Authentic Leadership ✨ Where Did You Win This Year?

Hello. My animal, G ninja is coming in here today. I am coming in from one of my coffee shop locations. Today's location is called Silver Fir. It's probably my favorite location. We're just going to hang out here for a few seconds. Good morning everyone. You're having a beautiful start to your week. And as you hop into the chat, my invitation to you is one, make sure that you can hear me. If it's too loud in the background, let me know. I'll move into a hallway. And two, hello, junkie. Junkie. As you pop into the conversation today, my invitation to you will be type in the chat one thing that you're most proud of that you accomplished in the last month afternoon, where are you located, junkie?

Junkie, where are you coming in from? But also type in the chat what are you the most proud of? Where have you been the most successful in the last month? And again, if you can't hear me very well, I'll move to a different location because there's some background here. So let me know. And if you haven't met me before, my name is J. I wear many hats. I am a corporate coach, executive coach. I work a lot with teams. Great. So then I go to. No, let's do that. We're going into a new space. Welcome on the journey with me and I hope this location is a little bit better.

So today on our Monday adventure plot, twisting my invitation to you when you come on into the conversation today is to type in the chat what is one thing that you are the most proud of or one space that you feel like you have been the most successful in in the last month or maybe even the last two weeks. Perfect. Thank you for the feedback. I always love honesty and if you can't hear that, it's no fun for anybody. Good morning Speak wonder. So I'll share with you as you prepare to type in the chat if you're not dry.

But we can do innately bold shares, we can also be really great followers. So sometimes to lead it requires realistically for a lot of people, the next two weeks will be your last working weeks of this year. Not for everybody, depending on your job. However, a lot of corporate, corporate companies, sometimes nonprofits, they will shut down during the holiday season. And so if you think about that, you have two more weeks to really make your best effort in your job. That's not a lot of time. However, what I want us to do is to think back and as an individual, as a leader, where did you grow?

Now, this isn't about your teams today and oftentimes we talk about our teams. This is legitimately about you. Now, my invitation to you is to look back and see where as a leader, you felt like you succeeded. And I'll piggyback on jc where, as a follower, did you succeed? Because really, there's true in the, in, in the grand scheme of all of it, we will always lead and we will always have a place to follow. The question will, Are we vulnerable and authentic in our approach? So following requires a certain amount of humility and vulnerability to say, today I can follow.

Leadership requires us oftentimes to feel passionate and bold and sometimes equally vulnerable to step into that space to say, I'm going to raise my hand today. So it requires both. So if you would play along with me, I'm going to ask you this question and feel free to type in the comments. In this last year could be in the last month, who is a leader that you admire? Now again, it doesn't have to be a manager or boss. It could be a family member, it could be a friend. It could be somebody you've never met before that maybe you see on Instagram or some other social media who has inspired you in the last year.

And have they inspired you into an action or have they simply inspired you because of what they do? Now, there's two different ways people can inspire you. They can write a beautiful book and it can feel inspirational and then you hold that book, or in Speak Wonder's case, a poem. And there could be that leader that inspires you into an action. Maybe that leader inspires you to feel comfortable following. So you don't necessarily have to type their name, but if you wanted to type their name, great.

But really, what is it that they did that inspired you this year? So speak Wonder. You put in there your layout coach, Robin. Say more, say a short sentence of what they inspired in you or what action you took because of them. So when I look back on 2025, I actually am really inspired by a couple of people on my team, our team at the stud. And here's why. I lead in a way where I like to set the box, but know that really there's nothing that can be done where somebody can significantly break anything, right?

That can't be fixed. We have an indoor cycling studio. And yeah, you can make mistakes and they can cost money, but at the end of the day, humans coming together to do work. And here's one of the things that I was inspired about. I had a new leader on the team who had never led before. And for the first couple of months, they felt like they needed to do everything. And I was like, okay, great. This is gonna last for about six weeks, and then they're gonna burn out, and they're gonn. They're tired and they need a day off.

And it happened, and I was ready for it. And we did the thing. So then after that, we had the conversation. Okay, now that you've tried to do everything, what are you the most passionate about? And they were like, well, I'm the leader. I should be doing everything. And I said, you said the word should, so let's strike that word and let's break it down. And so we did. And then I didn't hear from them for a little while, and they found their voice. So in the first manager meetings that we would host every single month, I led most of the content.

And then one day it was, jean, I have a slide deck. I was like, you do? She was like, yeah, I have a slide deck. So here's what I need you to talk about. And this is everything else I'm going to talk about. And I was like, okay. And so she came on the call, she went through her slide deck. The meeting was done according to her agenda in seven minutes because she talked so fast. And so I paused and I said, cool, we have all this information now. What? And then I opened up the dialogue and we had more of a conversation.

And the meeting lasted for 37 minutes. And after the call, we got off the call and I asked her how she thought it went, and she said, well, I got all my messages across, and I said, okay, great, that's you talking one way, but we're a team. And so how might we create space for people to contribute? And the next month came along and she did the same. Thank you, Jean. I got a PowerPoint. This is what I need you to say. And the next time that she did her call, it lasted about 15 minutes. So we got fundamentally longer.

It's not about the element of time. It's about engagement. How are we lifting up the team? So we checked in again. She said, I think that one went so much better. And I was like, it did Tell me what worked. She shared. And I said, okay, here's what I observed. I watched everybody on camera, and everybody read through your slides, and everybody looked like they were there. But our team is a really super fun team with a lot of ideas. So they didn't have space for their ideas. She was like, oh. And so fast forward to the last few meetings.

It's like, again, it's not about time. But she took all the feedback and she created a space that in between all of the calls, she gathered everybody's ideas because she works better with everybody one on one. And she took everybody's ideas, put them together, put them into the side deck, and allowed us to see what the effort of all were and not just what she thought was really important. And so she inspires me to be a better leader because she learned by doing, by asking the hard questions and receiving all the feedback.

And so I use as an example that sometimes, whether or not you're the boss or whatever hat you wear, we all have something to learn that we can grow with. Speak Wonder says you have a tendency to sit your voice through the grid of public opinion. I like that. So she inspired you to live authentically and to bring your voice with courage and connection. I love this conviction. Thank you for that. So everybody that we interact with has an opportunity to lift us up, to take us down. But when we as individuals look back on 2025, it's really important for us to invest time to see where we grew and who helped us grow.

Sometimes we can be really surprised along the way as to what we learn and who we learn it. We think often that I need to learn from the boss, the top. But the reality is, is we have as much to learn from the people that we manage, the people that we work with side to side, or the people who maybe we don't talk to on a regular basis. So the number one thing that I tell anybody on my teams, anybody that I coach with and any of my consulting clients, the number one thing that you can do is to be curious.

So when I look back on 2025, I actually reflect on all the places that I was the most curious because it's inside those opportunities of curiosity where we sh our lens, we shift our perspective, that we have the greatest possibility to grow. So when we look back on 2025, those are the golden nuggets to help us plant the seeds for what we want to Invest in for 2026. Yesterday, speak wonder mentioned that she has a theme or a word for the was illuminate for 2025, and she hadn't decided on 2026 yet.

Cool. Let's look back at 2025, celebrate how far we've come, celebrate where we've tripped, fall, fallen, stumbled and scraped our knees, and use that as the foundation leap from into 2026 to set our theme, to set our goals, and to choose where to invest in ourselves. Because as leaders, the number one investment, in my opinion, that you can make is in yourself. So if you do that, it requires us to see where our gaps, where are our potential so that we can plant those seeds and then bump our investments against that.

So I'll give you an example. Right now, as I look back on 2025, I am looking back on all the classes I signed up for. Now here's the deal. I signed up for a lot of classes and some of them I get a lot out of and some of them I don't. So when I look back, what I signed up for, what I leaned into and what I didn't, I look at where are my opportunities to continue to learn? Because every year I set aside a certain budget and I try to break it down into each quarter and I try to learn one new thing or invest into one thing that I'm curious about so I can learn and grow.

And I do that. And then I share that with my teams, my clients, so that they think about how do they want to invest in themselves. Because our best investment to reach our maximum potential is investing in our wellness, our mental wellness and our thoughts, our mind, our growth. So whether you're investing in a mental wellness course or Cadre, whether you're investing in a fitness regime or you're investing in a course, those are the places that we have the greatest opportunity to grow as a whole self.

And then we lead that way. We are better leaders for those that follow. So my invitation to you to take a look back. What did you invest in? Who inspired you? Where did you grow the most this last year? And use that as the fuel for where you're going to invest and grow in 2026. I hope you have the best day. Thank you for your honesty about my audio at the start. I appreciate you. And if you don't have Speak Wonder on your schedule for this week, scheduler.