What is leadership identity and why does it matter?

Leadership Identity a 3 part series

Through this 3 part series I’ll help you understand what leadership identity is, how it’s your direct link to getting what you want, and I’ll show you how to begin to transform your identity by expanding your capacity to receive more of what you desire.?

Part 1: What is leadership identity and why does it matter (Jan 11)

Part 2: Understanding your current state leadership identity and defining your desired future state identity?(Jan 17)

Part 3: How to expand your capacity (Jan 31)

What is leadership identity and why does it matter?

The B*tch slap of truth

“Who do you need to be today to create the outcome you desire?”

This is exactly what I asked myself 12 hours ago after I hopped in the car for a drive to clear my head.

Things have not been “going my way,” around a particular situation.

And I began to notice my frustration about it, followed by bitterness.

My primary default patterns.

When these show up, it’s the sign that something is out of alignment, and that’s no good for anyone.?

Everyone’s default is different.?

Yours might show up as avoidance, self-pity, or confrontation.?

After witnessing frustration and bitterness show up within myself,?

I knew I needed a shift.

A re-frame.

To put me back on track to reclaiming my own power around the situation.?

That one question: “Who do you need to be around this situation, to create the outcome you desire?” is what my friend Ellen Melko Moore likes to call, a b*tch slap of truth.?

And hey, sometimes as leaders we need gentle nudges, but sometimes we need a powerful reframe that’s enough to snap us back?

with enough force that it can do nothing less than pull you into complete clarity and focus around a situation.

A short drive and one powerful question later,

My energy was shifted, and I knew my game plan for how I’d proceed to take my power back around the situation.??

I knew who I needed to be, to create the outcomes I desired.

How your identity is your direct link to expanding your capacity to lead

How you perceive yourself is everything.

The story running through your head, shapes your outcomes.

If you’re telling yourself you’re not worthy,?

then your successes and outcomes will only ever be as much as you’ve told yourself you’re worth.

You will only ever go as far,

Love as deep,

Be as successful,

As your self-identity allows you to be.

If you desire more love, more abundance, more money, to move up the corporate ladder without feeling the insurmountable weight of the world on your shoulders,?

It requires you to become the person who can receive those things;?

it requires you to expand your capacity to receive love, success, leadership responsibility, abundance.

In order to expand your capacity,

You must first understand who you are and how you perceive yourself now so that you can recognize if there’s a gap between your self perception and where you see yourself going.

It also helps to have clarity in your vision, where you desire to go. You can check out this past article on creating your vision.?

We’ll come back to how to expand your capacity in more depth in part 3 of this series.?

What is identity?

Your self identity is a collection of beliefs, experiences and attributes that shape how a person perceives themselves, and how they are perceived by others. This includes personal, social and cultural components that can evolve over time.

Many psychologists say that by the age of seven, children have developed the core of their identity, including most of our patterns of behavior, beliefs and habits. Some psychologists say it happens even much younger than that.

Therefore, much of our identity is directly influenced by those who raised us at our earliest ages, before we were consciously aware and able to navigate many decisions for ourselves.

Many of us have learned great beliefs and patterns that serve us today. And for most people, we discover through life that some beliefs we are carrying, aren’t actually true for us anymore, and don’t serve us or our work.

This is why a journey of self-awareness is necessary to form your most authentic identity. There are many great books on self awareness to help with that like Brianna Wiest's the Mountain is You. Or check out my best that serves as a guide to help you step into greater self-awareness and authenticity: Unleashed.

What is leadership identity?

Leadership Identity is the same as personal identity, applied in a position of leading other people.

It’s how you show up in relation to leading others, as informed by your collection of beliefs, experiences and attributes.

Sometimes those beliefs help us, and sometimes they block us from evolving as leaders.?

For example, I once worked with a baby boomer who had the self-belief that you were only respectable if you worked hard. He believed this of himself and of others.?

This carried into his business where he expected staff to work hard and put in long hours to prove themselves.??

Staff who worked longer hours and on weekends were deemed more loyal, and earned greater respect.

Even though in some cases, their work product wasn’t as good as people who were refusing to work overtime.

He was frustrated by millennial employees who were bringing new demands to the world of work. For awhile he was stuck in the limiting belief that “nobody wants to work these days.” Given how he’d been raised and his own life experience, his views completely made sense.?

However, this leadership identity as a demanding hard-worker was no longer working for him, his business, or his employees.?

It wasn’t until he was ready to transform some of these beliefs, that he was able to create a new leadership identity for himself, one that helped him shift from being a leader who commanded and dictated, into one who learned to listen to his employees and lead more effectively based on what would help them reach win-win solutions.

Leadership identity is directly impacted by your personal identity.

And just like you personal identity can transform and evolve,

So can leadership identity!?

Self identity is the bedrock for leadership identity

Here’s an example of how my personal identity impacted my ability to lead, caused me to make a mistake and became an opportunity to learn from it and expand my leadership identity.?

Years ago when I hired my first employee I had a vision of where I desired to take my business. I wanted to build a thriving company culture that offered great benefits and pay.

Because of aspects of my personal identity and my growing up experience as the “child-parent,” I became both a high-achiever and a care-giver nurturer of everyone else. I wanted to take care of the “wounded” in my family, shower the adults with love, so they’d love me back.

I worked very hard to prove that I was capable of all the things.

I believed that if I was strong and had it all together, maybe that would be enough to earn everyone’s love.

Later, in leadership, this caused me to strive to appear to have it “all together.”?

My ego didn’t want me to show up as anything other than “perfect” or being a “super awesome employer,” who already had everything figured out (even though I hadn’t even hired my first employee yet so how on earth could I have everything figured out?!).

Yet, back when my business was just starting and we were hiring our first employee, we couldn’t yet afford to offer benefits and the wages weren’t great either.

Being the high achiever who had to be the best and have it all together so that I could take care of everyone around me,

I felt ashamed and embarrassed by this.

This caused me to tell myself I should “consider myself lucky and take what I can get,” in terms of who applied.

This caused me to set the lowest possible bar.

Which is the worst place to hire from.

It’s not good for you or your potential team-members!

Because of my ego running the show and running a story in my head that I wouldn’t look good because I wasn’t yet offering awesome benefits,

I completely overlooked all the many wonderful benefits about working for a company like mine: flexible remote work, hands-on ability to learn, autonomy, ability to learn and work side-by-side the founder.

I’d later come to learn that for the right person,

you couldn’t put a price tag on this type of opportunity.

But back then, I was only seeing things through the lens of my wounded identity, and where my identity was, at that point in my leadership journey.

Because I was too embarrassed to properly market the position to my network,?

The only place I listed the position ended up being…. Craigslist.

And there was one applicant.?

Ultimately, they were hired, and I know we both tried our best.

However, because I was showing up in the identity of a wounded leader who had to have everything perfect,

While also trying to keep my team member safe and coddling them,

This prevented me from be able to effectively give honest constructive criticism to help the team member grow.

This resulted in me being frustrated, and them being left leader-less about what they needed to do to grow.?

I didn’t know how to lead effectively,

because my self identity was directly influencing my leadership identity.

This became a huge growth point in my journey.

Through this hiring and leadership experience,

I was able to recognize the frustration I’d felt through that situation (again, my default showing up, thank you old friend).

And I decided I didn’t want to experience that the next time I hired.

I chose to dive deep and learn from it, dissecting the patterns of my identity that got me there in the first place.

Transforming the self-beliefs, which were directly impacting my leadership ability.?

And creating a new, more aligned leadership identity that would help drive me toward the future I was creating.

Not an old, stale, leadership identity that would keep me stuck in more of the same.

If I wanted to grow my company to multiple seven figures,

To pay staff well and offer cool benefits,

To transform hundreds, maybe even thousands of lives worldwide,

I’d need to become the person, the leader, who was capable of doing those things.

Ultimately, that’s what I did.

And today, I help leaders like you create your most authentically aligned leadership identity that helps you become the leader you need to be for where you desire to take yourself, and your company.?

If you have a big vision,

Perhaps a message to bring to the masses, or desire to make deep impact among a small group of people,

Whatever your heart calls you toward,

It requires you to be the leader who can lead and create that outcome.?

To join me on the journey, be sure to subscribe to the newsletter and mark your calendar for the first and third Wednesdays of the month. That’s when I’ll be posting newsletters for the forseeable future.

What’s to come

Next up, I’ll be guiding you into a journey to recognize where you are now in your leadership identity, while defining your desired future state identity.

Tell me, do you find this conversation helpful?

Would you like more content and education on how to expand your leadership capacity to create more success in life and career?

I’m developing content for the next few newsletters.?

Let me know what questions you have and what more you'd like to learn about leadership identity and strategies for authentic success!