Jean Nitchells guides a reflective session on limited versus limitless leadership, inviting listeners to recall moments when leaders constrained or expanded their strengths. She shares personal examples of micromanagement with post-it task lists and contrasting leadership that restored trust through small wins.
Jean Nitchells opens the session with friendly greetings, asks participants to share how they feel in the chat, and sets a relaxed, present tone for the talk.
Jean frames the month's theme of limited versus limitless leadership, encourages listeners to recall how limitless feels, and invites them to prepare mentally for reflection.
Participants are guided to recall a time when a leader constrained their strengths; Jean prompts reflection and begins sharing her own example of feeling boxed in.
Jean describes a rotating manager who micromanaged her with post-it notes, how this undermined her confidence and made her dread work, and how a mentor intervened to support her.
Jean contrasts the previous experience with a new limitless manager who invested trust, gave small wins, and helped her regain confidence and achieve recognition.
Hello everybody. Happy Monday, I'm back. It's nice to have you guys here. I'm coming in just a little early just to make sure that you have space and time to breathe and connect and be present. If we haven't met before, my name is Jean Nitchells. I'm excited to be here. And if you're coming in today, whether it's live or you're coming in on replay, I'd love to just have you type in the chat. How do you feel today in this moment? My word for the day is cozy. Coming in with my big, heavy, thick sweatshirt.
Feeling cozy today. It's a little chilly out there. Hi, Shannon. Happy Monday. Nice to see you. I'm inviting people as they pop on in to type in the chat a word or phrase about how they feel in this moment. Not an hour ago, not how you want to feel in an hour, but just how do you feel right now? My word for right now is cozy. Big ol' thanks once you're done. So today, as we're coming in on a Monday, everybody's diving back into work. If you're in corporate America, some people have varying schedules, but wanted to continue with this theme of limited and limitless for this month.
Optimistic, I love that. That's a great word. So when I think about limited and limitless, hey Luke, relax, I love that. And we've gone through a few weeks of talking about what does limited versus limitless mean. We've asked ourselves, if you go back and listen on replay, what limitless feels like in our body and how we can start to feel more expansion. And so I wanna take it and to the next level or a next step in the journey of limited versus limitless. And if you aren't driving your car and you want to close your eyes, you're welcome to do that.
And if you are driving a car or in a space where closing your eyes doesn't feel comfortable, don't. But my invitation is to go back into your mind, go back into the archives, the records of memories, And think about a time when you were working when you had a manager or a boss or a leader that you felt limited in your abilities. You felt as if your strengths were squished into a box or container. Now when we're working for leaders who put us into those boxes. What does it do for you as an employee?
How does it feel for you as an employee? If you wanna type something in the chat, feel free. So I'll give you an example of a time when I was working for a manager who led from a limited mindset. And for me, it was really unsettling because it was my very first experience working in a scenario where I had a leader who literally tried to put me in a box. They would come over to my desk every day and they would write on a post-it note what I needed to get done by when. And for someone who doesn't make a lot of lists and who thinks very strategically about how do the pieces of what I need to accomplish fit together so I can solve for many versus one, it felt extremely restrictive.
Every single day I dreaded coming into the office. I dreaded going to do my job. And this new manager of mine had gotten they run a rotation. So she rotated into our area. And the area that I worked in, I have a corporate finance background. I was in a decision support and analytics role. So it wasn't a very structured role in the same way that her previous job of working in accounting and systems was. In some other roles, having a timeline of how you need to accomplish your activities could be very beneficial.
In the work that I did, in the work that I choose to do, it really was very constraining because I was living on someone else's timeline, but I wasn't able to actually solve anybody's problems. And that was a big part of the work that I did. So it took a while for us to figure out what a new working rhythm was going to look like, and it never got great. I actually remember a time when a mentor of mine had walked past my desk And we would play this little game. I had stuffed animals on my computer and he would flip them at me and then he would duck.
He was like 6'3 ducking underneath a wall. So it was funny. And on this particular day, he did his little trick to just come check in, see how I was doing. I literally started bawling at my desk and he was like, Nitchells, conference room now. And I was like, not gonna question him. And we walked into this room and we closed the door and I just unleashed a waterfall of tears. And it was horrific and he asked me what was going on and gave me some tools that I could do to one, navigate the space and then two, started advocating for me to be able to move into a different position in the company because there were some openings and he was going to help me find a different situation to work in.
So it was very demoralizing. When I got into the new job, I actually felt like I wasn't qualified to do my work anymore. So just that one instance of a couple of months where I was striving in my job and then all of a sudden a new manager came in that had a very different lens of how they viewed the work that we were doing. I went from being a high performer to wanting to quit my job, but also believing that I shouldn't ever apply for another job like the one I was doing because I didn't feel qualified anymore.
So my new manager was a limitless manager. It doesn't mean that there aren't constraints and that there aren't boundaries, but she really wanted to focus on tapping into my potential because she knew if this mentor was telling her that she should hire me, she had enough trust and faith in them that she knew that I was the right person for that job as well as my experience, right? But coming into this new scenario, I felt like I couldn't even, I felt like a puppy dog when they did something wrong and they hide their tail and it wraps underneath them.
That's how I felt coming into this new job. And so luckily, this new manager was patient and kind and saw potential, limitless potential. and started unpacking and giving me small opportunities to have wins. By that one manager investing that time with me, seeing a limitless possibility within this one person, I started to get more involved and more engaged in different type of work. I actually, underneath working with this particular person, won some awards for work that I was working on. I got to travel around the country doing presentations on my work with CEOs and executives, and I got to become part of a women's leadership group where I got published in some magazines and articles.
So I went from being one person feeling very small and squished in a container. with working with a mindset that couldn't understand my way of working. And it didn't mean that one of us was better or worse. It just meant that each of us had a different way in how we showed up in our work. And that's okay. But when we're leading people, it's really important that we have the possibility to see where we feel constrained, where we feel maybe threatened by the strengths of someone else, or uncertain how to manage somebody like that.
And that's okay. We're going to bump across those. But I now lead people. I have a team of 23 people in a business that I co-own. I work with leaders in really large companies and really small companies because no matter what, we're always going to approach something from a human capacity, a human possibility. There are going to be days that I feel small. There are going to be days that I feel expansive. And on the days that I feel small, those are the ones that we need to pay attention to because how might we be impacting the potential of somebody around us?
So we may or may not always be able to control the scenarios of which we're working in, but every day we do have the possibility to feel aligned within ourselves. We have the possibility to tap into the potential of somebody around us. So I would love to know if you've had an experience that's similar and if yes, how did you get out of it? Or If you are that leader, having that day where you feel like you're holding on to the rein super tight, what might the impact on the people that you're working with be feeling in that moment?
So my invitation to you today is to just go within. See where you're at today. We can't live in the future. It's not here yet. So where are we at today? What kind of leader are you today? What kind of employee are you today? And how do we meet in the middle? How do I, as a leader, pull back on my own need to control and contain how people work and instead set the expectation for what I expect and allow them to drive the process and the how do they get there so we can learn together. How do I as an employee when I'm working in a situation where I feel constrained or limited in the possibilities of all I can achieve?
ask for what I need and then ask again if it doesn't work the first time. So that we can start to build trust because in order for me as a leader to be able to give you the freedom to get to the finish line with the expectations that I've set on your own terms, there needs to be trust. So whether you're leading from a limited or a limitless lens. The difference between the two can be founded or grounded on trust. And maybe it just takes some time to let go of the reins. Maybe it takes someone mirroring our behaviors as a leader so that we can invite change and have the courage to invite change.
Maybe it takes Listening to one mentor to remember who we are as that individual and the gifts that we have available to offer. Limited versus limitless. At any given moment you might show up on either end of the spectrum. But once we realize what it feels like to shift or tilt towards a limitless mindset, it's going to be harder to go back to that box. I hope you all have a beautiful day. I look forward to seeing you all soon. And today, possibilities thinking. Why not?
