Today I want to share with you the most beautiful Leadership advice I have ever received.
But first, I want to clarify what I mean by leadership, because today it is mainly used to talk about certain hierarchical positions in corporations, for people with high responsibilites jobs.
And I have the strong belief that Leadership is for everybody. Leadership comes from the verb ‘to lead’, which means to conduct, to direct, to steer. And of course one can conduct a group or a team towards a common goal, but one must firstly conduct their life, by exerting their free will and acting by their values and ethics. It’s for this reason that Leadership relates to everybody. When one masters and feels responsible for their life, they create the conditions to move ahead in all other aspects of their life, no matter the goal.
Being a leader means:
- being aware of what we have control over, what we can influence, what it’s out of our hands
- making decisions instead of complaining about how the situations turned out in the end
- acting instead of reacting
Now that I set the foundations, I am going to share the most beautiful Leadership advice I have ever received. It was more than 10 years ago, when I just finished University and I was looking for my first real job. I was with a coach-mentor friend and we were doing a job interview simulation. It was clear that I was not comfortable, I was speaking very fast and with low voice, my sentences were over-complicated and I was gesticulating too much (even for an Italian!).
I was simply not convinced myself of what I was saying, I was not really aware of my qualities, my capabilities, my resourcefulness and it was very visible in the way I introduced myself.
“What if, instead of waiting for others to give you legitimacy and confidence by offering you a job, you decided to embody these qualities no matter what?“
And that’s when I discovered the “Act As If” concept. It’s not about lying about who we are, but on the contrary, it’s about acting according to what we could be if we really allowed ourselves to embody that. It’s a visualisation technique allowing you to act as if you already had the qualities you wish you had. This has two positive effects: the first one is that the people around you will see this change of behavior and will start acting accordingly and the second one is that when we receive positive feedbacks from others it encourages us to keep going, it boosts our self-esteem and it shows us that we didn’t need anyone else to feel and embody what was already within us (ex: confidence, legitimacy).
This technique comes from NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming), which is a powerful way of coaching that I constantly use with those clients lacking self confidence, with those who get caught in comparison, those who believe that beautiful things are possible just for others, those who are starting something new and still have little experience and those who needs to overcome an important challenge in the short run.
“If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.”
Apply that to yourself too
