Leading With Authenticity

Happy Monday, everybody. My name is Jean Mitchells. I'm excited to be here with all of you on this beautiful, amazing Monday. Wherever you're at today, whether you're listening to it on replay or you're dialing in live with me. Excited to hear where you're from, what your aspirations for this week are. I've been here a little bit early, so I figured I would pop on and say hello, give everybody a little extra time. Last week was really cool to be able to meet one of our fellow Cadre members. Jules, live in person, didn't know that she was going to pop into one of my sound baths.

She happened to be in Minneapolis for a few days and then I was on a little walk with my dog to a coffee shop. So pretty much almost every day I obviously I have to walk my dog many days, but he knows the way to a local coffee shop. He also knows the way to the local pet store. So on any given day, he will go on a walk and at least walk once every few days we'll take the path that gets us to the coffee shop. I don't drink coffee, so to me it's no big deal. But it's really kind of funny because he will walk right up to the counter.

And on a particular day last week, we walked into the coffee shop and I looked over and there's was Jules Cotter. Remember, one more time before she head back home. So on this Monday, the conversation topic is leading with authenticity. So I wanted to give a couple shares and then also share with you a book that I'm reading. I feel like Mondays could also become a little bit of a book club. You could share the cool topics that were. That we're seeing. So the story I wanted to share with you is I have.

I co own an indoor cycling studio and have an amazing team and I have an instructor on my team who is always jumping into everybody else's classes. She is coming to us with ideas on themes to do, ways to make experiences even better. At the studio she will attend our team training. So I had a two and a half hour instructor training because I'm also one of the instructors with our team over the weekend and she shows up with ideas. She has good shares with the team around feedback for how everybody is doing.

She will send me notes on the side of ideas that she had about coaching our team and asking if it's okay for her to work one on one with a few of our team members who are a little less experienced. And in the last five and a half weeks I've been training a brand new instructor through what we have as a virtual bootcamp through our corporate because it's a franchise. And she reached out to this person that was in training because she knows her as well and set up extra time to come into the studio 2 hours before she would have to teach to come in with this new instructor and help her train and go through the steps and go through the process and make sure she felt really comfortable going through this virtual bootcamp.

So I asked her one day in the last couple of weeks if she wanted to become a lead instructor and partner with me on designing trainings for the team. And her comment back to me was this, Jean, I'm not a leader. And I was taken aback by that. She said, I'm really good behind the scenes, but I'm really nervous getting in front of groups of people and like, you do a really great job at that. I just happen to be really good at following the rules. And I paused and it made me giggle a little bit. Hi Jules.

Nice to see you virtually. I will miss seeing you in person this week. It was so great to have you. So I'm talking about one of the leaders on my team. And so what she said to me again is that she didn't feel that she was a good leader because of all these different reasons. She had all these excuses of why she wasn't a leader and that she thought I would do a better job of just leading the team by myself. And so I asked if she would go to coffee with me or tea and have lunch with me so that we could have a conversation about this.

So we haven't had that conversation yet. We're doing that this week. But the reason why I wanted to bring up that individual is her perception of being a great leader is about being inspirational, being in front of everybody, and what she's not realizing or recognizing in herself. Good morning. What she's not realizing and recognizing in herself is that she is already leading and she does it organically and innately because she is so passionate about lifting up our team. She will post on her social media and talk about other instructors on the team, inviting people to go try out other instructors besides herself in the fitness industry.

I will share this there's a lot of ego. Even though most fitness studios might say that we're egoless, we're human, there will always be ego and identity with our craft. Doesn't matter what craft you do, and it's fascinating in fitness because there is so much ego attached to how many people attend your classes, they get paid or compensated differently the more people that they have as encouragement to build their class times and be come really good at their craft or trade. So to have an instructor in fitness who selflessly, selflessly promotes other instructors on the team is a sign of a good leader.

So when we think about authenticity and how we show up in our jobs and really what that looks like, like I've said it many times before, we don't have to be a manager. We do not have to be a director, a CEO, a vice president, whatever title you associate with being a leader, leadership comes from passion. Leadership comes from our innate ability to see the possibility in something around us and lean into that possibility and get other people on board with that possibility as well. So I'm going to ask a question, and if you're listening on replay, fantastic.

If you are, live with me right now, I would invite you to share one or two traits of the best leaders you've ever worked for or best leaders you've seen. Maybe you haven't worked for them. Maybe you've read a book or watched a YouTube video or a TED talk of them. What are you, what are the top two, one or two traits in a leader that makes you feel inspired by them? What is it that they do? So, as you're thinking and typing, and if you're driving, no driving and typing, please. But I would simply invite you to take a pause and think about that, because the traits that you resonate with the most are likely going to be the traits that you give to other people.

So Jules mentions in here someone who listens and is encouraging. So I've had the experience of being with Jules in person in the last week. Thank you. She attended a sound bath of mine, and then we bumped into each other at a coffee shop. I mentioned that earlier on the livestream today. And what I will say is, my experience with you, Jules, is exactly that one where when we sat down to talk, you asked a lot of questions and then you listened and you wanted to learn, and you gave me that space and time, and you had a lot of really positive feedback in our interactions about either things that you had seen either through Cadre or through what our dialogue is.

So when we find those traits in a leader or people that we feel inspired by, when we ask ourselves the question, what is it about them that we either aspire to be like or inspires us to move into action, those traits that we identify are going to be most likely what is naturally intrinsic to us as humans and those are our starting points for how we can lead every single day. Now, the book that I'm reading right now is his leaders eat last by Simon Sinek. I don't know if you've ever heard of this author.

He has some YouTube videos, he's done some TED talks, and he the first one that he wrote is a book, or his most famous book at the start is a book called it starts with why. If you haven't read it, I would highly encourage it. I invite every leader that I coach to read that book at some point in our coaching relationship or in our consulting and work relationship. I've also given it to a number of people on my team because it's just a really good foundational set of insights. And when we think about our work, whatever role we play, if we only focus on what we're doing or what we have to get done, we are missing some valuable information.

And the most valuable piece of information is why are we doing what we're doing anyway? What attaches the importance and the value to us about why we're doing that. So anytime, whatever it is you're working on, maybe you're volunteering, maybe you have a new idea for your team at work. If we can start with why, even if we are high executors and we make lists every day of things that we need to accomplish, if we start with why we're doing it, our lists become more refined. It gives us more purpose, more direction.

If we start with why, we can have a story and we can emotionally get invested, not only ourselves, but everybody around us, so that we can align on the purpose of the work. So in my job at the studio, at the fitness studio, it's to really help our whole team understand why are we there. Like what we are doing. It's not rocket science, right? We are a fitness studio, but our why isn't just to teach a great spin class. Yeah, that's what we do. We create an experience. But our why is to create a community and a connection so that people can feel like when they come into our studio, they're walking into their third home.

And if I train a new instructor on our team, or I ask somebody why they want to teach, if the answer that they give back to me is all about themselves, that tells me one thing. But my newest instructor that's going through training, she's been at our studio riding for eight years. She's taken 1800 rides with us in eight years. That's a lot of time, days. If you take up all the 45 minutes, and you add them into a bundle. That's like days that she's been at the studio with us. She's known every instructor that's come through the team.

She's known every manager, every ambassador that's worked on our team in those eight years of time. And her why that? She said when she started training, and she cried when she said, this is. You guys have meant so much to me. We have been together in so much of my life where I've had highs and some very big lows, and this studio got me through all of it. The team got me through all of it, and I want to do that for somebody else. And she started to cry. And in that moment, I knew that the what was going to be trainable.

I can train her how to teach a spin class, to ride to the beat of the music, but I can't give her that purpose. That's hers. And so everybody that comes into our team, we're grounded in the why of creating a sense of community, where we give back to the community and that we create that community. And we want people to feel that when they walk through the doors, they are connected to something or someone. That's what. That's our why every single day. The what we're checking people in, and we're having them clip in a bike, in a dark room, on bikes.

They go nowhere. Literally. They don't move. They're stationary. That's what we do. But why we do it is so much more so when you think about those leaders. So, when I started the story today, I talked about one of the leaders on my team who think. Thinks that she's not a leader. Yet every action she does is to help inspire and lift up the rest of the team so that our culture and our community feels connected, no matter which instructor they take on what day of the week and what time they take it, to me, that is a leader.

Her why is oozing from her even though she says out loud, I'm not a leader. I'm just an instructor who follows the rules. She is so much more than that. And so, inside this book, leaders eat last, she is a primary example of where she's eating last and really seeing behind the scenes to lift everybody up. When I'm working with the instructors or working with our team or working with any of my corporate clients, helping them to figure out what do they need to do next, it always starts with the why.

What is your organization trying to do? What is your department trying to do? Why does that matter? Because at the end of the day, we are human beings that are here for whatever period of time that we have. And as we're doing our own reflections, whether we say it in the same way that I do, I'm a high empath, so I'm going to use very emotional language. That's just who I am and my superhero strength. Whether or not you think the same way, at the end of the day, what we do isn't just about what hits our bank account.

Even though we need to make money to survive, live, do all these other things, at the end of the day, what we do matters. Why we do it matters because if we're taking time to reflect, we're also recognizing is it fueling us? And if it's not fueling us, usually we start to act out in really odd ways because we're not happy. We're not comfortable either. The culture doesn't fit anymore because new leadership came in and it's changing. The why is changing and it doesn't align with our purpose anymore.

Or maybe we've outgrown the why and we're aspiring for something more. And so that's what we're going to look for, is a new culture that will allow our why to blossom and flourish now. Leaders eating last, leading with authenticity, leading without even know we're leading all of these. And this whole leadership word can become a buzzword. But when we break it down into context, what is our why? Why are we showing up every day? Sometimes we'll show up every day to a job that we don't like anymore because we love the people that we work with.

And that's our why. Sometimes we, we will show up to work that is overwhelming for us because what we do matters. And that's our why. So really getting crisp and clear on that and taking a look back and reflecting on ourselves to see how you might be leading every day and looking at the people that inspire you to identify which traits resonate the most with you about those leaders. Why do they inspire you? Why would you go to battle for them or with them? Understanding what that motivator is also is a little nugget of understanding who you are and what your purpose is and what your why is.

So, on this beautiful, amazing Monday, I sing simply invite you to take a few moments to identify two things. One, what does inspire you and leaders around you, either today or leaders you've worked with in the past? And two, what's your why? And land in it, ground in it, sink in it, lather yourself up in it, and then share it with somebody. Somebody that you work with. Share it with a mentor, share it with a friend, a coach, and then check in every once in a while to see if the environment that you're in is supporting your why.

And if not, what's changed you, the culture? And is there a way that you can lead from behind the scenes to continue to evolve the space, the work, the team? So that's my little bit of inspiration for you this morning. If you have comments, questions, pop it in the chat. Go to the comments, post in there. Anything about leaders that resonate with you, tag me in it. Let's have a virtual dialogue. Let's do this. So I hope you have a great rest of your day. Thanks for spending a small snippet of it with me.

You can dial in to next to listen to Matt and see what greatness he has to share today as well. Mondays are packed with brilliant minds, so check us out. Check everyone out if you have the time or listen to them on replay. Have an amazing rest of your day and I'll see you soon. I will post this in the comments later and I'd love to hear more about your why.