Leading with Authenticity

Happy Monday, everybody. I hope you're all having a great day. I'm excited to be here on another beautiful Monday. My name is Jean Mitchells. I am here on professional development day and to talk to you about leading with authenticity, but using that phrase leadership differently, using it to not only represent being a leader or a manager in an organization, but leading through our own day to day. So I'm going to hang out for a hot second here while people join in. I get to hello, Jocelyn. Happy Monday.

Hope you're having a great day. Hi, Jules, it's been a hot minute. Nice to see you. Thanks for joining today. I feel like I'm pulling a JC calling into you from my car today. I needed to drive into the office to have a meeting and that doesn't happen often. So here we are in the car, excited to be here regardless. So this morning on our time, and as people join in, I'll pause and say hello to all of them. I wanted to take a few minutes and when we think about leading with authenticity, again, reshaping our minds a little bit around what leading means, and that doesn't always mean, again, that we are managing people.

Leading an organization. Managing an organization. That leadership is something that comes intrinsically from within each of us as individuals. Now, we can apply that to how we manage people or manage teams. Maybe we are mentors. We can apply that there as well. My headset is going to follow, so there are different ways that we can think about applying that. I do this wrong and I'll hang up. So I don't want to do that again. I had that happen once, talked to you guys for 15 minutes, and then I hung up by accident two minutes in.

So when I think about that leading with authenticity, today's focus is going to be on transitions. And I'm saying that because it's actually hitting pretty close to home. I am a consultant and I have contracted work. Sometimes it's really short contracts, sometimes it's really long contracts. And as of today, on this Monday, a contract that I've been on for a while now has just broken. Not broken, it just decreased. The organization has a bunch of budget cuts. Our project is shifting how it's going to work.

And so I find that I have 50% of my time available now. I've been a consultant for a long time, had my own company for 14 or 15 years now. So this isn't the first time that I've gone through this. But each time that I do, it reminds me that it's an opportunity for me to pause and reflect. Now, when I worked in corporate America and had been an employee, I had gone through a layoff in one of my jobs. And we attach so much of who we are, a lot of our own personal identity to the work that we do. And that's not a bad thing, because we spend a significant amount of time at work thinking about work, dialing into calls from anywhere.

You know, Jules, you actually physically go to work and you're on, and sometimes those hours can get extended longer in your day to day than what your scheduled shift might be. So we all have that possibility of being on and attaching our brand, attaching a lot of who we are, our values, our validation of who we are through our work. That is super normal. You know, one of the biggest things when people retire is, you know, as I've worked with people transitioning out of their jobs into retirement and just different studies that I've read as well, especially when my parents were approaching retirement a number of years ago, when people retire, they lose a part of their identity.

They don't always know who they are. Hi, Nettie. Welcome today. And sometimes that's when Alzheimer's or dementia or other things might hit an elderly person faster because you're taking away a significant portion of their identity, what they know, what their purpose is, and that is no longer there. So as people are preparing for retirement, the focus is on what can you do in your time instead of what you did before. Can you volunteer? Can you take classes, travel, different things? So having those backup plans is really important.

So as I'm thinking about us, as we're leading through change, leading through our own authentic way, what happens when we go through a job change? Some of it is by choice, and some of it is not by choice. So for me, as I mentioned earlier, I have 50% of my time available. So my project right now is 20 hours a week. Now, I also own a small business, and I do sound bath meditations, and I teach spin classes, so I'm not at a shortage for doing things. But when I think about the work that I want to bring into my life, into my space, next, I have a unique opportunity to take some time and reflect on what is it that I want to bring in, what kind of work, what kind of clients, what is the impact that I want to make through my work.

Because if we think about, you know, our own selves, being authentic in our jobs, and. And it's, you know, we're in a very different space, I think, in our professional lives now, where it's more accessible to some extent, to bring our whole self to work or on this project. Did I feel successful building relationships? Did I feel successful with executing whatever it was I was working on? And then I also asked the question, where did I feel depleted? Because as much as I can be rosy glasses or glass overflowing, the reality is that there are always going to be things that drain us and things that energize us.

And if I can be really crystal clear on what that is, then I can also be really crystal clear on the kind of work that I want to bring in next. Now, we don't always have the choice. Sometimes financially, we just need to take a job, right? And we need to get back to work. But when we have the opportunity to take that pause, maybe we haven't left a job yet, but we're looking to leave it because we know that we want to be more fulfilled. We want to make a greater impact in the work that we do. So I always start with my backwards reflection.

Where did I feel that I was successful? Because that will give me the stories and the examples for the new work that I want to attract when I'm interviewing or when I'm talking to somebody about what it is that I want to bring in. And then I always ask myself and try to be as honest as I can, where did I feel depleted in the work? So if I think about, you know, some of the work that I've been doing, part of it for me is I don't feel like I was able to make a big enough impact. And that's for many reasons.

Budget constraints, leadership constraints. There's a whole bunch of different reasons, some of them in my control and some of them out of my control. So when I do that backwards reflection, I also look to see, was it something I had the control to change or have the control to change in the future, or is it something that I was a byproduct of and just understanding that maybe that was part of the culture, part of the project, part of a plot twist in the work. And now, as I start to think about my time, and we think about our time as an investment, and it's an investment in ourselves, because if I choose work, or any of us choose work, that drains us, that depletes us day in and day out.

It doesn't just affect us in our work. It affects us emotionally, mentally, physically, physically. I was just talking to somebody over the weekend, and they were talking about how they had given so much to their job because it was very much a. The company that they work for is very much FaceTime oriented and very much, like, get everything done as fast as possible. But she was starting to see that some of her peers are getting promoted, and those people getting promoted around her were taking three hour breaks in the middle of the day to go train for an ultramarathon while she sat at her desk waiting for the next instant message and question to come up.

And so she decided that she lost a lot of her physical health and physicalness, right. And so she is prioritizing, trying to get some of her time back for her. So that was depleting for her. She invested too much into work, lost her own self. So when we are in a place where we're drained all the time, it affects us physically, emotionally, mentally. It also impacts our family and friend life. If we're depleted on those days, you know, we all have those days where work that day just was, like, not great.

It was just not great. And we get home at night and we don't want to walk the dog, we don't want to go to happy hour with our friends. Or if we do go to happy hour or out to dinner, we're the one that's complaining all the time. And then maybe we don't get invited to dinners anymore because we're always the person showing up complaining. So it's okay to do that. It's important that we get that out. But when we can take the time and realize that our work environment is now physically draining us, it's impacting the whole rest of our life.

So as I'm taking time right now, I did the backwards reflection. Now it's really important for me to see what is it that I want to be doing when I'm having the best day at work. What kind of problems am I solving? What kind of people am I interacting with? What challenges do I want to have next? Because for me, being challenged into the unknown is really important. That's not always important for everybody. So as I look to try to fill the next 50% of my time with another project or another type of work, it's really important that I think about what am I going to bring my best self into, what type of work will allow me to do my best work, so that when I'm done at night, I feel good and I can be proud of the work that I did, or I can create a structure where I balance so that I'm taking care of my physical and mental health as well as my, my mental activity of doing the work and really trying to write out on paper.

Why all of this is important to me. What's stopping me from asking for this type of work or finding this type of work?