The Importance of Understanding your Personal Leadership Story

Today on the Leadership Vision Podcast, we are talking about leadership narrative and the importance of using your life’s collective experiences and story to shape and inform who you are as a leader today. Brian Schubring and I will be talking about how our stories have a shaping influence on how we lead and influence in our current context.

Our Team Leadership & Facilitation training is coming up on February 20 & 21, 2020, where we will be leading participants through this process of writing, documenting, and developing your personal leadership narrative.

This professional training provides a platform to develop, sharpen, and apply your unique leadership style within a team context. You’ll learn how to create a meaningful engagement and effectively present your message in a way that fits who you are.

As you’ll hear in this episode of the podcast, Brian springs some reflection questions on me that I wasn’t expecting. We were actually planning to record something about the generative nature of Strengths (we still will, stay tuned), but then started talking about the training, about leadership narrative, the importance of story, and thankfully I was recording the whole thing.

Enjoy this episode as you reflect on how your own leadership history has shaped you.

A Process for Reflection

After you finish listening to this episode, do this as you begin to construct your personal leadership narrative.

1. In your favorite note-taking device (paper, app, doesn’t matter), jot down any and all memories you have of significant events, people, places, and/or experiences that have made some impact on your life.
2. Once you have a big list, attempt to put them in some sort of chronological order.
3. Next, what jumps out? Make a note of it and after you’ve looked at everything, attempt to identify themes and connect them back to your life today.

This is an extremely simplified version of what we do in the training. That exercise takes hours, involves tons of sticky notes, highlighters, multi-colored pens, and more. If you don’t have time to do all of the above, just reflect and think about how your past has shaped or is shaping your present and future.