past weekend. It was my mom's birthday and on Saturday, but also we had her celebration of life on Saturday as well. Good morning, speak wonder. And it was pretty apropos. She was someone that loved to sing. She would always sing in the choir. And so at the cemetery we sang happy birthday to her and it was pretty lovely.

So, Luke, your message hit ways and maybe ways you don't even realize. So thank you. Speak wonder, coming in from Erie, Pennsylvania. Jean Mitchell's coming in from Minneapolis, Minnesota. So today's conversation, I like calling it a conversation, is talking about leading with authenticity. And I decided to shake it up a little bit from leading bold at work and talk about leading with authenticity. Now, oftentimes I find that when I use the word leading or leadership, people will attach that phrase to a hierarchy.

Maybe a manager, a boss, a boss's boss. But we forget that we are leaders every single day. All that requires to be a leader is for us to have a vision and for us to take an action to move forward and to inspire somebody to move forward with us. So Luke this morning was a leader on our Monday mornings with his motivation, because he has a unique ability to play some beautiful music and provide a message that kickstart the day and the week in a way that gets us excited and motivated. And when I think about leading authentically at work, sometimes it's really hard.

It's hard to show up exactly as we are. Bring our whole self together. Bring our whole self into the workplace. Good morning, Tiffany. Nice to have you here. And so when we think about authenticity, I'm going to invite everybody that's on. And if you're not driving a car, if you're willing to chat, type in the chat box. When you hear the phrase leading with authenticity, what does that mean to you? Now, I'm not going to dive in to explain it yet, because I want to hear what you guys have to say, but when I came up with this idea or this topic, it was simply because I co own an indoor cycling studio.

And what is lovely about that is we have a really big team. Tiffany says, real. Thank you for that. And the last six months for me personally, has been tricky to navigate as a spin instructor and also leading Sven's studio. Speak. Wonder says, empathetic. Yes. Tiffany says, real. Yes. I've had a really hard time with that because I've gone through a lot of grief. A year prior, I had lost my father, then I lost my mom, and I kind of went into a fog or a tailspin. But as I was preparing for this last weekend to say the final goodbye to my mom, my team started to rally.

And I got all these different notes from varying people on my team, instructors or managers, telling me that I've got this, sending me their love. And they were part of the story with me, because the whole time as I was going through it, there were days where I needed to get a sub to teach my spin classes, because emotionally, I wasn't available to provide to the community what they needed when they come to take a spin class from me. Or on different days, I might have had to ask for help on maybe even some simple, really simple tasks because I was having brain fog and I just emotionally couldn't think through some of the solutions.

So I relied on my team in ways that I hadn't relied on them before. But the whole sub of the way and the feedback that I got from them was they were really grateful that I was willing to share my experience. Many of them are young, they're early to mid twenties, and they haven't experienced a loss before, and so they found a great appreciation. Even though almost everybody on my team or our team is a part time employee and they have full time employers, they hadn't experienced a leader, a manager, or someone sharing with them the way in which I shared with all of my team.

Now there's pluses and minuses, right? You can maybe share too much. TMI is an acronym for a reason. But what I saw as I took a step behind the scenes is I saw a team of people who had the freedom and the inspiration to step up without having a title. I had an instructor. Oh, I love that. Speak, wonder. Yes. Transparent. I had an instructor on my team step up and create a list of all the things we could do to refresh the studio. And they went out to people in our community, members, got their ideas, went to our whole team, got ideas and presented them back, and we created a task list and we worked on them together.

So while I might be one of the managers or the owners, they chose to lead and step in when I didn't have the energy or the mindset to be able to do that. So when we lead with authenticity, it's exactly what we're sharing in the chat. It's being real, it's having empathy, it's being transparent. It's understanding that it's not always about the title of our job, but the humanness that comes from our heart, because it's that humanness when we can share those moments with other people in a way that feels comfortable to us.

For many people, sharing that much emotion is really hard. And so that's respectable, too. But even in those moments, there were some days that it was so much that when somebody would ask me a question, I would say, I am so grateful for the question I can't actually share right now. I'm not there. I'm not ready. And even just being transparent in that way with my team, with my clients, I work with a lot of different clients, coaching them and on designing communications and training strategies. Like, even on those days where I was like, I just don't have it today, I don't have the words today, or I don't have the thoughts today.

Being able to say that out loud and know that it's okay for me to advocate for myself and what I need that is leading with authenticity, that is saying that I am a human and that I can be vulnerable. I don't have to be overly vulnerable. It's not about the spectrum. It's about what you're comfortable with and leading from that place. I'm a huge book geek. I don't know if any of you, others of you are podcasts, books, online trainings, sign me up for anything. I'm very curious. I love to learn, but I wanted to start this little series on leading with authenticity with one of my favorite authors.

Maybe you've heard of them, maybe you have not. They have podcasts, they have some TED talks. But it's Brene Brown and the book that felt like it wanted to be shared today is the book daring greatly. I'll also take a photo of this. I'll put it in the comments later today. And the little subset on the side I'm going to read, it says how the courage to be vulnerable transforms the way we live, love, parent, and lead. Yeah, speak, wonder. Same. But as a poet, I have a feeling you have even a broader spectrum of books that you read than I do.

One of the things, and I don't know if you read books like me, but I highlighted my books. I dogmarked them, add post it notes when I feel like there's something really important that I want to remember as I go through it. But then this particular one, I wrote down the comment or the quote vulnerability is the beginning, the feeling, the humanness that we crave hi Jules, how you doing? Happy nurses week. I know you're an EMT, but medical field. Happy week for being in the medical field and thank you for all you do vulnerability I'm going to just read this part.

Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful lives, vulnerability is the path. And I just felt like today, that really hit home for me. Tiffany, I love that you say that you read three books at the same time. I'm same. I love how this passage about vulnerability, it really hit home today because coming into this past weekend, I had a lot of emotion, a lot of emotion around how I could show up for everybody else on the day that our mom passed away and her birthday.

How I could create an experience that really honored her and then still play a hat in every other role in my life. And it really required me to invest in myself and my own emotional and wealthy health Cadre has been a gift and a blessing in my journey of healing. So thank you to all of the amazing speakers that are out here. But it helped remind me that the best path forward for me and the leaders that I'm inspired by the most is when I can be as transparent as I feel comfortable in that moment.

And sometimes in that moment, transparency is saying I can't. I can't. I don't have the energy right now. I don't have the capacity. I'll get back to you on that. So when we think about leading with authenticity and we think about the words that we already shared up there around transparency, vulnerability, it's about having that courage to understand that no matter what role we play, no matter what hat we wear, at any given point in time, someone is always looking to us for an insight, for information, for a connection, a humanness.

And that is regardless of our title, it's regardless of if we manage a team of one, team of zero, a team of 1000, because we are always taking a step forward and there is always someone that is taking a step behind us, that's looking ahead to us and seeing how we step first so that maybe they mirror us, maybe they have the courage to do the same. So in the chat I see that we have lots of other great book people. If there are any resources that you have really enjoyed about being an authentic leader, showing up in the workplace, or showing up in life with your whole self, I would love to see you posted in the chat or when I add this book, daring greatly, a photo and some insights on what inspires me about this book to the comments later today.

Maybe add a couple of books that inspire you as well and let's share that with one another and see how we can come together. So with that everybody, I wish you all a beautiful, wonderful Monday. There are some amazing presenters that are coming up later today. Go back and listen to Luke's message for today. If you only can take one other moment, I invite you to take that one one more step for you. And I just want to send you off the well wishes of being brave, being bold and being authentically you today, tomorrow and the rest of this week.

I hope you have a great one and we'll see you all soon and speak wonder. You're welcome. I look forward to seeing more of your poetry in our comments out here on Cadre. Have a great day.