Embracing your Leadership Shadows.

Have you ever considered your leadership shadows?

The ones you might be living out, every day. Without even realizing?

If you don’t know about the Jungian concept of the ‘shadow self’, he believed that we all have part’s of us that are shadows, the parts that we pushed aside usually in our formative years.

For example if you were always told you were “ too loud” as a child, a an adult you might find it difficult to speak up because it’s “bad”.

Shining a light on these shadows helps us to integrate them and grow and expand in ways we never thought possible,

A leader who has the shadow of being “too loud” might not speak up in meetings, they might not voice their values, they might feel unheard. They also might feel stressed or anxious in situations where they’re forced to use their voice.

I have cleared out a ton of shadows for myself, but one I failed to see for a long time was the “perfectionism” shadow.

It had manifested itself in the way I worked pretty deeply:

-Working and thinking about work constantly

-Always having to be the best

-Getting upset when other people slowed me down

-Never feeling like people got what I was trying to do

-People pleasing

-Being overly sensitive to feedback

Which then led to me reacting in a way that stressed out my team, which led to just a whole bunch of more stress.

It was a toxic cycle.

Until I noticed what the f*ck was really going on.

I go into all the messiness of the situation in this episode , how I finally freed myself of this behaviour and the positive impact it had on me, my work, my team and my relationships.

Go listen, if you were nodding along to that^, you’re going to resonate a lot.

Listen to the full episode here